teaching today

For years I’ve been introducing students in my college-level fine- arts courses to the photographs of Diane Arbus (1923–71)....  Together they form a communion of beings as ethereal as saints, whose lovely, silver-tone relics seem at home under glass.

Projected onto a lecture-room wall, their dearness vanishes. No longer objects to be held and studied like jewelry, the photos assume the scale of billboard graphics, which one might think would heighten their power. Lately, however, my students seem less responsive to Arbus’s pictures than they once were, even if I try nudging them in the direction of honest emotion with a few lines from Grace Bauer’s tribute poem The Eye of the Beholder. Bauer dares my classes in her evocation of Arbus,

Run your hands
across your average face,
your normal body,”And tell me
how you differ from these
miracles that always make you
want to look away.
And see.

More and more, however, my students don’t turn reflexively from Arbus’s anomalies of nature and culture, or show much interest in “seeing” in a way that doesn’t entail keeping at least one eye on the screens of their iPhones. Instead, an icy stupor possesses them, something partly induced by the bullet-point approach to learning they’ve endured since grade school—all prepackaged “data” with little affective content. Sitting beside classmates with Popsicle-colored hair and more angles on filigreeing one’s body parts than even Arbus’s subjects knew of, they balk at the chance to examine art that asks, Who among you is without blemish? and only half buy my claim we’re not doing religion....

I regard the classroom as a hallowed place and require male students to remove their baseball caps upon entering....  Experience tells me that five or ten years down the road they’ll write to say they’d stumbled on the [a certain graphic image] in the pages of some magazine, no older or less terrifying than they remembered him. They’ll recall the hours we shared letting great images and ideas wash over us like baptismal water, a trick to keep our hearts and minds supple against life’s hard edges, our eyes fine-tuned to behold the world as it points beyond itself. - Experience tells me that five or ten years down the road they’ll write to say they’d stumbled on the boy with the grenade in the pages of some magazine, no older or less terrifying than they remembered him. They’ll recall the hours we shared letting great images and ideas wash over us like baptismal water, a trick to keep our hearts and minds supple against life’s hard edges, our eyes fine-tuned to behold the world as it points beyond itself. - Michael E. DeSanctis cw2013Jun1p31

peace / good will

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. - Lk 2:14

Today the NAB has:

Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.

I have been meditating on the relationship between peace and good will. One can have good will without being in peace. Certainly one can have good will without being in a time or place of peace.

For good will to be effective, it must be reciprocated. That, in and of itself, is peace; the sharing of good will.

I find that, as I age, peace becomes more important; and more elusive.

I find it unhealthy not to be always seeking peace.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is sadness, joy.

Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

To be understood, as to understand;

To be loved, as to love;

For it is in giving that we receive,

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.

It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

- Although the authorship of this prayer, first printed in the early 20th century, remains unclear, it has traditionally been attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.

Patty and Pat Crowley

from Jim McCrea in post of Margaret O'Brien Steinfels @ commonweal.com

During the 1966 Papal Birth Control Commission, at which Chicago Catholics and co-directors of the Christian Family Movement Patty Crowley & her husband Pat were members, a heated discussion about how the church could save face if it were to allow couples to decide how to limit offspring, Marcelino Zalba, a Spanish Jesuit member of the commission, asked, “What then with the millions we have sent to hell” if the rules are relaxed?

Patty immediately responded in what became perhaps her most memorable quote. “Fr. Zalba,” she said, “do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?”

www.natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2005d/120905/120905o.php

Andrew Greeley requiescat in pacem

his website

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels @ commonweal.com

2013 Baccalaureate Mass @ Thomas More College

On behalf of the 1963 class of Villa Madonna College, an apology to Sr. Margaret Stallmeyer SND, outgoing President for the way the 2013 Baccalaureate Mass was handled. The two master of ceremonies failed to be tasked with making sure the graduates and faculty had enough seating. Their job should extend beyond just the flow of the Mass. The pontifical servers managed the crosier and miter. No one managed the seating arrangements. Could no one count how many graduates there were? how many faculty there were? Did anyone do due diligence?

The point of a Mass is gathering of the people of God to worship. Anything that impedes that gathering needs addressing before the service proceeds. The ultimate responsibility for the gathering resides the presider and the community itself. Sr Margaret and some of the faculty are to be congratulated for their makeshift adaptation.

It is symptomatic of the problem that the homily used politics in the USA in the 1960s as a point of departure and not the renewal of the whole church in the twentieth century, which peaked in the 1960s. The election of a Catholic and his assassination three years later are not seminal moments in the life of the country nor of the church. The renewal of the church is good news of greater importance.

But it is symbolic that this happened while a woman was president of the college but the person effectively in charge of the ceremony was a bishop. Besides showing a lack of respect, it showed a shallow appreciation of the state of the world today, and the state of the church in the world.

Attention to cultic ceremonial details should not supersede the need to attend to fundamental symbolic actions which should mirror the basis for and composition of the community.

bucket list

I have resisted even thinking about a bucket list before this, but is now on my mind,  So I am making two lists: one of things done and one of not done,

done	2 do	books
go 2 Ireland go 2 Germany	make new will	Small Mercies (loyalapress.com $13) Still Point Loss, longing and our search 4 God (avemariapress.com $12) Rooted in Love Our calling as CAtholic women (avemariapress.com $15)

Morning has broken, like a new morning

I slept in this morning.  My brain needed time to work through whatever is bothering it.

It is spring, but the rain outside indicates it is not wise to do yard work.  I will water the new flower in the shade under the mailbox, and perhaps shop for more later.

We view sun as a blessing almost unreservedly.  Rain less so.  Yet God sends both to nourish the earth.

I have serious things to do in this last week of March, but I thought I needed to wake up my mind.  I turned to a stack of unread magazines and books.

As Catholics, we name the Hebrew and Christian scriptures gathered in the Bible the word of God.  Sometimes we hear him elsewhere.  Both are blessings.

This morning it was "Regime Change" Cw2013Mar22 - a quintet.  Some lancing the boils of the past and present (the confused media reaction to the resignation of the cat loving Rottweiler), others praying hope for the future.

I look forward to the next concert featuring the recently revised "How do you solve a problem like Francis?"

In the meantime I will settle for:

I saw raindrops on my window.
Joy is like the rain.
Laughter runs across my pain.
Slips away and comes again.
Joy is like the rain.

I saw clouds upon a mountain.
Joy is like a cloud;
sometimes silver, sometimes gray,
Always sun not far away.
Joy is like a cloud.

I saw Christ in wind and thunder,
Joy is tried by storm.
Christ asleep within my boat,
whipped by wind, yet still afloat.
Joy is tried by storm.

I saw raindrops on the river
Joy is like the rain.
Bit by bit the river grows,
Till at once it overflows.
Joy is like the rain.

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCIXVPYJuSg