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Another One of Those Tests….

You Are a Dreaming Soul

Your vivid emotions and imagination takes you away from this world So much so that you tend to live in your head most of the time You have great dreams and ambitions that could be the envy of all… But for you, following through with your dreams is a bit difficult You are charming, endearing, and people tend to love you. Forgiving and tolerant, you see the world through rose colored glasses. Underneath it all, you have a ton of passion that you hide from others. Always hopeful, you tend to expect positive outcomes in your life. Souls you are most compatible with: Newborn Soul, Prophet Soul, and Traveler Soul

What Kind of Soul Are You?

I’m not so sure I’m always hopeful. Or charming and endearing. Also, I think “vivid emotions” is a little too nice of a way to put it. *eg* Otherwise, this isn’t too far off.

Get Ed Gets Good

Over on ABC Family Channel, there’s a pretty decent slate of Saturday and Sunday morning cartoons for the young ‘uns. Of course, I watch ’em too. (Not much of the Sunday ones, though! As we all know, I’m up the hill half of Sunday!) Anyway, other than The Tick, Kong, and the inimitable Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force, my favorite show there is Get Ed. It’s a decent enough action show, and it’s had a story arc from the beginning. (Also, it has a sock puppet as a character.) But I wasn’t all that excited about it. I mean, every week the Dojo Delivery team tried to keep the Big Bad Guy from stealing their courier packages, or tried to steal Big Bad Guy packages from other courier companies. So Ed was an alien-built cyber-warrior with flashes of foreknowledge who was reassembled from parts by his boss. We’ve all seen that before, haven’t we? 🙂

But as Ed’s found a missing part of himself and the Dojo Delivery team have made friends out of hostile robots, the show has grown ever more endearing and interesting. Until this week, when the team rescued Ed from the Big Bad Guy, and Ed revealed that he’d had a vision of where he was supposed to go.

Unexpectedly, we met up with a good guy from the future — who looks like a future version of the Big Bad Guy! Erh?! He helps Ed and the others escape, using nanobots to turn a junkyard into a giant robot. Erh?! And then, in a surprising change from the usual plotlines about a Chosen One, Ed has all his friends join him in the Secret Ancient Alien Machine so that they all get a briefing and a power-up symbol.

Including Old School, their geezer hacker skateboarder boss.

Dude! That just isn’t done! The adult never gets to play! Especially not the father!

So yeah, I’m interested.

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Well, That Was Weird.

For some reason, Blogger didn’t want to let me back on and was claiming my cookies weren’t working. So I deleted my Firefox cache, and then it turned out I hadn’t logged out of Blogger.

*spooky ominous music*

My theory is that the bad karma and the outraged Chinese gods are already attacking Google… and worse is yet to come….

*segue to ominous symphonic crescendo*

Run, Google, run! The Kitchen God’s about to report back to Heaven on Chinese New Year!

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St. Augustine on Rape

I was over reading the Catholic Answers forums last night, which is always interesting, and specifically their Ask an Apologist feature, which is often enlightening. Anyway, back on the 9th, some lady had written in, sure that the Church didn’t think rape victims were guiltless. Her evidence for this was that St. Maria Goretti was praised for fighting back.

*pounds head against wall*

This is especially frustrating, since when I was young, stories about St. Maria Goretti made it sound like she didn’t fight back. Also, that she was an ethereal maiden and not a robust young Italian version of the song’s “Irish agricultural girl”. Apparently, the culture thinks Maria Goretti is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

But, moving on…

Anyway, the apologist gave a good answer. But I kept thinking about the beginning of St. Augustine’s City of God. No, I haven’t read the whole thing. But the first part, written right after the sack of Rome by Alaric’s Visigoths, deals with the problems of such an event. One of them is the rape of Christian consecrated virgins.

Pagan Romans felt that raped women had lost their honor, and that it could only be regained by killing themselves, like the famous Lucretia of legend. We know that many cultures today still teach this sort of behavior — most notably the Muslims. But for Christians, such an idea was wicked foolishness, on many levels.

St. Augustine attacks this problem head on. First of all, he proclaims that “the virtue which makes the life good has its throne in the soul, and thence rules the members of the body, which becomes holy in virtue of the holiness of the will; and that while the will remains firm and unshaken, nothing that another person does with the body, or upon the body, is any fault of the person who suffers it, so long as he cannot escape it without sin.”

