unconventional reading list.

+ ART AND PRAYER

<On Beauty as a Way to God: Art is like a door opened to the Infinite> 
by Pope Benedict XVI
from Castel Gandolfo, Italy, August 31, 2011 
reposted from zenit.org

Dear brothers and sisters,

On several occasions in recent months, I have recalled the need for every Christian to find time for God, for prayer, amidst our many daily activities.The Lord himself offers us many opportunities to remember Him. Today, I would like to consider briefly one of these channels that can lead us to God and also be helpful in our encounter with Him: It is the way of artistic expression, part of that "via pulchritudinis" -- "way of beauty" -- which I have spoken about on many occasions, and which modern man should recover in its most profound meaning. 

Perhaps it has happened to you at one time or another -- before a sculpture, a painting, a few verses of poetry or a piece of music -- to have experienced deep emotion, a sense of joy, to have perceived clearly, that is, that before you there stood not only matter -- a piece of marble or bronze, a painted canvas, an ensemble of letters or a combination of sounds -- but something far greater, something that "speaks," something capable of touching the heart, of communicating a message, of elevating the soul. 

A work of art is the fruit of the creative capacity of the human person who stands in wonder before the visible reality, who seeks to discover the depths of its meaning and to communicate it through the language of forms, colors and sounds. Art is capable of expressing, and of making visible, man's need to go beyond what he sees; it reveals his thirst and his search for the infinite. Indeed, it is like a door opened to the infinite, [opened] to a beauty and a truth beyond the every day. And a work of art can open the eyes of the mind and heart, urging us upward.

But there are artistic expressions that are true roads to God, the supreme Beauty -- indeed, they are a help [to us] in growing in our relationship with Him in prayer. We are referring to works of art that are born of faith, and that express the faith. We see an example of this whenever we visit a Gothic cathedral: We are ravished by the vertical lines that reach heavenward and draw our gaze and our spirit upward, while at the same time, we feel small and yet yearn to be filled. … Or when we enter a Romanesque church: We are invited quite naturally to recollection and prayer. We perceive that hidden within these splendid edifices is the faith of generations. Or again, when we listen to a piece of sacred music that makes the chords of our heart resound, our soul expands and is helped in turning to God. I remember a concert performance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach -- in Munich in Bavaria -- conducted by Leonard Bernstein. At the conclusion of the final selection, one of the Cantate, I felt -- not through reasoning, but in the depths of my heart -- that what I had just heard had spoken truth to me, truth about the supreme composer, and it moved me to give thanks to God. Seated next to me was the Lutheran bishop of Munich. I spontaneously said to him: "Whoever has listened to this understands that faith is true" -- and the beauty that irresistibly expresses the presence of God's truth.

But how many times, paintings or frescos also, which are the fruit of the artist's faith -- in their forms, in their colors, and in their light -- move us to turn our thoughts to God, and increase our desire to draw from the Fount of all beauty. The words of the great artist, Marc Chagall, remain profoundly true -- that for centuries, painters dipped their brushes in that colored alphabet, which is the Bible.

How many times, then, can artistic expression be for us an occasion that reminds us of God, that assists us in our prayer or even in the conversion of our heart! In 1886, the famous French poet, playwright and diplomat Paul Claudel entered the Basilica of Notre Dame in Paris and there felt the presence of God precisely in listening to the singing of the Magnificat during the Christmas Mass. He had not entered the church for reasons of faith; indeed, he entered looking for arguments against Christianity, but instead the grace of God changed his heart.

Dear friends, I invite you to rediscover the importance of this way for prayer, for our living relationship with God. Cities and countries throughout the world house treasures of art that express the faith and call us to a relationship with God. Therefore, may our visits to places of art be not only an occasion for cultural enrichment -- also this -- but may they become, above all, a moment of grace that moves us to strengthen our bond and our conversation with the Lord, [that moves us] to stop and contemplate -- in passing from the simple external reality to the deeper reality expressed -- the ray of beauty that strikes us, that "wounds" us in the intimate recesses of our heart and invites us to ascend to God. 

I will end with a prayer from one of the Psalms, Psalm 27: "One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple" (Verse 4). Let us hope that the Lord will help us to contemplate His beauty, both in nature as well as in works of art, so that we might be touched by the light of His face, and so also be light for our neighbor. Thank you.

+ POLITICS AND HUMAN DIGNITY 

<From a Clear, Blue Sky> 
by Jason Jones
September 11. 2011 . TEN YEARS
reposted from www.biggovernment.com

It was a brilliant summer day in a world at peace. The worldʼs superpowers, once locked into conflict by irreconcilable ideologies, were now alike committed to stable, prosperous co-existence. Their vast military establishments, they said, existed solely for self-defense. Except in a few backward lands, horsetrading had replaced brinksmanship.

