I Have Conquered Canada

The revolution will not be televised. But this part of it will be blogged.

For it was on this triumphant note, that my second adventure around the world with the Militia of the Immaculata came to a graceful end. I prefer to think of it ending here gracefully in this Canadian garden over where it arguably came to a more definite end: When I came stumbling out of the airport in Seattle smelling like a man who had worn the same clothes for several days, living off a 2hrs/day sleep quotient, and then was locked in a small space for endless times with only a short break to run crazily across the stickily humid Atlanta airport.

Sliding a discreet and wholly translucent veil over all those more ungentlemanly details, I am home now, and happy to be so. There is much work to be done in Seattle.

He Said She Said Father Said

I keep hearing rumblings from the sidelines about a FSSP parish coming into being in Seattle, besides the community at the Josephinum? Does anybody know what's going on?

From The Ed

...who is a seminarian in Rome with the Apostles of the Interior Life, a fantastic and freshly born religious community.

...Yesterday evening I was out for a run making my way to the forest preserve when an elderly woman signals for me to stop as I am passing her on the sidewalk. In a weak voice she asks if I could help walk her to her destination and that she would pay me for the service. I smile and tell her that I would help her and that she didn't have to pay me. She leans on me for support and then replies (in the typical blunt manner of some elderly people), "You're SWEATY." I smile and apologize (I was just running) and then discover that she's making her way to... Mass! Before leaving her, I tell her that I am a religious seminarian and that I am counting on her prayers in becoming holy. I must admit that with the never-ending list of tasks to attend to, I often run the risk of being negligent to the finer details in life: the human person and being attentive to them in their needs. How easily I could have missed this opportunity! Thus, I saw this brief and seemingly "insignificant" encounter as a gift and a reminder to keep my mind fixed on what's important most important in life.

In Jesus and Mary,
Edward

Schedule of Late

All Last Week: Volunteer to help run the Militia Immaculata camp in Seattle, worked with two other leaders to keep stack of energetic children triangulated at all times, have fantastic retreat.

Wednesday: Finish camp, hang out with leaders for hours and hour into the night.

Thursday: Go to a graduation, dance and party until 4am.

Today: Wake up at noon, immediately decide to fly to Chicago for the MI camp there, leave at about 3.

Tomorrow: Explode with awesomeness.

Pray a whole lot for me and my crazy compatriots.

Quote of the Day

[Encouraging my elder brother in the face of a lot of homework]

Mom: Go do the champion whatever!

Poem of the Day

The Quickening of St. John the Baptist
Written in 1949 on the Contemplative Vocation
~ Thomas Merton

Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee,
From the sands and the lavender water?
Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,
The yellow fishing boats, the farms,
The winesmelling yards and low cellars
Or the oilpress, and the women by the well?
Why do you fly those markets,
Those suburban gardens,
The trumpets of the jealous lilies,
Leaving them all, lovely among the lemon trees?

You have trusted no town
With the news behind your eyes.
You have drowned Gabriel's word in thoughts like seas
And turned toward the stone mountain
To the treeless places.
Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?

The day Our Lady, full of Christ,
Entered the dooryard of her relative
Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves
like gold?
Did not her eyes as grey as doves
Alight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon
miraculous Elizabeth?

Her salutation
Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell:
And the unborn saint John
Wakes in his mother's body,
Bounds with the echoes of discovery.

Sing in your cell, small anchorite!
How did you see her in the eyeless dark?
What secret syllable
Woke your young faith to the mad truth
That an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?
Oh burning joy!

What seas of life were planted by that voice!
With what new sense
Did your wise heart receive her Sacrament,
And know her cloistered Christ?

You need no eloquence, wild bairn,
Exulting in your hermitage.
Your ecstasy is your apostolate,
For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.
Your joy is the vocation of Mother Church's hidden children -
Those who by vow lie buried in the cloister or the hermitage;
The speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian,
The quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare, Planted in the night of
contemplation, Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.

Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied
sermon.
Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air
Seeking the world's gain in an unthinkable experience.
We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners
With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:
Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels upon the world's frontier.

But in the days, rare days, when our Theotokos
Flying the prosperous world
Appears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails,
Then, like the wise, wild baby,
The unborn John who could not see a thing
We wake and know the Virgin Presence
Receive her Christ into our night
With stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.

Cooled in the flame of God's dark fire
Washed in His gladness like a vesture of new flame
We burn like eagles in His invincible awareness
And bound and bounce with happiness,
Leap in the womb, our cloud, our faith, our element,
Our contemplation, our anticipated heaven
Till Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.

I know, as a very sociable man, that there is special grace in being able to undergo a life of contemplative solitude. Even more so, then, for the contemplative who makes that life sound so entirely gangster.

Living, working, hidden from sight and saving the world, silent but stronger than hatred? Sign me up.

The Call of Dude

My little brother Charleston has discovered the multifaceted and rubbery word "Dude". He uses it to refer to any human person, as an expression of anger or awe, and frequently repeats it to himself to keep his hand in, and now one of us must die. Soon.

Happy Birthday, GK Chesterton!

"To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance."

In honor of his birthday, here is an essay by the one and only Dale Ahlquist, head of the American Chesterton Society. It's titled "Who is this guy and why haven’t I heard of him?"

[...]

"Who is this guy. . .?"

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) cannot be summed up in one sentence. Nor in one paragraph. In fact, in spite of the fine biographies that have been written of him, he has never been captured between the covers of one book. But rather than waiting to separate the goats from the sheep, let’s just come right out and say it: G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century. He said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else. But he was no mere wordsmith. He was very good at expressing himself, but more importantly, he had something very good to express. The reason he was the greatest writer of the 20th century was because he was also the greatest thinker of the 20th century.

Born in London, Chesterton was educated at St. Paul’s, but never went to college. He went to art school. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly. (To put it into perspective, four thousand essays is the equivalent of writing an essay a day, every day, for 11 years. If you’re not impressed, try it some time. But they have to be good essays - all of them – as funny as they are serious, and as readable and rewarding a century after you’ve written them.)

Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology. His style is unmistakable, always marked by humility, consistency, paradox, wit, and wonder. His writing remains as timely and as timeless today as when it first appeared, even though much of it was published in throw away papers.

This man who composed such profound and perfect lines as "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried," stood 6’4" and weighed about 300 pounds, usually had a cigar in his mouth, and walked around wearing a cape and a crumpled hat, tiny glasses pinched to the end of his nose, swordstick in hand, laughter blowing through his moustache. And usually had no idea where or when his next appointment was. He did much of his writing in train stations, since he usually missed the train he was supposed to catch. In one famous anecdote, he wired his wife, saying, "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" His faithful wife, Frances, attended to all the details of his life, since he continually proved he had no way of doing it himself. She was later assisted by a secretary, Dorothy Collins, who became the couple’s surrogate daughter, and went on to become the writer’s literary executrix, continuing to make his work available after his death.

This absent-minded, overgrown elf of a man, who laughed at his own jokes and amused children at birthday parties by catching buns in his mouth, this was the man who wrote a book called The Everlasting Man, which led a young atheist named C.S. Lewis to become a Christian. This was the man who wrote a novel called The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which inspired Michael Collins to lead a movement for Irish Independence. This was the man who wrote an essay in the Illustrated London News that inspired Mohandas Gandhi to lead a movement to end British colonial rule in India. This was a man who, when commissioned to write a book on St. Thomas Aquinas, had his secretary check out a stack of books on St. Thomas from the library, opened the top book on the stack, thumbed through it, closed it, and proceeded to dictate a book on St. Thomas. Not just any book. The renowned Thomistic scholar, Ettienne Gilson, had this to say about it:

"I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a 'clever' book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas. . . cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which we had tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him."

