Jung’s Birthday, 4 AM:

Jung on the Trinity
and Quaternity

Jung’s Birthday, 3 AM:

The Shape of God:
Deepening the Mystery
of the Trinity

State and Church

Today’s birthdays:

George W. Bush and
Sylvester Stallone, born on
the same day 60 years ago.

Two birthday quotations from Kathleen Parker:

“Verily, I say unto you – Whatever.”

“No, wait, how about this: ‘Yo, Christ Buddy!‘”

— Orlando Sentinel
   column written for release July 1, 2006

Parker’s column, on recent Presbyterian interpretations of the Holy Trinity, is titled

“I believe in Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe.”

What about Shemp?

High Concept, continued:

“In the beginning there was nothing.
 And God said, ‘Let there be light!’
 And there was still nothing,
 but now you could see it.“

— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
    Slate‘s “High Concept” department

Related material:

1. On the phrase “verbum mentis”
2. From Satan’s Rhetoric, by Armando Maggi
   (University of Chicago Press, 2001):

Intersections

1. Blue Ridge meets Black Mountain,

2. Vertical meets horizontal in music,

3. The timeless meets time in religion.

Details:

1. Blue Ridge, Black Mountain

“Montreat College is located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina…. The Black Mountain Campus is… three miles from the main campus in the historic town of Black Mountain.”

Black Mountain College was “established on the Blue Ridge Assembly grounds outside the town of Black Mountain in North Carolina in the fall of 1933.”

USA Today, May 15, 2005, on Billy Graham:

“MONTREAT, N.C. — … It’s here at his… homestead, where the Blue Ridge meets the Black Mountain range east of Asheville, that Graham gave a rare personal interview.”

See also the following from June 24:

“No bridge reaches God, except one…
God’s Bridge: The Cross.”

— Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
according to messiahpage.com

For some remarks more in the spirit of Black Mountain than of the Blue Ridge, see today’s earlier entry on pianist Grete Sultan and composer Tui St. George Tucker.

2. Vertical, Horizontal in Music

Richard Neuhaus on George Steiner’s
Grammars of Creation:

 “… the facts of the world are not and will never be ‘the end of the matter.’ Music joins grammar in pointing to the possibility, the reality, of more. He thinks Schopenhauer was on to something when he said music will continue after the world ends.

‘The capacity of music to operate simultaneously along horizontal and vertical axes, to proceed simultaneously in opposite directions (as in inverse canons), may well constitute the nearest that men and women can come to absolute freedom.  Music does “keep time” for itself and for us.'”

3. Timeless, Time

A Trinity Sunday sermon quotes T. S. Eliot:

“… to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint.”

See also The Diamond Project.

Zen and the Trinity

(See entries of December 6, 2002.)

Zen: The time is now 3:00:00 PM.

The Trinity: “Three illustrations will suffice.”

Epistle and Hymns

In the spirit of Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs, we conclude our Hiroshima Day service with a link to The Epistle of Jeremiah and a deadly trinity of singers:

For the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola:

In God’s Name

Scoop

This afternoon I came across, in a briefcase I seldom use, two books I had not looked at since I bought them last month:

• The Footprints of God, a recently published paperback by Greg Iles, a writer who graduated from Trinity High School, Natchez, Mississippi, in 1979, and from the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1983.
• Sanctuary, by the better-known Mississippi writer William Faulkner.

At the time I purchased the books, indeed until I looked up Iles on the Web today, I was not aware of the Mississippi connection.  Their physical connection, lying together today in my briefcase, is, of course, purely coincidental.  My view of coincidence is close to that of Arthur Koestler, who wrote The Challenge of Chance and The Roots of Coincidence, and to that of Loren Eiseley, who wrote of a dice game and of "the Other Player" in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours.

A Log24 entry yesterday referred to a comedic novel on the role of chance in physics, Cosmic Banditos.  Today's New York Times quotes an entertainer who referred to President Bush yesterday, at a political fund-raiser, as a bandito.  Another coincidence… this one related directly to the philosophy of coincidences expounded jokingly in Cosmic Banditos.

I draw no conclusions from such coincidences, but they do inspire me to look a little deeper into life's details — where, some say, God is.  Free association on these details, together with a passage in Sanctuary, inspired the following collage:

Related Texts

Faulkner on a trinity of women
in Sanctuary (Ch. 25):

"Miss Reba emerged from behind the screen with three glasses of gin. 'This'll put some heart into us,' she said. 'We're setting here like three old sick cats.'  They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips.  Then they began to talk.  They were all talking at once,* again in half-completed sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation."

