Carpe Cakem!

Sound familiar?

Such enjoyment would need a good foundation, and I hoped to build it on the significant transformations I had undergone on my life’s journey.

What does it mean to have learned how to love, rejecting the fleeting pleasures of infatuation for the deeper satisfactions of commitment?

Read that line again. How often do we ask THAT question nowadays, eh?

Or to have apprenticed myself to the discipline of writing, so that I now crave the desert journey of revision as much as the initial burst of creativity and flow of words?

Or to have undergone a religious conversion, replete with fervor and gladness in this early stages, and now marked by aridity and pain?

If I find myself starved for the merest hint of spiritual ardor, I know I have arrived in a place where many others have been.

The monks and mystics of my faith all teach that persevering in a spiritual discipline, especially when it seems futile, is the key to growth.

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.261

This quote was mentioned in Kathleen Norris’s Acedia & Me. It is also perhaps my creed for blogging, and quite possibly many other things as well.

There is no such thing as writer’s block for writers whose standards are low enough.”

-William Stafford

Childlike faith and and coming to faith as a child are both good things. But to communicate to others about it… like anything else, why should it be easy? This later becomes a barrier to coming to faith as an adult.

Religious vocabulary is demanding, and words such as sin and repentance carry so much baggage that even many Christians are reluctant to employ them. In a culture marked by theological illiteracy it is tempting to censor terms that are so often misconstrued and misused. Many people who would not dream of relying on the understanding of literature or the sciences they acquired as children are content to leave their juvenile theological convictions largely unexamined. If they resented religion when they were young, as adults they are perplexed and dismayed by its stubborn persistence in the human race. But religions endure because they concern themselves with our deepest questions about good and evil, about the suffering that life brings to each of us, and about what it means to be fully human in the face of death.

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.114

When [Andrew Solomon] asserts that “the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality,’ he is echoing the existential monastic view that the opposite of acedia is an energetic devotion.

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me, p.99

This heralds back to Chesterton’s notion that the man who is most “true to himself” is the worst sort of person.

Self-consciousness feeds on sincerity, and both have attained cult status in America. But as Henri de Lubac reminds us, “It is not sincerity, it is Truth which frees us, because it transforms us. It tears us away from out inmost slavery. To seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed.”

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.142

Well I took my wife and 3 kids (all >6 years old) to Portland Oregon the whole last week. It was fun but exhausting!

We got a hotel right across the street from the Stumptown Ace Hotel location. Excellent coffee the whole week. No hint of bitterness.

The guy behind the counter had the fullest giant mustache I’ve ever seen. Another barista was a fedora-wearing doppelganger of a guy I know back home.

Their behind-the-counter system was interesting. They had three folks – two on espresso machines, the middle on on the register and… pouring milk. They burned through tons of milk steamer pitches, one per drink, each portioned ahead of time. Perfectly consistent though.

I met a guy in line who asked if I was a Christian (I holding a copy of a Kathleen Norris book) and we chatted for a while. He was visiting from California and was thinking about moving up here because of the “Christian art scene”. I said, yeah, that’s what I hear, but I’m not sure what that means!

Speaking of coffee, I also went to a cupping (tasting) at newly remodeled place called Public Domain. Very nice. the shop was pretty interesting. They had pour-over funnels for making single cups from specialty batches as well as multiple espresso blends available. Black and white minimalist decor.

While I was there, a crazy looking old guy with a painted blue face and a dyed blue beard walked by and looked in. The baristas commented, “Oh yeah. He’s a down-towner. He loves us. What’s his name? I don’t know, Osama A-blue-bin. No no no. He doesn’t have a name. I think is name is Markis. He’s a real down-towner.”

Visited Powell’s multiple times. The haul:

• Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me (have wanted to read this ever since reading the review in The Rabbit Room. Her earlier memoir Dakota was surprisingly good.)
• George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie (The sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, which I recently read my daughter. I’ll probably wait to read her this one though. The plot has some political intrigue in it that is way over her head right now.)
• James Alison, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-In. (This book, without question, wins the award for confusing titles. It’s actually a collection of theological essays. It’s turning out to be (as expected) rather hit and miss. When he’s good though, he’s dynamite.)
• Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island (Probably my favorite of the ten or so Merton books I’ve read. I’ve checked it out from the local library about 4 times. I figured it was time to add it to the shelf. Read the essay on vocation.)
• A bunch of early reading stuff for my daughter and a several books for my wife, most of which she’s already finished!

I read an interview with Glen Hansard in an edition of Fretboard magazine. In it he talked about his very beat up guitar (seen in the movie Once), and how he learned to sing and play. The part I found the most interesting was where he talked about how he came to sing loud. He practiced projecting his voice and adjusting the timbre so it would reverberate back off the walls of the buildings across the street. In this way, he would make more money busking. It’s hard to describe right now, but I feel there is an important lesson about shyness and breaking out of your shell in this.

I stopped by the Living Room Theatre one night to catch some jazz. I was curious how the band would stack up compared to the local and student ones I see in Moscow. Piano player: OK. Drummer: Very stylish clothes, but completely boring performance. Yawn. Bass player: Way above average. Cool.

