bitkin's Xanga

Monday, April 13, 2009

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:33:37 GMT

"We are therefore not required to bring a systematically conceived hell into harmony with the love of God and make it credible, or indeed to justify it conceptually as love (and not perhaps merely as the revelation of self-glorifying divine justice), because no such system could be constructed out of a possible 'knowledge' apart from or beyond love and at the same time related to it. We are required only not to let go of love, the love that believes and hopes and through both is suspended in the air so that its Christian wings may grow. Soaring in the air, I also necessarily experience the abyss below, which is only part of my own flight. Similarly, I can speak of hell only in relation to myself, precisely because I can never imagine the possible damnation of another as more likely than my own."

--Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible

Take that, scholastics.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:35:48 GMT

There is a time of youth
When you know
How all inadequate
Is the wineskin
For all of what should be
Put into it--
How, just as Eliot said
About Hamlet,
The problem is too small
For the feeling--
Which explains some suicides--
What do you do
With excess, exiled, excited wine?

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:28:38 GMT

The seventeenth century is eating my life.

Rachel's one and only blog post about politics--this will not happen again:

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:40:15 GMT

Why is it that of all the people in this country who are very vocal and articulate about abortion as a moral issue--people like Dawn Eden and all the Catholics--there seem to be none who are also worried about war and the environment as moral issues, too?

And it is just as bad when you look at people who I would say have a thoughtful and ethical view of these last two issues--people like Noam Chomsky and Wendell Berry--these thinkers say almost nothing about abortion as a moral problem. Where are the writers, bloggers, etc. (Christian or not!) who are concerned both about "creating a culture of life," AND ending imperialism? This is very frustrating to me right now.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:33:35 GMT

i think i have become dependent on brach's candy corn in order to get any work done.

this could be a very bad thing.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:51:33 GMT

Autumn smacks of childhood:
Of afternoons drawn out
And spent beneath the front-yard tree
Alone, walking about--
Yes, walking back and forth, thinking
Of characters I've just
Made up, as my feet shuffle through
The leaves and grass and dust.

No playthings else--I am content
To live inside my head
And get drunk on my fancies, dizzy-drunk,
My shyness shed.
Then, reeling, I reach out to touch
The tree, for I must know--
O life, o tree, o leaves, o wind--
If all is real or show.

And dear God I miss:

--going to Richmond with the family to buy pecans
--TMEA and all its terrors and glories
--weekends in Corsicana at Kristen's, my freshman year at Baylor
--Prickett's Victorian Fantasy class in the basement of Armstrong Browning Library
--a year ago, that night when Jojo and Dave and I went to hear the Hungry Villagers at Super Happy Funland, and the evening was magic
--the old Half-Price Books, the one we moved out of, with all its shabby charm
--and all the other autumns of my life, times of change and anticipation and love, and that undefinable sense of loss and yearning for another time and place

In Which Yvain Proves Himself No True Knight:

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:34:39 GMT

"Et ele li dist beaus sire ie
voz requier que voz facies ce que ie voz
dirai. & il dist que si fera il seurement.
Or me baisies vne fois fet ele.
& ie voz clamerai quite. Et il le
regarde si le vit si laide & si fron
chie que nule plus. si se targe vn poi de
respondre. car trop est esbahis de ce quele
li demande. Et ele li dist encore vne au
tre fois. sire chevaliers sil onques ot loiaute
en voz. si voz aquites vers moi. Et il
respondi trop corroucies. Ha dame de
mandes moi autre chose. car certes ce
ne feroie ie mie uolentiers."

(And she said to him, "Fair sir, I ask of you that you do what I tell you." And he promised that he would do it. "Now, kiss me once," she said, "and I will consider your debt paid." And he looked at her, and saw that she was uglier and more wrinkled than anyone else ever was. And he waited a moment to answer, for he was altogether amazed at what she had asked of him. And once again she said to him, "Sir knight, if ever there were faithfulness in you, pay me your debt." And he answered in anger, "Ah, lady, ask of me something else, for you may be sure that I will never do this thing of my own free will.")

This stuff cracks me up. (It's part of a transcription I'm doing, of a thirteenth-century manuscript online. I did the English translation myself.)

The only thing that would be better would be getting to see the real, honest to goodness manuscript, and touch it and feel it and smell it. This works for now, though.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:09:16 GMT

In the community group I've joined at City Church (wow, I love that name; it reminds me of what Bethany DeGray once said--and I totally agree: "God loves cities"), we are going to be studying reconciliation, which I think is a fabulous topic, going as it does to the heart of the gospel, as well as to the heart of our human need for community.

Thinking about reconciliation excites me; unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), it also tends to make me feel guilty about past failures to handle conflict in a Christian way. A lot of the time I'm afraid what I've done is the following: when I get tired of dealing with people, and am too lazy to work out my differences with them, I just avoid them. And I let the relationships wither and perish. Which is NOT ever what we're supposed to do as Christ-followers! Rather, as Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love, "the lover expresses that the relationship which another considers broken is a relationship which has not yet been completed."

How to put this into action?

Friday, September 12, 2008

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:26:12 GMT

il me semble que tout le monde me manque aujourd'hui ...

a lovely passage from a beautiful book:

"If we can be divinely fed with a morsel and divinely blessed with a touch, then the terrible presence we find in a particular face can certainly instruct us in the nature of the very grandest love." (Marilynne Robinson, Gilead)

st. bernard/aquinas/c.s. lewis/josef pieper would all agree.

***sending out my hugs and prayers for everybody in ike's path--

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:33:09 GMT

Have been having a small-scale identity crisis lately, where I fear turning into a strange and crochety old-maid type.

Getting out more may solve this problem.