"In Defense of the Brand":

"When I was helping Frito corn chips expand its core user group in the mid-'90s, we didn't ask Frito-Lay to just wave the Fritos banner. The brand was elevated to a place where it could address its core users in a way that was relevant to their lifestyle. We took the profile of the audience and created a campaign starring Reba McEntire. It captured the brand's essence, and set Frito eaters amidst good music, good people, and good fun."

Song lyric, Reba McEntire:
 

"I might have been born
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name."

Loren Eiseley, 
Notes of an Alchemist:

I never found
the hole in the wall;
I never found
Pancho Villa country
where you see the enemy first.
— "The Invisible Horseman"

* A significant phrase. See

We Are the Key:
The Shining of December 13,
and
Naturalized Epistemology.

Trinity Test

Some background on the previous entry, Honorable Bird….

A note on the Michael Douglas film in that previous entry:

“This film is not to be confused with Japanese director Shohei Imamura’s BLACK RAIN, which was produced around the same time. Imamura’s film deals with the lives of a Japanese family who survived the nuclear-bombing of Hiroshima. The phrase ‘black rain,’ used in both films, refers to the deadly fallout caused by the detonation of an atomic weapon.”

For related material on the religion of Trinity, see Hiroshima Mayor Says US Worships Nukes, a news story quoted in Death of a Holy Man (8/10/03).  The phrase “holy man” there is from John Steinbeck, who once wrote a sentence saying that sons of bitches, viewed from another perspective, are holy men.

Here is the death of another holy man, Clayton S. White, a medical researcher who developed the field of blast biology — the study of how nuclear explosions affect people immediately and over time.  This holy man died on April 26, 2004.  A log24 entry of that date supplies an appropriate epitaph for the holy man, dead at 91, who has now joined his younger brother, the late Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, in some region of the afterworld.

Affirmation of Place and Time:
East Coker and Grand Rapids

This morning’s meditation:

“Let us talk together with the courage, humor, and ardor of Socrates.

In that long conversation, we may find ourselves considering something Plato’s follower Plotinus said long ago about ‘a principle which transcends being,’ in whose domain one can ‘assert identity without the affirmation of being.’  There, ‘everything has taken its stand forever, an identity well pleased, we might say, to be as it is…. Its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for nothing there has ever ceased to be.’  Individuality and existence in space and time may be masks that our sensibilities impose on the far different face of quantum reality.”

— Peter Pesic, Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature, MIT Press paperback, 2003, p. 145

A search for more on Plotinus led to sites on the Trinity, which in turn led to the excellent archives at Calvin College in Grand Rapids.

A search for the theological underpinnings of Calvin College led to the Christian Reformed church:

“Our emblem is
the cross in a triangle.”

The triangle, as a symbol of “the delta factor,” also plays an important role in the semiotic theory of Walker Percy.  A search for current material on Percy led back to one of my favorite websites, that of Percy expert Karey Perkins, and thus to the following paper:

The “East Coker” Dance
in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
An Affirmation of Place and Time
by Karey Perkins

For a rather different, but excellent, literary affirmation of place and time — in Grand Rapids, rather than East Coker — see, for instance, Michigan Roll, a novel by Tom Kakonis.

We may, for the purposes of this trinitarian meditation, regard Percy and Kakonis as speaking for the Son and Karey Perkins as a spokesperson for the Holy Spirit.  As often in my meditations, I choose to regard the poet Wallace Stevens as speaking perceptively about (if not for, or as) the Father.  A search for related material leads to a 1948 comment by Thomas McGreevy, who

“… wrote of Stevens’ ‘Credences of Summer’ (Collected Poems 376),

On every page I find things that content me, as ‘The trumpet of the morning blows in the clouds and through / The sky.’

A devout Roman Catholic, he added, ‘And I think my delight in it is of the Holy Spirit.’ (26 May 1948).”

An ensuing search for material on “Credences of Summer” led back, surprisingly, to an essay — not very scholarly, but interesting — on Stevens, Plotinus, and neoplatonism.

Thus the circle closed.

As previous entries have indicated, I have little respect for Christianity as a religion, since Christians are, in my experience, for the most part, damned liars.  The Trinity as philosophical poetry, is, however, another matter.  I respect Pesic’s speculations on identity, but wish he had a firmer grasp of his subject’s roots in trinitarian thought.  For Stevens, Percy, and Perkins, I have more than respect.