He acknowledged that people who are raped feel “shame invades even a thoroughly pure spirit from which modesty has not departed — shame, lest that act which could not be suffered without some sensual pleasure, should be believed to have been committed also with some assent of the will.”

First, he says (as an act of pastoral comfort to those worried about the fate of suicides’ souls) that “even if some of these virgins killed themselves to avoid such disgrace, who that has any human feeling would refuse to forgive them?” (Normally, suicide was considered back then as an aggressive, controlling, act of defiance against God and the world. Considering the culture, it may well have been.)

But then he makes sure to emphasize that if a woman refused to commit suicide, she was doing a good thing, not being shameless and wicked as the local culture said. “Why, then, should a person who has done no wrong do wrong to himself, and by killing himself kill the innocent to escape another’s guilty act, and perpetrate upon himself a sin of his own, that the sin of another may not be perpetrated on him?”

Furthermore, he insists that “what sane man can suppose that, if his body be seized and forcibly made use of to satisfy the lust of another, he thereby loses his purity?” In fact, the soul’s intention sanctifies the body, no matter what has been done to it by others against its will.

“For the sanctity of the body does not consist in the integrity of its members, nor in their exemption from all touch; for they are exposed to various accidents which do violence to and wound them, and the surgeons who administer relief often perform operations that sicken the spectator. A midwife, suppose, has (whether maliciously or accidentally, or through unskillfulness) destroyed the virginity of some girl, while endeavoring to ascertain it: I suppose no one is so foolish as to believe that, by this destruction of the integrity of one organ, the virgin has lost anything even of her bodily sanctity. And thus, so long as the soul keeps this firmness of purpose which sanctifies even the body, the violence done by another’s lust makes no impression on this bodily sanctity, which is preserved intact by one’s own persistent continence.”

“This, then, is our position, and it seems sufficiently lucid. We maintain that when a woman is violated while her soul admits no consent to the iniquity, but remains inviolably chaste, the sin is not hers, but his who violates her.”

He also rips on the story of Lucretia: “But how is it, that she who was no partner to the crime bears the heavier punishment of the two? For the adulterer was only banished along with his father; she suffered the extreme penalty. If that was not impurity by which she was unwillingly ravished, then this is not justice by which she, being chaste, is punished.”

The pagan Romans argue that suicide is a good way to prevent women getting interested in their rapist. (Clearly they’ve been watching General Hospital too much.) Augustine slaps this down, too.

“Now, in the first place, the soul which is led by God and His wisdom, rather than by bodily concupiscence, will certainly never consent to the desire aroused in its own flesh by another’s lust. And, at all events, if it be true, as the truth plainly declares, that suicide is a detestable and damnable wickedness, who is such a fool as to say, ‘Let us sin now, that we may obviate a possible future sin; let us now commit murder, lest we perhaps afterwards should commit adultery’? If we are so controlled by iniquity that innocence is out of the question, and we can at best but make a choice of sins, is not a future and uncertain adultery preferable to a present and certain murder? Is it not better to commit a wickedness which penitence may heal, than a crime which leaves no place for healing contrition?

“I say this for the sake of those men or women who fear they may be enticed into consenting to their violator’s lust, and think they should lay violent hands on themselves, and so prevent, not another’s sin, but their own. But far be it from the mind of a Christian confiding in God, and resting in the hope of His aid; far be it, I say, from such a mind to yield a shameful consent to pleasures of the flesh, howsoever presented. And if that lustful disobedience, which still dwells in our mortal members, follows its own law irrespective of our will, surely its motions in the body of one who rebels against them are as blameless as its motions in the body of one who sleeps.”

Later, he points out that if people are supposed to kill themselves to avoid one sin, obviously these folks would advocate everybody killing themselves. Right after getting baptized, preferably. After all, that’s the only sure way to avoid sinning, right?

But before that, he moves to the point which the forum questioner raised, of saints who heroically got themselves killed. In Augustine’s case, actually, he deals with virgin martyrs who heroically resisted pagan Roman attacks by throwing themselves into rivers, etc.

“Of such persons I do not presume to speak rashly. I cannot tell whether there may not have been vouchsafed to the church some divine authority, proved by trustworthy evidences, for so honoring their memory: it may be that it is so.

“It may be they were not deceived by human judgment, but prompted by divine wisdom, to their act of self-destruction. We know that this was the case with Samson. And when God enjoins any act, and intimates by plain evidence that He has enjoined it, who will call obedience criminal? Who will accuse so religious a submission? But then, every man is not justified in sacrificing his son to God, because Abraham was commendable in so doing.”