Voodoo Doughnuts is the epitome of the phrase “hole in the wall”. It was in a seedy part of town next to a strip club and XXX shop. There was a line out the door (of the donut shop).

There are tons of places to eat down town, all competing for your business. You can tell where the really good places are though by how busy they are. At several friend’s recommendations, we tried to go to a Mexican restaurant called Cha Cha Cha. It was super busy so we had to go somewhere else.

In the restaurant guide and everywhere I looked I saw ads for this fancy joint called Ten 01. I visited it one night and it was only mildly busy. Maybe 20 people in there. About 20% full. They had a huge scotch list though, most of it very steeply priced. On the other hand, down the street a ways, next to our hotel, was a place of similar caliber called Clyde Common. THIS place was absolutely packed out every time I walked by it all week. I never even bothered stopping in – there were no seats. Also, I never once saw an ad for this place anywhere. Apparently word-of-mouth is always the best.

Oh my. Here is the best quote in this book. I am definitely going to steal this.

I will not conclude with a long list of what we must do. In too many books the word “must” increases in frequency in inverse relation to the number of pages left to point out how what must be done might be done.

-Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther, p.251

Though Erikson here uses a list of modern secular heroes, I don’t find his point any less potent.

Consider for a brief moment certain great names of our time, which prides itself on a dominant identity enhanced by scientific truth. Darwin, Einstein, and Freud omitting Marx, who was a conscious and deliberate ideological craftsman would certainly deny that they had any intention of influencing, say, the editorials, or the vocabulary, or the scrupulosity of our time in the ways in which they undoubtedly did and do. They could, in fact, refute the bulk of the concepts popularly ascribed to them, or vaguely and anonymously derived from them, as utterly foreign to their original ideas, their methodology, and their personal philosophy and conduct.

Darwin did not intend to debase man to an animal; Einstein did not preach relativism; Freud was neither a philosophical pansexualist nor a moral egotist. Freud pointed squarely to the psycho-historical problem involved when he said that the world apparently could not forgive him for having revised the image of man by demonstrating the dependence of man’s will on unconscious motivation, just as Darwin had not been forgiven for demonstrating man’s relationship to the animal world, or Copernicus for showing that our earth is off-center. Freud did not foresee a worse fate, namely that the world can absorb such a major shock by splintering it into minor half-truths, irrelevant exaggerations, and brilliant distortions, mere caricatures of the intended design. Yet somehow the shock affects the intimate inner balance of many, if not all, contemporary individuals, obviously not because great men are understood and believed, but because they are felt to represent vast shifts in man’s image of the universe and of his place in it shifts which are determined concomitantly by political and economic developments.

The tragedy of great men is that they are the leaders and yet the victims of ideological processes.

Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther, p.177

I find it personally interesting that Luther was attracted to mysticism, but unable to make much of it.

Martin also pursued his lifelong unhappy love, mysticism.

All the primitive superstition and German simplicity in him should have found refuge in the mystic’s unification with God which needed no formula of justification and which, in fact, left all “thinking” aside. He did yearn for the birth of God’s “uncreated word” in his soul; he desired to be physically pervaded with the kind of assurance “that really gets under your skin” (senkt sich ins Fleisch). The mystic proclaims as attainable exactly that total piety which Martin desired (tota corde and tola mente; omni affectu and toto intellects). Bonaventura “drove him nearly mad” with his advice that it is better to turn to grace than to dogma; to nostalgia than to intellect; and to prayer than to study. But, alas, Martin had to admit that he never “tasted” the fruits of such endeavor (ullum unquam gustum . . . sensi) sincerely as he had tried. He could not feel his way to God.

Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther, p.164

Just finished reading a lengthy essay by Mark R. Anspach that serves as the introduction to a collection of studies by Rene Girard entitled Oedipus Unbound.

Excellent stuff. Freud’s “Oedipus Complex” is completely kicked to the curb and can never rise again except with a severe limp.

The essay mostly builds on Girard’s earlier work and uses some excellent examples to further explain the scapegoat mechanism.

Here, we have some of these ideas applied back in the garden of Eden:

“Psychoanalytic man is forever an Adam from paradise becuase he devoured or coveted the forbidden fruit,” writes Girard. But mimetic man covets the fruit BECAUSE it is forbidden; he covets whatever is withheld from him by the mediator, who acts as both model and rival: “The obsession with forbidden fruit is not primary, it is not the cause but the consequence of the rivalry” The paradise of mimetic man is not a place of enjoyment he had to leave, it is the place he cannot go: “The model shows the disciple the gate of paradise and forbids him to enter with one and the same gesture.” Thus, it “is with the model and not the obstacle that the dialectic begins. But this heirarchy will soon reverse itself, dissimulating the true genesis of desire.”

Mark R. Anspach, Imitating Oedipus, p. xxxix

Satan desired to be like God. Eve picked up this desire from the snake. Adam picked up this desire from Eve.

We are so much like God – more so than any other created thing. But we desire what we are missing and he won’t give it to us. And we hate him for it. We were content before we started imitating the serpent.