Today in History:
The Comeback Kid

(Courtesy of Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar)

On this date:

In 1962, having lost the California governor’s race, Richard Nixon said to the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”

In 1972, Republican incumbent President Richard Nixon was re-elected, defeating Democratic candidate George McGovern, 520 electoral votes to 17.

From the archives of singer/songwriter Shannon Campbell (“voice of an angel, mouth of a truckdriver”)–

Feb. 6, 2002: The Essential Matrix

NEO: (whines) Who am I?

TRINITY: You are The One.

EVERYONE ELSE: Eh, he might be The One.

TRINITY: He is The One.

NEO: I am not The One.

TRINITY: You are The One.

THE ORACLE: You are not The One, but you can’t tell anybody.

NEO: (whines) But I wanted to be The One. I want to go home….

TRINITY: Fuck. He’s not The One.

EVERYONE ELSE: Told you so.

MORPHEUS: Sure wish someone was The One. I’m in deep shit.

Death of a Holy Man

Part I:  An American Religion

Hiroshima Mayor Says
US Worships Nukes

“HIROSHIMA — Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba warned that the world is moving toward war and accused Washington of ‘worshipping’ nuclear weapons during Wednesday’s ceremony marking the 58th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city….

… the Hiroshima mayor blamed the United States for making the world a more uncertain place through its policy of undermining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

‘A world without nuclear weapons and war that the victims of the atomic bomb have long sought for is slipping into the shadows of growing black clouds that could turn into mushroom clouds at any moment,’ Akiba said. ‘The chief cause of this is the United States’ nuclear policy which, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by starting research into small ‘useable’ nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God.’ “

— Mainichi Shimbun, Aug. 6, 2003

Part II: Holy Men and
             Sons of Bitches

“I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

— Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
    Director of Los Alamos

John Steinbeck describing Cannery Row in Monterey:

“Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”  

“Now we are all sons of bitches.”

— Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge,
    Director of Trinity Test

Part III: Death of a Holy Man

From a review of The Atomic Scientists:

“… the authors try to add a personal element that can excite the reader about science.”

For more excitement, see Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Beware of…
Jews Peddling Stories:

An episode in the ongoing saga of the conflict between the "story theory of truth" and the "diamond theory of truth."

The following set of pictures summarizes some reflections on truth and reality suggested by the August 9, 2003, New York Times obituary of writer William Woolfolk, who died on July 20, 2003.

Woolfolk was the author of The Sex Goddess and was involved in the production of the comic book series The Spirit (see below).

The central strategy of the three Semitic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — is to pretend that we are all characters in a story whose author is God.  This strategy suggests the following Trinity, based on the work of William Woolfolk (The Sex Goddess and The Spirit) and Steven Spielberg ("Catch Me If You Can").  Like other Semitic tales, the story of this Trinity should not be taken too seriously.

A Confession of Faith:

Theology Based On the Film
"Catch Me If You Can":

The Son to God the Lutheran Father:

"I'm nothing really, just a kid in love with your daughter."

This is taken from a review of "Catch Me If You Can" by Thomas S. Hibbs.

For some philosophical background to this confession, see Hibbs's book

Shows About Nothing:
Nihilism in Popular Culture
from The Exorcist to Seinfeld.

By the way, today is the anniversary of the dropping on Nagasaki
of a made-in-USA Weapon of Mass Destruction, a plutonium bomb
affectionately named Fat Man.

Fat Man was a sequel to an earlier Jewish story,

Trinity.

A Queer Religion

August 4 headline:

Gay bishop on way to win

This suggests the following theological meditation by a gay Christian:

Amen to the conclusion, at least.

The author of this meditation, “Pharsea,” is a “traditional Catholic” and advocate of the Latin Mass — just like Mel Gibson.  One wonders how Gibson might react to Pharsea’s theology.

As for me… I always thought there was something queer about that religion.

Yesterday

On July 2, in various years, authors

• Ernest Hemingway,
• Mario Puzo, and
• Vladimir Nabokov

died.  They may serve as a sort of Trinity for those who admire excellence in style, character, and art.

Quotations from Papa Hemingway that seem relevant to yesterday’s entry:

“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”
— Ernest Hemingway,
   Death in the Afternoon, Ch. 11

“There is never any ending to Paris….”
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

See also entries of Sept. 27, 2002.