Augustine ends by telling the women, “Let not your life, then, be a burden to you, ye faithful servants of Christ, though your chastity was made the sport of your enemies. You have a grand and true consolation, if you maintain a good conscience, and know that you did not consent to the sins of those who were permitted to commit sinful outrage upon you.” He tells them to say to the pagans, “our God is everywhere present, wholly everywhere; not confined to any place. He can be present unperceived, and be absent without moving; when He exposes us to adversities, it is either to prove our perfections or correct our imperfections; and in return for our patient endurance of the sufferings of time, He reserves for us an everlasting reward.”

The Fathers of the Church are separated from us by time and culture. But this is no true separation for all those of us who are members of the Body of Christ. They have a lot to say to us today, if we are prepared to listen with sympathy.

Btw, you may have noticed on the encyclical reading over on my podcast blog that I pronounce the man’s name as “AW-guh-steen”. However, the preferred pronunciation among the English-influenced is “ah-GUH-stin”. I say they’re both correct (but point out that my pronunciation is a lot closer to the Latin, via Spanish), so I will continue pronouncing the man’s name like the city in Florida. (Which I visited when I was five. It’s a bit late to change now.) However, I will note that the really correct Anglicization of “Augustinus” is Chaucer’s “Austin”. So there. (Naeh!)

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Unhappy….

Apparently, Blogger thinks I’ve got a spam blog. So I have to type in these stupid characters until such time as they get a human person over here to look at my blog.

Guess I shouldn’t have posted about all that bad stuff China’s doing, huh?

Okay, that was mean. But I still can’t figure out why their algorithm or whatever thinks this place might be a spam blog. Do I link too much or something?

Sigh. Whatever.

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Good Food Alert!

On Jan. 29 — this Sunday — Chinese New Year and Vietnamese New Year (Tet) begin! This means that, if you have a Chinese, Vietnamese, or international grocery in your area, this would be a good time to go pick up a few yummy things.

Like rice cakes. And bean cakes. Mmmm.

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Thinking of Gerard….

A lot of passages from the Pope’s new encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est”, made me think of Gerard, one of St. Blog’s departed faithful. (You can also visit his site, which his relatives have left up.) So, a quote from the encyclical, Gerard-style:

In the love-story recounted by the Bible, he comes towards us, he seeks to win our hearts, all the way to the Last Supper, to the piercing of his heart on the Cross, to his appearances after the Resurrection and to the great deeds by which, through the activity of the Apostles, he guided the nascent Church along its path.

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Sources

The first time I read this, it was quoted at the beginning of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Sayers quoted it too. But later I read it in the source, Sir Thomas Browne’s “Urn-Burial”:

What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entered the famous Nations of the dead, and slept with Princes and Counsellours, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above Antiquarism.

But who was Browne quoting? For that, we go to Laudator Temporis Actii on “The Pleasures of Pedantry”:

Tiberius was fond of questions like this, according to Suetonius (Life of Tiberius 70.3, tr. J.C. Rolfe):

Yet his special aim was a knowledge of mythology, which he carried to a silly and laughable extreme; for he used to test even the grammarians, a class of men in whom, as I have said, he was especially interested, by questions something like this: “Who was Hecuba’s mother?” “What was the name of Achilles among the maidens?” “What were the Sirens in the habit of singing?”

maxime tamen curavit notitiam historiae fabularis usque ad ineptias atque derisum; nam et grammaticos, quod genus hominum praecipue, ut diximus, appetebat, eius modi fere quaestionibus experiebatur: “quae mater Hecubae, quod Achilli nomen inter virgines fuisset, quid Sirenes cantare sint solitae.”

Knowing this makes me very happy. So I guess I too am a pedant!

Wikipedia on “Urn Burial”

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Requiescat in Pace

Late on Friday night, one of my neighbors, a middle-aged lady with many health problems, had a heart attack. She apparently tried to consult one of my other neighbors, who’s a nurse. She got no answer at the door, so she left a note and went and sat down by her own door with a pillow. That’s where she died, not long after midnight, before the nurse came home. All alone. The only good thing is that she doesn’t seem to have felt much pain or realized she was as sick as she was. (We’re only about three minutes from a hospital. If she’d felt that sick, she would’ve called.)

The whole thing is spooking the apartment building pretty fierce. Normally, somebody would have been in that hallway on a Friday night. But somehow, nobody was. Normally, the ambulance and the commotion with the police would have woken everybody up, too. But mostly, it didn’t.