Chesterton debated many of the celebrated intellectuals of his time: George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow. According to contemporary accounts, Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these contests, however, the world has immortalized his opponents and forgotten Chesterton, and now we hear only one side of the argument, and we are enduring the legacies of socialism, relativism, materialism, and skepticism. Ironically, all of his opponents regarded Chesterton with the greatest affection. And George Bernard Shaw said: "The world is not thankful enough for Chesterton."

His writing has been praised by Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Karel Capek, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Claudel, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Sigrid Undset, Ronald Knox, Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Anthony Burgess, E.F. Schumacher, Neil Gaiman, and Orson Welles. To name a few.

T.S. Eliot said that Chesterton "deserves a permanent claim on our loyalty."

". . . and why haven’t I heard of him?

Why haven’t you heard of him?

There are three answers to this question:

1. I don’t know.
2. You’ve been cheated.
3. Chesterton is the most unjustly neglected writer of our time. Perhaps it is proof that education is too important to be left to educators and that publishing is too important to be left to publishers, but there is no excuse why Chesterton is no longer taught in our schools and why his writing is not more widely reprinted and especially included in college anthologies. Well, there is an excuse. It seems that Chesterton is tough to pigeonhole, and if a writer cannot be quickly consigned to a category, or to one-word description, he risks falling through the cracks. Even if he weighs three hundred pounds.

But there is another problem. Modern thinkers and commentators and critics have found it much more convenient to ignore Chesterton rather than to engage him in an argument, because to argue with Chesterton is to lose.

Chesterton argued eloquently against all the trends that eventually took over the 20th century: materialism, scientific determinism, moral relativism, and spineless agnosticism. He also argued against both socialism and capitalism and showed why they have both been the enemies of freedom and justice in modern society.

And what did he argue for? What was it he defended? He defended "the common man" and common sense. He defended the poor. He defended the family. He defended beauty. And he defended Christianity and the Catholic Faith. These don’t play well in the classroom, in the media, or in the public arena. And that is probably why he is neglected. The modern world prefers writers who are snobs, who have exotic and bizarre ideas, who glorify decadence, who scoff at Christianity, who deny the dignity of the poor, and who think freedom means no responsibility.

But even though Chesterton is no longer taught in schools, you cannot consider yourself educated until you have thoroughly read Chesterton. And furthermore, thoroughly reading Chesterton is almost a complete education in itself. Chesterton is indeed a teacher, and the best kind. He doesn’t merely astonish you. He doesn’t just perform the wonder of making you think. He goes beyond that. He makes you laugh.

The Urban Legend

Much like Sasquatch, I am considerably larger than you. Much like Sasquatch, I have much more hair on my person than most civilized persons. Much like Sasquatch, I speak no known human language and subsist on a diet of berries, vines, and tiny rodents and baby fish.

This is all stuff you already knew about me.

The comparison goes a bit farther this day, for much like Sasquatch, I have also been recently spotted by fanatics running blurrily through the forests and neighborhoods of the Pacific Northwest, my home of several hundred years, furtively completing tasks meaningful only to myself, the final bastion of my species, as I await my inevitable and unenviable end at the hands of a shadowy governmental cover-up.

However, I come here not as Sasquatch does, to kidnap the elderly and howl at intoxicated college students or to produce footprint-related artwork. I come here to say "I am back in Seattle. Love me as you have never loved me before. Because I am kind of like Bigfoot. And that is awesome."

Surprise! It's Easter!

So, turns out I gave up blogging for Lent. I was going to tell you, but instead I gave up blogging for Lent...but I'm back now, sucker! Happy Easter!

I'll give you guys a fuller update on where I've been and what I've been doing for the past month and a half, but right now I'm going to go eat some steak and hang out, these being two of the most important things one can do on Easter.

For a brief overview: I am doing quite well, I'm very happy, and although I am in Arkansas, I am surrounded by people I love and so I have no complaint! God bless you!

Details

In other news, writing has been left to the side lately, due to some unexpected life developments.

The second most noticeable one of these is the surprise of my deciding to stop working at Starbucks, and even more shocking than this is that tomorrow I fly out for the midwest, to spend another several months in service of the Militia Immaculata.

I was asked to do go on the road again for the purpose of missionary and evangelizing work again. I decided not to go for several reasons; I had commitments at home, friends to be with, a good job, an education to look forward to.

And ultimately, a consecration to live out.

St. Max once wrote "We are Knights of the Immaculata, ready for any expedition; any place, anytime."

It's because of that single quote, which needled and haunted my brain, that I know am leaving again, quite humbled and way happy. I'll miss being home, and all the beauty of my family and friends. But for now, I know I'm supposed to be doing this, I know that I am called to help with Max08, doing my best to serve the Church in this little way. This trip is going to bring a lot of hope to people, myself among them.

I'm sorry I didn't write sooner, or give any sort of warning, because I know that there are many of you that didn't get your last chance to see me, but in the words of an important modern orator and public servant in California: I'll be back.

Basic deal of the trip is this: I leave Seattle in about 5 hours, and probably won't return until the summer. During the interim, I will overtax my health and sanity running youth retreats, driving the heck out of various highways on in the midwest and East Coast of the America, and generally living the charming life of a sweaty and impoverished pilgrimissionary as previously documented on this blog.

Speaking of this blog, as before I will post when able or moved or commanded to, but I will be largely out of contact. I promise I don't hate you.

Now it's off to pack my stuff and then stay away looking forward to soaring out of the rain. I'll write again pronto, and until then: Stay classy.

I mean, be good. Whatever.

But for real, be good.

How I Got To Chicago, Unfinished

I wrote quite a long reflection on my retreat at Marytown over New Years. Then I went back and edited it, added more, reconsidered some of the things I was thinking about. Then I wrote some more, and reflected more. And basically kept the document alive and growing until I had gotten out what I was thinking about.

The end effect of all this is that in the end it was something I needed to write, not something I needed to tell other people. So you guys get nothing from all that.

What you do get is what I wrote when I realized I needed to have a more personable bit of prose for the public...but by then, I was pretty much prosed out, and so instead this is merely the explanation of how I got to Chicago. It's not very long, all things (particularly the length of time since my last post) considered, but I thought I should at least get this up for you all.

In keeping with an old and stupid Cow tradition of not sleeping before I fly, I just stayed up all Boxing Day night doing laundry and reading comics and burning CDs of music to show off to all the chumps with whom I would be trading blows of raillery.

So, all the things a gentleman does before spending a week in prayerful retreat...instead of sleeping.

I don't get anxious about flying or trying to get through security (Thought the soul-suction cyborg skeleton fused onto my bones can be a hassle, I'm not gonna lie), I just tend not to sleep before I go, mostly on the basis of "Sleeping in boring airports and on tarmacs is a great way to pass the time" and also it helps to be exhausted to adjust time zones. Excluding all facts outside my own rationalizations and sleep-starved enterprising imagination.

In retrospect, I really should've slept while I had the chance. Even admitting that my flights were gentle and my surroundings painted with the eager brush strokes of ethereal gold by the waking Apollo, (And to a lesser degree of agreeability, my person soused with the intestinal caress of ginger ale and globs of breaded Meat Nectar from Burger King,) all creature comforts, along with every happy memory of my childhood and, I'm ashamed to say, even the tender hope of my salvation, were savagely and untimely ripped from the tatters of my mind the same dark moment I walked out into the flesh-eating winter air of Milwaukee.

Some of you may remember Kyle the Hyperborean Freezing Death God of Relentless Wind I've previously talked about in reference to a series of chilly, soggy, and Seattley adventures I had.