In memory of Leon Uris:

Mate Change Problem

White to mate in 2 moves

H.W.Grant, 1st Prize,
Australian Column 1924

The concept of “mate change,” appropriate on this, the coronation date of Henry VIII, is explained at Chathurangam.com, my source for the above problem.

For the connection with Leon Uris, find the “key” to the above chess problem… i.e., the notation for White’s first move.

From the New York Times, June 24:

“Reviewing Mr. Uris’s 1976 novel Trinity in The New York Times Book Review, Pete Hamill wrote: ‘Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human.'”

Uris, 78, died at the summer solstice… Saturday, June 21, 2003. 

See also Force Field of Dreams.

Mental Health Month, Day 23:

The Prime Cut Gospel

On Christmas Day, 1949,
Mary Elizabeth Spacek was born in Texas.

Lee Marvin, Sissy Spacek in “Prime Cut”

Exercises for Mental Health Month:

Read this discussion of the phrase, suggested by Spacek’s date of birth, “God’s gift to men.”

Read this discussion of the phrase “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” suggested by the previous reading.

Read the more interesting of these discussions of the phrase “the eternal in the temporal.”

Read this discussion of eternal, or “necessary,” truths versus other sorts of alleged “truths.”

Read this discussion of unimportant mathematical properties of the prime number 23.

Read these discussions of important properties of 23:

• R. D. Carmichael’s 1937 discussion of the linear fractional group modulo 23 in 

Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order, Ginn, Boston, 1937 (reprinted by Dover in 1956), final chapter, “Tactical Configurations,” and

• Conway’s 1969 discussion of the same group in    

J. H. Conway, “Three Lectures on Exceptional Groups,” pp. 215-247 in Finite Simple Groups (Oxford, 1969), edited by M. B. Powell and G. Higman, Academic Press, London, 1971….. Reprinted as Ch. 10 in Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups 

Read this discussion of what might be called “contingent,” or “literary,” properties of the number 23. 

Read also the more interesting of  these discussions of the phrase “the 23 enigma.”

Having thus acquired some familiarity with both contingent and necessary properties of 23…

Read this discussion of Aquinas’s third proof of the existence of God.

Note that the classic Spacek film “Prime Cut” was released in 1972, the year that Spacek turned 23:

Day of the Mother Ship:

A Close Encounter of the Third Level

• Level 1:  Religions in General —
  adherents.com
  • Level 2: Religions in Literature —
    adherents.com/lit/
    • Level 3: Zenna and Her People —
      adherents.com/lit/bk_Zenna.html
      Scroll down about 3/4 of this page to find… Moi!

Today is also the feast day of Saint Zenna Henderson, who was born on All Saints’ Day, 1917.   The Adherents.com website says she was a Mormon, but the printed reference work Contemporary Authors (written when she was still alive and could defend herself against any accusation of Mormonism) says she was a Methodist.  Maybe she was just one of The People — i.e., a Person.

“The concept of a person, which we find so familiar in its application to human beings, cannot be clearly and sharply expressed by any word in the vocabulary of Plato and Aristotle; it was wrought with the hammer and anvil* of theological disputes about the Trinity and the Person of Christ.”

— Peter Geach, The Virtues, Cambridge U. Press, 1977, p. 75

See also Terpsichore and the Trinity.

* For a use of this phrase suited to Mental Health Month, see The Prisoner, Episode Ten.  See, too, Inaugural Address.

Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil
on Shakespeare’s Birthday

Tony Scherman on an April 7, 1968, recording by Nina Simone:

“…nobody could telescope more emotion into a single, idiosyncratically turned syllable (listen to the way she says the word “Savannah” in her spoken intro to “Sunday in Savannah.” It breaks your heart — and she ain’t even singin’ yet!).”

See also the following entries on midnight in the garden:

Trinity, Oct. 25, 2002

Midnight in the Garden, Oct. 26, 2002

Point of No Return, Dec. 10, 2002

Culture Clash at Midnight, Dec. 11, 2002

Dead Poets Society, Dec. 13, 2002

For the Dark Lady, Dec. 18, 2002

Nightmare Alley, Dec. 21, 2002

For the Green Lady, Dec. 21, 2002

“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”

— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness Isaiah 5:20

As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her….  The Archivist

The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today, And black’s white today, And day’s night today Cole Porter

Point of No Return

From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar for December 10:

• On this day in 1864, General William T. Sherman’s Union army reached Savannah and the 12-day siege began.  Sherman was able to present the city to President Lincoln as a “Christmas present.”