There’s been a lot of gunk going around, so I think a lot of folks were just like me. I was sick, so I went to bed early with a big dose of cough medicine. None of the comings and goings all weekend even registered on me, since I was staying in my apartment or in bed most of the time.

All the same, it doesn’t seem like anyone should have to die alone like that. So surely God was with her when the rest of us failed her. Surely.

Grant her eternal rest, O Lord, and may light eternal shine upon her.

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“Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator” Returns!

This time, the name of the game is “Switcheroo”.

Amy Welborn shut her eyes and was silent for a few moments. Then she sighed, reached into her briefcase and handed me a piece of paper. “Two weeks ago, Bishop Sullivan delivered that sermon.”

I began to read. “In the name of God the Creator, God the Redeemer and God the Sanctifier.” I looked at Nicky and said, “Uh oh.”

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The Audiobook Problem

So why is my iPod still bookless two weeks post Christmas?

I won’t pay the price that’s being asked. I won’t pay hardcover prices for a digital file. I won’t even pay trade paperback prices. I believe that a digital book should cost about the same as a paperback.

Amen.

I know my Maria Lectrix podcast is more than a little quirky, but I really need something in the way of an audiobook to listen to at work. (Radio’s just not enough.) I need to feel like I’m doing some kind of uploading to pay for all that downloading from Librivox and other audiobook podcasts. And I can’t go to the library every five minutes to feed the need. So there you go.

Just to prove that this blog puts its time where its mouth is, the folks behind it have put up a serialized podcast of hackoff.com, a mystery novel set waaaaaay back in the days of the dotcom bubble. (That was about twenty years ago in Internet time.)

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Things That Make My Brain Ooze from My Ears, Part 1

People who read strongly rhythmic and rhymed poetry out loud and try to make it sound like free verse, thus laming the horse instead of riding it.

Poets were sometimes the rock stars of other eras — and part of their power was the primal interaction of sound and rhythm, combined with the more cerebral pleasures of imagery and meaning. If you don’t combine them, your reading is going to sound horrible. Like William Shatner “singing”.

I don’t care how much your English teacher feared you sounding “singsong”. A prosy drone with no rhythm and no power is worse.

A poem with a driving beat is not the same as a lyrical piece of free verse, any more than a dance hit is the same as a meandering 30 minute guitar solo. Pay attention to the poem. Read what it says, the way it says. Otherwise, you’re not reading the poem at all.

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Iran: In the Fire of Spring?

In case you’ve been totally out of touch with world events, Iran is just a tad bit volatile these days. The people don’t like the mullahs anymore. They run corrupt elections. They ban everything fun, including the big Spring family holiday, Nourooz, celebrating the traditional New Year on the spring equinox. So every year on Nourooz for the last few years, the students and the people have been demonstrating. And burning mullahs’ cars and houses, just to make their point clear.

The current president is not just a hardliner mullah; he also thinks the Mahdi is coming. And since it turned out that Khomeini wasn’t, he thinks he’s probably he’s it. (Roll your Paul Atreides clip here….) He has visions of being clothed in a beautiful light and an Armageddon battle in Iraq. Near the holy city of Najaf.

Oh, yeah, and he’s got this thing for developing nukes. Not to mention several Saddam scientist alumni in fun fields like biological and chemical weaponry.

Meanwhile, the holy Shi’ite city of Najaf, in Iran, is now open to just about anyone who wants to go there for the first time in years. So the faithful Shi’ites from Iraq and Iran are back to regarding Najaf’s mullahs as the authorities on what to do to be a faithful Shi’ite. Najaf’s mullahs, who now advocate democracy. Instead of Khomeini’s mullahs in Iran, who only came to prominence there because Saddam had pretty much shut down and cut off the mullahs of Najaf.

And Ahmadinejad, who has method and motive and can create opportunity, is dreaming of an Armageddon battle near Najaf. Convenient for him, isn’t it.

But he has to move fast, because Nourooz is coming, and the Iranian people are angry, and the Iraqi people are growing strong.

So what will happen? Will the Iranian people jump over the bonfires on Chaharshanbeh Souri without getting burned? Will it be out with the old, and in with the new — freedom, peace with Iraq, and prosperity for all?

Or, God forbid, will the fires of Spring be the consuming kind?

The bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter — and the bird is on the wing.

On a more hopeful note, if anybody out there wants to invite me to a Nourooz party…

…and 2006 is also the Year of the Dog according to the old Persian year calendar.