New industrial and information technologies were annihilating distance, uniting mankind and globalizing the world economy. The English language had leaped far beyond its island home, and now knit together hundreds of millions of people on four continents. Medical advances were rapidly stretching the human lifespan, while new agricultural methods offered hope of eradicating hunger. Research, science, and philosophies of progress had weakened the hold of religion in countries that once had fought bloody doctrinal conflicts and persecuted dissenters. Transnational organizations in defense of human rights were striving with rising success to eliminate evils like forced labor and torture, and reform movements in once-tyrannical countries promised to gradually introduce democracy. Man had become, more than ever before, the measure of all things, and political philosophers predicted with confidence that mankindʼs self-destructive history was drawing to an end; we had entered a new and perhaps the final phase of human development, an age of reason. The sun that dawned that morning shone bright as all our hopes in a sky almost clear of clouds.

So it was on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand came to visit. So also on September 11, 2001 in Manhattan, as millions of New Yorkers made their way to work. Those of us who remember what occurred just ten years ago should know that all of it happened once before: an act of political terror committed by a small band of conspirators plunged the world into a conflict that would take on a life and logic of its own—claiming countless lives, causing undreamt-of destruction, consuming vast resources, making mincemeat of ancient liberties, reviving bloodthirsty fanaticisms that enlightened people had thought long-dead, toppling governments, causing ethnic cleansing that displaced millions of civilians, and plunging the wealthiest part of the world into economic stagnation and crippling debt. The fact that history grimly repeats itself should only surprise those who do not believe in original sin—which means that it surprises almost everybody.

What can we learn from reading these two great signposts of disillusion? Perhaps there is no useful lesson we may draw beyond a bitter irony, a grim smile of agreement with Rudyard Kipling:

But that is too easy, isnʼt it?

It might do, for those who plan to have no children, to leave behind no hostages to fortune. For anyone else, what is needed is more than cynicism, or stoic acceptance of what Freud called the “thanatos principle,” manʼs inborn compulsion to build, tear down, then re-build the Tower of Babel. We want more than insight. What we crave, more than bread, is hope.

Hope is radically different from optimism. Stock analysts and campaign managers are optimistic—even when caution is called for. Optimism is the fragile dream that pervaded the West in 1914 and 2001. It was shattered by just one attack. Hope can survive in cancer wards and even concentration camps—as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Victor Frankl have testified. Hope exists, if you will, in a fourth dimension that cuts across the world we can see at an angle we cannot imagine. It rises from secret places in the heart where the torturers cannot find it, and spreads through quiet gestures or silent prayers they cannot quash. Hope is what Winston Smith hungered for in 1984, but all he knew how to look for was optimism— a plausible prospect for social change. And so he cursed God and died.

If we in our darkening times would not learn to love Big Brother, we need a higher, indestructible Love. To find it, we must claw our way through the detritus that blocks our path. Much of the rubbish consists of the empty boxes that held our optimism, the wrapping paper from the gifts we gave ourselves. We must realize, deep in the bone, that there is no salvation in a cargo cult, that we can place no faith in princes, or in whispered, promised knowledge that will help us be “as gods.”

The centuries-long effort to place man at creationʼs apex, which our ancestors hailed as “humanism,” ended by goading men to sterilize, butcher and bomb their brothers. The adventure of secular science led by a straight, steady path from Galileoʼs ebullient, “Eppur si muove!” to Robert Oppenheimerʼs epiphany: “I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Without renouncing the wondrous powers to improve manʼs life that come with scientific discipline, we urgently need to rediscover what too many humanists and scientists impatiently set aside. We must rummage through their libraries and labs to find the questions they suppressed, the data they fudged. We have spent five centuries asking only “How?” We must step back and ask again, “Why?” The answer will help us resist many temptations, of the sort our race falls into so very easily—to use the superhuman powers we gain in inhuman ways, to treat the weak, the “other,” the Enemy, as subhumans, as flies we can kill for sport. (King Lear)

To restrain ourselves and each other, to prepare a liveable future, there are certain fundamental axioms we need to accept as the bedrock of human rights and lasting peace. We do not need an infallible authority to reveal them; any honest student of twentieth century history could piece them together by looking at which perennial truths totalitarian movements systematically sought to deny:

I) The unique and absolute value of every human person, at each stage of life, who must be treated not as a means but an end in him or herself.

II) The transcendent moral order against which every law, custom, or policy must be judged, regardless of culture or government.

III) The duty of governments to serve the governed and defend—not replace or control—the free institutions of civil society.

IV) The priority of certain core humane values over economic or political expediency.

In the next several articles in this series, I will unfold the implications of each of these “inconvenient truths”—so styled because they stand in the way of every “pure” ideology that has emerged in the course of modernity, each partial truth about man that claims his absolute loyalty. They are speed bumps, if you will, on the road to any bruited utopia.

By slowing or even stopping us short of choosing “easy” shortcuts that render us less human, these “gods of the copybook headings” may well be thought of as commandments—or if you prefer, the wisdom of history, for which our parents and grandparents paid such a very high price in past hundred bloody years.

+PS. it was totally a coincidence. I was reading through this article right after writing all about the personally ground-breaking insight brought to my attention by Fr. Jacques and then Pope Benedict's <Spe Salvi> : The difference between Hope and Optimism. And lookey-here....it is exactly the point Jason is driving home. I cannot explain to you adequately how much I needed this lesson right now. Leave it to God to find so many ways to convince me of something I have never really understood.