An album recorded in September 1961:

Songs in the above list:

September Song * When the World was Young
I’ll Be Seeing You * I’ll See You Again
Memories of You * There Will Never Be Another You
Somewhere Along the Way * A Million Dreams Ago
It’s a Blue World * I’ll Remember April
These Foolish Things

Not in the list, but in the album:

As Time Goes By

The Savannah Connection:

Augustus Saint-Gaudens
William Tecumseh Sherman,
1892-1903 (installed 1903)
Central Park, New York City

From

The Necessary Angel,

by Wallace Stevens
(New York: Knopf, 1951)
 (New York: Vintage Books, 1966):

“The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety….”

Part of a journal entry for
October 25, 2002:

Point of No Return was Sinatra’s
last album for Capitol.

Note the strategic placement
of the Capitol Records logo
on the album cover.

Great Simplicity

Today

is the day that Daisetsu Suzuki attained satori,
according to the Zen Calendar.  “Daisetsu” is
said to mean “Great Simplicity.”

For those who prefer Harry Potter and
Diagon Alley, here is another calendar:

To Have and Have Not

Those who prefer traditional Western religions may like a site on the Trinity that contains this:

“Zen metaphysics is perhaps most succinctly set forth in the words ‘not-two.”  But even when he uses this expression, Suzuki is quick to assert that it implies no monism.  Not-two, it is claimed, is not the same as one.*  But when Suzuki discusses the relationship of Zen with Western mysticism, it is more difficult to escape the obvious monistic implications of his thinking.  Consider the following:

We are possessed of the habit of looking at Reality by dividing it into two… It is all due to the human habit of splitting one solid Reality into two, and the result is that my ‘have’ is no ‘have’ and my ‘have not’ is no ‘have not.’  While we are actually passing, we insist that the gap is impassable.**”

*See: Daisetz T. Suzuki, ‘Basic Thoughts Underlying  Eastern Ethical and Social Practice’ in Philosophy and Culture — East and West: East-West Philosophy in Practical Perspective, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), p. 429

** Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, Mysticism Christian and Buddhist (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957, Unwin paperback, 1979), p. 57.

Personally, I am reminded by Suzuki’s satori on this date that today is the eve of the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.  I am also reminded by the rather intolerant tract on the Trinity quoted above that the first atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert at a test site named Trinity.  Of course, sometimes intolerance is justified.

Concluding unscientific postscript:

On the same day in 1896 that D. T. Suzuki attained satori,
lyricist Ira Gershwin was born.

Dies irae, dies illa.

Trinity

On this date in 1963…

1. Father:  C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man), 
2. Son:  John F. Kennedy (“Grace under Pressure” — displayed, not written), and 
3. Holy Spirit:  Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy)

all died.

On the bright side:

On this date, Tarzan (John Clayton III, the future Lord Greystoke) was born and Ravel’s “Bolero” was first performed.

Trinity

The last two days were eventful on the obituary front.  See below for a reasonably holy trinity of lives: 

• Richard Helms as the Father,
• Derek Bell as the Son, and
• Adolph Green as the Holy Spirit. 

See also Bonaventure’s
Itinerarium Mentis in Deum and

the graves list for Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah,
final resting place for Johnny Mercer and plot key
to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

To the Green Lady
 of Perelandra

View from the slopes of Slieve na mBan

In honor of the relationship between theology and literature, of the Green Lady of C. S. Lewis, and of… 

John Flood BA, MA (NUI), Ph.D. (Dublin)
Senior Lecturer. Formerly a tutor at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Trinity College, Dublin, his Ph.D. was on the influence of the interpretation of the figure of Eve in Early Modern writing. His research interests include the Renaissance, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien and the relationship between theology and literature.

… this site’s music is now Caoine Cill Chais, The Lament for Kilcash.

God Is Her Co-Pilot

On the soundtrack album of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,"  Clint Eastwood advised us to "eliminate the negative."  As a sequel to the extremely negative note below, written at midnight on the night of September 13-14, 2002, the following is my best attempt, on this very dark night of the soul, to eliminate the negative.  

Some of us are old enough to recall that the beloved Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, died on September 14, 1982 — exactly 20 years ago —  from injuries she suffered in a car accident the day before.  The following photo recalls happier days of driving the Riviera, in the 1955 film "To Catch a Thief."

