Events Full

Five weeks ago I gave six-weeks notice at the business journal.

It came about five weeks in on the largest weekly increases in initial unemployment claims since the real estate recession. To date we’re just shy of 39 million in nine weeks, with, for me, one week to go.

As at least one other person has said, ‘Who does that?’

Stay with me.

Concomitant with that — inherent links within hitting closer to the truth of the matter than the implied accidental relationship of concurrent — are working through Ignatian Adventure, reviewing Way of the Ascetics, some ex tempore praying this morning, and classic Leonard Cohen.

Sometimes even I feel the pushiness of my tendency to relate a new event to several that’ve come before. I am eye-deep in confirmation bias and more than mistaken in finding fate or even fortune from everything that happens to me.

But I don’t feel it as I’m so awesome … more along the lines of this is good and God is for a movement toward him + incarnating the realities of our authentic baptismal self in events and awarenesses and a realization-discovery or three, one by connecting one by integral one.

Is life not thus?

This we believe.

And so here is

  • ‘ … the many ways in which God calls … ‘ [location 920 of 3548 in the Kindle IA]
  • multiple avowals of uncertainty for the week after this [threaded through ex tem]
  • ‘first thing … is never in any respect to rely on yourself’ [ch. 2, Colliander’s WotA]
  • ‘the minor fall, the major lift / the baffled king composing Hallelujah’ [LC a’course]

Beginning and ending in gratitude, as it happens.

‘cept it doesn’t just happen.

‘cept for sometimes it does.

And really I’m hardly tryin’ here … more commonly it’s a half-dozen or 10, and occasionally more. This is just what’s just now in just a moment.

S’all I have for now.

I don’t know.

 

 

 

Image:
It Was Better Before God Took Up Knitting
Bruce Eric Kaplan, the New Yorker 24 Oct 05

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

Random

It’s Not Gonna Be Me

First thing I noticed anew this year watching It’s a Wonderful Life was how happy George Bailey was to be going to jail. He celebrates it, as he bursts through his front door to be greeted by a bank examiner, a journalist, and the sheriff. If those three “walked into a bar” it might not be

Read More »

Sadie! Sadie!

Hadda dream that Zadie Smith asked me to babysit two kittens. She and her husband, an older Jewish man, had somewhere to go. He was involved in classical music of some kind, possibly a conductor or composer; seemed like a nice guy. One cat was incontinent, one only inconvenient … Zadie and her mensch were

Read More »

Kim Possible

All the while watching Mad Men seemed to me the question was ‘Would Don Draper be redeemed?’ Breaking Bad was running roughly concurrently and the same question with an otherly alliteration was being posed: ‘Would Walter White be damned?’ The answer to the first was quintessentially postmodern, exquisitely childish, and thereby perfect — neither. Or, as an actual

Read More »

Pas De Duh

Is ballet a sport? The question is asinine in at least two ways. Of course it is, whether one is asking does it qualify as one or simply based on the assumptions implicit in the question itself. To put it as stupidly, would a Ferrari fit in my garage? Is Rivendell a better deal than

Read More »

Related

Finding Level

Relationship finds its own level. Generally it looks like we [and others] choose — a boy’s entreatment rejected, an attorney makes partner, 158 million of us vote — but there is a finality to much that we ostensibly do. This is how such absurdities as determinism gain purchase, how authors can talk and be misunderstood

Read More »

Whee

Each animal has its glory. The dog his ears, the rabbit her tail, the dolphin their leaps. Elephant trunk Moose antlers Giraffe … duh Walrus tusks Whale tails Wolf howl Bear claw Bird caw + [We’d first say flight of course but see, think, feel they all fly and largely the same — tho the

Read More »

Plague Dog

During the lockdown read The Plague, turned page next to The Book of the Dun Cow. Not an immediately clear connection not least because Dun Cow is far lesser known. Both chronicle communities within a larger one within a larger world. First, of course, is the full circle vicious and virtual, during a pandemic; latter

Read More »

Like A Rolling Stone

A totally unscientific survey — texted my brother-in-law on the other coast — shows [my] fears of the death of the ice cream cone have been at least mildly exaggerated … tho looking, literally, a little topsy-turvy. A’course, I’d not heard anything specific; the reports were only in my head because about nothing from this

Read More »