'moments that were perfect in their certainty'

I began to spend more time at the Dante but at irregular hours. In the mornings I just got deli coffee and sat on my stoop. I reflected on how my mornings at Café 'Ino had not only prolonged but also afforded my malaise with a small amount of grandeur. Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards. I have watched the snow fall onto the sea and traced the steps of a traveler long gone. I have relived moments that were perfect in their certainty. Fred buttoning the khaki shirt he wore for his flying lessons. Doves returning to nest on our balcony. Our daughter, Jesse, standing before me stretching out her arms.

—Oh, Mama, sometimes I feel like a new tree.

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

—Patti Smith, M Train (2015)

Nothing less.

Be satisfied with nothing less than Love....Never must any difficulty hinder you from serving people, be they insignificant or important, sick or healthy. And the sicker they are, and the fewer friends they have, the more readily must you serve them. And always bear with aliens willingly. As for all who slander you, contradict them not. And be desirous to associate with all who scorn you, for they make the way of Love broader for you.

—Hadewijch of Brabant, "Letter 24: Love through Virtues" (13th Century)

The beauty of the oft unseen love in our lives

My mom told me a few years ago that my grandfather, referring to Swaggert, had said, "If God can love an asshole like him, then I guess I'm not too far gone." He wasn't a Christian, my grandfather. At least he didn't have an altar-call conversion like I did, nor was he slain in the Spirit. But he must've felt himself hollowed-out when he heard Swaggart preach--cratered, like a demolition charge had gone off inside him.

Nobody I knew at the time believed in Swaggart. He was a joke, a hypocrite. A burned-out Pentecostal preacher. My grandfather knew all this, of course. He watched the news.

But Swaggart's words that day became a sacrament for him--presence where there seemed only absence. They stilled him somehow, and showed him his own holy, human worth. They gave him his life back.

Alistair MacLoed once wrote that "we are all better when we're loved"--loved by those present in our lives and those now gone; loved by those we see and those we do not. It's easy to know the first, to glimpse such care in smiling faces. But it's hard to see the latter: difficult to imagine what's not apparent. (How can I know my grandfather's joy when he never smiled in pictures?) That is why we need sacraments, and art: to give us the beauty of the oft unseen love in our lives.

I realize now that I've been trying to piece together what is not whole: in some fragmented way to make whole what is broken, to control it, to account for my encounter with (and through) Castellino's art. In the end, all I have is enough light to glimpse this mystery somehow present in the demolished rooms that are my grandfather's life now long gone.

And discovering this mystery is joy--joy written with light and words, Castellino's art and my memories cupped in those images, these words.

--Samuel Thomas Martin, Candy and Copenhagen, "Image Journal" (No. 86, 2015).

I would rather be wrong with St. Thomas

The priest was a young man of Philipot's age with the light skin of a metis. He preached a very short sermon on some words of St. Thomas the Apostle: "Let us go up to Jerusalem and die with him." He said, "The Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple who struck off the ear of the high priest's servant, our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism. In the days of fear, doubt and confusion, the simplicity and loyalty of one apostle advocated a political solution. He was wrong, but I would rather be wrong with St. Thomas than right with the cold and the craven. Let us go up to Jerusalem to die with him."

--Graham Greene, The Comedians (1965)

The Way of Love

For the activity and clear proof of perfect love towards God is a genuine disposition of voluntary goodwill towards one's neighbor. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, says the divine Apostle John, cannot love God whom he has not seen (1 John 4:20). This is the way of truth, as the Word of God calls himself, that leads those who walk in it, pure of all passions, to God the Father. This is the door, through which the one who enters finds himself in the Holy of Holies, and is made worthy to behold the unapproachable beauty of the holy and royal Trinity.

—Maximus the Confessor, "Letter 2: On Love" (626)

On loving the world.

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that you are a human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing—the violence and greed and falsehood that overcome the world that is meant to be overcome by love.

—Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (2000)

'like young thieves in a glowing orchard'

Rawlins mounted up. You ready? he said.

I been ready.

They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

--Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (1992)

A consolation tinged with melancholy

On out-of-the-way shores, local historians ply their craft. Their burden is giving form to little places in an era of massive forces and generalizations. Like folklorists or ethnographers, they strive to keep alive in memory ways of life and habits of mind that civilization no longer countenances. And their reward for doing so is carrying out the duty of their affection. Their passion for the meanings of small things forces them to deliberate not just on the fate of their beloved places but on all things human. Their faithfulness to home is a compass in a great and shifting sea. 

Although it forever moves between the ragged edge of contemporary change and the cutting blade of time, local history compensates its practitioners with the blessing of preserving and creating other lives, places, and times. Surely, to offer a consolation tinged with melancholy, there are less-worthy callings than giving fresh forms, however transitory they be, to the work and complex ways of human beings. 

Local history can also bless one with a passion and a mission. How can one measure the gift of being joined to a conversation one can't truly quit? How wonderful it is to be caught up with a hundred topics that need exploration and exposition!...The local historian's driving ambition is to record the manifold realities of the place one calls home.

--Joseph A. Amato, "Local History: A Way to Place and Home," Why Place Matters (2014).

The only two arguments

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty—and hence truth—is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell....A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

—Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report (1985)

So Few Rememberers

I am an old man now and oftentimes I whisper to myself. I have heard myself whispering things that I didn't know I had ever thought. "Forty years" or "Fifty years" or "Sixty years," I hear myself whispering. My life lengthens. History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room. They could loaf together in the old poolroom up in Port William and talk all of a Saturday night of war and rumors of war.

—Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (2000)