This note's title, combined with the photo, suggests that I have a mystical vision of Cary Grant as God.  I can think of worse people to play God.  The best I can do tonight to eliminate the negative is transcribe  the remarks I made in a (paper) journal entry in 1997.  (By the way, I realize that ordinary people are just as important as movie stars, but the latter are more suitable for public discussion.)

In memoriam: Robert Mitchum and James Stewart 

Eternal Triangles (July 3, 1997)

Every civilization tells its own story about the relations between heaven and earth.  Some of the best stories — those of Lao Tsu, the Greek poets, and Buddha — are now almost 26 centuries old.  Some even older stories — those told by the Jews — have enabled our current civilization, led by Charlton Heston as God, to outlast Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.  However, recent claims of Absolute Truth for these stories (The Bible Code) are disturbing.  Perhaps it is time — at least for Robert Mitchum and James Stewart — to meet a kinder, gentler God.

I propose Cary Grant — specifically, as seen in "The Grass is Greener" (1960) with Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, and in "The Philadelphia Story" (1940) with Stewart and Katharine Hepburn.  If we imagine Grant as God, then these films reveal a very old, always entertaining, and sometimes enlightening version of the Trinity:  God and Man as rivals for the Holy Spirit — as played by Deborah, by Kate, and (in heaven) by Grace.  Such a spirit, at work in the real world, may have influenced two of this century's better Bibles:

1. The Oxford Book of English Prose (1925, reprinted through 1958), and

2. "LIFE — The 60th Anniversary Issue" (October 1996)

From (1), for Mitchum's memorial, Deborah might pick "The Basket of Roses" (pp. 1057-1060).  From (2), for Stewart's memorial, Kate might select the page of LIFE's covers for 1941 — and all that page implies.

Finally, Grace, in the Highest society (beyond Bibles) might recall the following telegraphic catechism:

Q. — How old Cary Grant?
A. — Old Cary Grant fine.  How you?

Miss Sauvé

Homily on Flannery O’Connor

for the Sunday following Corpus Christi Day, 2002:

The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.” [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969)] 

 A modest example comes to mind. In a short story  ….  the setting sun appears like a great red ball, but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line like a red clay road in the sky.” [Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971)] 

In a letter to a friend of hers, O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. [Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage: New York, 1979) 124-125] 

….There is, of course, something entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation itself.  

             — Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.

From James Joyce

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

Chapter 3 :

Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?

— Here he is! Here he is!

From The Gazette, Montreal,

of Sunday, August 20, 1995, page C4:

“Summer of ’69,” a memoir by Judy Lapalme on the death by accidental drowning of her 15-year-old younger brother:

“I had never tasted pizza until Jeff died.  Our family, of staunch Irish Catholic stock with more offspring than money, couldn’t cope with the luxury or the spice.

The Hallidays, neighbors from across the street, sent it over to us the day after the funeral, from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria, on Sauvé St., just east of Lajeunesse St. in Ahuntsic.  An all-dressed pizza with the hard hat in the centre….

I was 17 that summer and had just completed Grade 12 at Holy Names High School in Rosemont….

…. Jeff was almost 16, a handsome football star, a rebellious, headstrong, sturdy young man who was forever locking horns with my father…. On Friday, Aug. 1, Jeff went out on the boat… and never came back….    

The day after the funeral, a white Volkswagen from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria delivered a jumbo, all-dressed pizza to us. The Hallidays’ daughter,  Diane, had been smitten with Jeff and wanted to do something special.

My father assured us that we wouldn’t like it, too spicy and probably too garlicky. There could not be a worse indictment of a person to my father than to declare them reeking of garlic. 

The rest of us tore into the cardboard and began tasting this exotic offering — melted strands of creamy, rubbery, burn-your-palate mozzarrella that wasn’t Velveeta, crisp, dry, and earthy mushrooms, spicy and salty pepperoni sliding off the crust with each bite, green peppers…. Bread crust both crisp and soggy with tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano. 

It was an all-dressed pizza, tasted for the first time, the day after we buried Jeff….

The fall of 1969, I went to McGill…. I never had another pizza from Miss Sauvé’s.  It’s gone now — like so many things.”

     Ten thousand places

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

   — Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889

American Literature Web Resources:

Flannery O’Connor

She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.

In almost all of her works the characters were led to a place where they had to deal with God’s presence in the world.

She once said “in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts.”

Encounter – 02/17/2002:

Flannery OConnor – Southern Prophet:

… When a woman wrote to Flannery O’Connor saying that one of her stories “left a bad taste in my mouth,” Flannery wrote back: “You weren’t supposed to eat it.”

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