Month: April 2009

Fearsome Comrade wrote today:

I was explaining something about RANS turbulence models to a coworker once. To fact-check me, he looked at Wikipedia and found confirmation of what I was saying. Of course, I wrote that section of the article!

Classic. As the information in Wikipedia becomes more and more specialized, this can’t help but happen more often.

This sums it up in once sentence pretty well.

Good is hard to preserve, but it is also terribly hard to eradicate completely.

-C.S. Lewis, describing how Taliessin’s household remained after the fall of Logres.
Williams and the Arthuriad, p.184

Merton on first confessing his sins:

But one by one, that is, species by species, as best I could, I tore out all those sins by their roots, like teeth. Some of them were hard, but I did it quickly, doing the best I could to approximate the number of times all these things had happened-there was no counting them, only guessing.

I did not have any time to feel how relieved I was when I came stumbling out, and I had to go down to the front of the church where Father Moore would see me and come out to begin his-and my-Mass. But ever since that day, I have loved confessionals.

-Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, p.224

Growing up, the formalizing of confessions was always scorned. I wish it had been actually REPLACED by something. With the exception of “getting in trouble” for something with my parents, I don’t recall ever confessing sin to another person (a peer or mentor) until later in college. It causes secrets to build up. Not good. Of courses Jesus hears our prayers and he alone is our mediator and intercessor. But there is something powerful in another human being KNOWING. Where’s a confessional when you need one?