Amsterdam. Recent watercolor. The Desert Fathers and Mothers, according to Kathleen Norris’s Acedia and Me defined sin as “bad thoughts.” They said that sin, at its source, was a matter of the mind, of skewed thinking. From these bad thoughts came bad actions. Somewhere along the line bad actions began to edge out bad thoughts in importance. “Well, everyone has bad thoughts,” we say, “you can’t control them, so just concentrate on the actions. Besides, bad thought alone, don’t hurt anyone” And while it is true from a victim’s standpoint, (I would much rather you think bad thoughts about me then physically assault me,) neglecting the inner source of the drive to assault me (bad thoughts of greed, impatience, competition, control, etc) fails to address the human condition at its core, thus cutting off the thinker in this scenario from the only path of rescue. The church as it grew in power both politically and socially, turned the Desert Fathers’s and Mother’s focus from our ...
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And Yet . . .
Shelby Foote on the left and Walker Percy on the right. I read Proust in college, but it has taken reading the letters of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy to make me want to go back and read him again. Certainly a complicated man, homosexual, liberal yet anti-socialsim, anti-Catholic–though raised Catholic–an atheist, yet very complimentary of the Christians who were willing to speak up for the poor and middle-class and go against the Church’s power. He was against the absolishment of the clergy as he felt that there were many good and honest monks/priests, and that there were as many “scoundrel” secular people as religious ones. A novelist, essayist and literary critic. As I said a complicated man. When his father insisted that he get a job, he obtained a volunteer position at the famous french library, the Bibliotheque Mazarine. Immediately after, he took sick leave and never worked there (or anywhere for that matter) a day of his life, although he continued on their ro...
Most recent Ink and Watercolor. I like to think of this as a vision of Vic and I sitting companionably on a bench as we hike/visit the Alps. Good morning. Working through Kathleen Norris again. As a young wife setting up house on her grandmother’s farm in the “desert” of South Dakota, her interest is peaked when she visits a monastery 90 miles north to hear a author speak. Afterwards, she had a list of questions and wrote them in a letter to one of the monks she had met. He answered as best he could and sent her a dense book on theology. When that didn’t do the trick he advised her to read the letters of Flannery O’Connor. In O’Connor Norris found a kindred soul: a serious writer striving to incorporate faith into the human experience. Norris struggled with the twin desires to write and to explore faith—a combination she had come to see as impossible while in college—and while not antagonistic to her grandmother’s little church down the road, she cou...
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