Now, keep in mind that I haven't talked to any Professional Weather Philosophers, but I'm pretty sure that the thing I have known as Kyle was actually just a passing whimsical thought of whatever unholy and unnameable force moves in the American midwest during winter, and the tangential and faded power of Kyle was such that even this was enough to keep our whole emerald city of pale and doughy computer programmers, alt-indie scenesters, would-be space-glass blowers and space-sandwich-makers, Boeing engineers, and public fish-heavers stuck indoors with a trusty bucket of Trader Joe's eco-friendly "Winter Coat Hibernation Lard".

I did come prepared, fortunately. But I soon realized that my attempting to come prepared was in itself a preparation of another sort. Pretty much a preparation for the inevitable death I was fated to have under the sunless and tenebrous sky of Milwaukee. Indeed, my paltry two sweaters and one light jacket (Or in the Wisconsin colloquialism: An outsider's funeral clothes) seemed to call out for my death and I know that the battle for my battle would soon be fought and over.

With all this in mind, and after a few minutes of waiting in vain to spot somebody I knew driving by I decided to turn around sharply and dash pell-mell back into the baggage-claimey warmth from whence I came.

Realizing now a flaw in my "Get to Chicago" plan, I called Mark, who is the Chicagoan hub for all "Dude, so I just flew into Milwaukee, but I'm not sure if anybody was going to pick me up here..." inquiries.

He called around, and found out that the person who was planning on picking me up was coming off the runway...to head back into the airport several states away. Which is...inconvenient, at best.

Fortunately, he was only mildly busy running himself ragged wildly waving his e-semaphore flags to help get everybody into Marytown, and so before too long he and another good friend Dave were starting the hour-long drive up to pick me up.

The drive was thankfully uneventful, aside from much fraternal yukking it up, as we had all three had our share of adventures together over the summer, and we eventually pulled into home sweet home, Marytown, the National Shrine to St. Maximilian Kolbe.

From there, the week progress on to include Big Holy Things, even more familial yukking it up, scads of great talks, and karaoke. Eventually, I came home. Again, sorry, I'm not including any important things.

But in actuality, it should be expected. The ol' first rule of Cow writing: If I have time to write, it's because interesting things aren't happening. The corollary to this being that anything I write is not very interesting, by default.

And for that matter, if I'm writing during something interesting, then I am either not paying proper attention to my writing or the interesting event, so even that's going to be a flat tire in Dullsville.

Under the Influenza

A New Years Retreat post is still in the works, but I came down with some bug and I've been feverish and bad-natured and asleep since Tuesday.

For the record, if you want to have really hideous dreams, I recommend not only the flu, but also being introduced to really suspenseful TV shows right before you get sick, and also reading grotesque Southern gothic novels during your lucid moments.

I'll get something decently interesting up here soon. But not right now. I'm not going to lie, right now I'm just going to go sit down and listen to Balkan folk music and read Spe Salvi. Sue me.

Schmee....

There and back again, as of Thursday night in truth. Stories to tell when it's not 2am and the author isn't near asleep at the helm.

A good retreat, though.

Going, Going...

...Nope, not gone yet.

But this shall soon change. Largely due to 4am tomorrow morning being when I leave to go to Marytown.

I shall not post for a week whilst I am in the smothering embrace of solitude. Complete and utter solitude. Just me and like five dozen other completely uninteresting young papists, sanctimonious dullards every last one of us. Replete in our hermetic pious-ocity, we shall creep together solemnly and solitarily in a cold empty room with blank walls, to ring in the New Year the way it was meant to be rung in: Quietly, alone, and with great trepidation.

Ha! Forgot I was Catholic, didn't you?!
"I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you." ~ John 16:22
"I am happy and you should be happy too. Do not weep. Let us pray together with joy." ~ Among the last words of the beloved Pope John Paul II
May you all rock onwards. I'm personally intending to rejoice so hard that I may lose my sense of smell, and stay so focused on praying that I may not even notice. Be back next Thursday.