Let none lament his failings,
forgiveness has risen from the tomb.
Let none fear death,
for the death of the Savior has set us free.
--St John Chrysostom, via Wesley Hill

...and speaking of WH and Easter, this made me laugh, perhaps inappropriately.

The disciples of John approached Jesus and said,
"Why do we and the Pharisees fast much,
but your disciples do not fast?"
Jesus answered them, "Can the wedding guests mourn
as long as the bridegroom is with them?
The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
and then they will fast."
--Matthew 9:14-5, today's reading

I like this because it works against the temptation to view Lent as a self-improvement project. I don't like self-improvement and I'm not good at it! This passage is a reminder to focus outward, on deepening our love for Christ as we long and prepare for Him, rather than inward on our own various foibles or even major besetting sins.

Every murder turns on a bright hot light... and a lot of people, innocent or not, have to walk out of the shadows to stand investigation.
--The Naked City

"You see, stupid as I am, I still keep thinking about it, I keep thinking, every once in a while, of course, not all the time. Surely it's impossible, I think, that the devils will forget to drag me down to their place with their hooks when I die. And then I think: hooks? Where do they get them? What are they made of? Iron? Where do they forge them? Have they got some kind of factory down there? You know, in the monastery the monks probably believe there's a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now me, I'm ready to believe in hell, only there shouldn't be any ceiling; that would be, as it were, more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran, in other words. Does it really make any difference--with a ceiling or without a ceiling? But that's what the damned question is all about! Because if there's no ceiling, then there are no hooks. And if there are no hooks, the whole thing falls apart, which, again, is unlikely, because then who will drag me down with hooks, because if they don't drag me down, what then, and where is there any justice in the world? Il faudrait les inventer, those hooks, just for me, for me alone. Because you have no idea, Alyosha, what a stinker I am...!"

"No, there are no hooks there," Alyosha said quietly and seriously, studying his father.

"Yes, yes. Only shadows of hooks. I know, I know."
--The Brothers Karamazov (tr Richard Pevear and Larissa Volonkhosky)

I had long been haunted by the Russian conception of the humilated Christ, the lame Christ limping through Russia, begging his bread; the Christ who, all through the ages, might return to the earth and come even to sinners to win their compassion by his need. Now, in the flash of a second, I knew that this dream is a fact; not a dream, not the fantasy of a devout people, not the prerogative of the Russians, but Christ in man...

Although [the vision] did not prevent me from sinning again, it showed me what sin is, especially those sins done in the name of "love," so often held to be "harmless"--for to sin with one whom you loved was to blaspheme Christ in that person; it was to spit on Him, perhaps to crucify Him. I saw too the reverence that everyone must have for a sinner; instead of condoning his sin, which is in reality his utmost sorrow, one must comfort Christ who is suffering in him. And this reverence must be paid to those sinners whose souls seem to be dead, because it is Christ, who is the life of the soul, who is dead in them; they are his tombs, and Christ in the tomb is potentially the risen Christ. For the same reason, no one of us who has fallen into mortal sin himself must ever lose hope....

I knew too that since Christ is One in all men, as He is One in countless Hosts, everyone is included in Him; there can be no outcasts, no excommunicates, excepting those who excommunicate themselves--and they too may be saved, Christ rising from death in them.

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life.

--Caryll Houselander; via

"I worry that on Judgment Day my punishment will be that God will read aloud all the poems I could have written had my life been good."
--character of WH Auden, in The Habit of Art, now playing at the Studio Theater

[I don't actually recommend this play, I don't think--it's too baggy, there's too much on-the-nose dialogue, and while I get that the sordidness is a major part of the point, it isn't great enough to make me want to spend more time with its sordidness. Still, the acting is really good and there are some very fun lines and moments.]

"SO I'M CONVINCED YOUR DEEPEST PROBLEM IS...." (via Wesley Hill)

I'M ON A SUBMARINE MISSION FOR YOU, BABY: A series of stupid thoughts about the Michelle Bachmann "wifely submission" question. These are really just kind of starting points for thought, not actual thoughts, but I haven't seen them anywhere else yet, so hey.

1. Obviously this whole conversation would be so different if most American Christians genuinely believed that submission is a privileged, honored position. It was rarely the eldest sons who inherited the king's mantle, you know? Exaltavit humiles.

2. If husband = Jesus and wife = Church, then by transitivity wife = Mary... whom Jesus did actually listen to. Which suggests not that Mary is God but that "submission" in a Christian context is more complicated than simply an army-like command structure in which He gives the orders and she follows them. There is some kind of interweaving in which both are necessary to hear and understand God's will. I think that's a possible Catholic understanding of Bachmann's "lol, really?!" respect-based answer to this question.

The other thing you could say is that nuns are the Brides of Christ in a really obvious way, and yet they are not known for a lack of feistiness.

So again, maybe the hermeneutic here is more complex than just "I am a computer which runs program DOMINION when my husband presses the ENTER key."

3. I was really intensely struck by this passage from an MSNBC "Meet the Press" interview with Bachmann:

MR. GREGORY: But you said that Gald — God called me to run for Congress. God has said certain things about, you know, going to law school, about pursuing other decisions in your life. There’s a difference between God as a sense of comfort and safe harbor and inspiration, and God telling you to take a particular action.

Because... I don't remember what Bachmann answered, and I can guarantee it wasn't what I'm about to say. But this whole question is just so far from what I understand.

God is not a sense of comfort. God is not a "sense of" anything, actually, He is a source of joy or peace or what have you but not the internal sense of it. But okay whatever, I've totally said ridiculously dumb things in live interviews. Move on.

When I follow God I find peace.

That does not mean that I find happiness or comfort. I think I was well served by reading Dorothy Day's autobiography early in my conversion, because Day makes it clear that peace is not comforting or nice or easy. Peace is the hard work of dragging each moment into place like a giant brick. Peace is grueling. Peace is debilitating and you feel stupid and boring and dumb and worthless every time you drag another stupid boring brick up to its place.

Peace is about finding your place.

Your place may not be comfortable. It may not be pretty; maybe part of your vocation is to make this kind of Christian life beautiful! Maybe you have the painful crown of the pioneer.

But Christ will move you past happiness, past comfort, into the hard work of peace.

IF WHISKEY WERE A WOMAN, HOW MUCH WOULD I OWE IN ALIMONY? Also last week, I saw Everything Must Go, now playing at the E Street Cinema and the AFI Silver theater. Will Ferrell gets fired for being an alcoholic mess, and comes home to find his wife gone, the locks changed, and all his possessions on the front lawn. He basically says, "Well to hell with it then," and lives on the lawn, holding an ongoing yard sale to get around local zoning laws. Based on a short story by Raymond Carver.

It's not a perfect movie. There's some on-the-nose dialogue and at least one over-easy plot twist, which I thought let our hero off a bit cheaply. Ferrell's character befriends a local kid who's played with a very flat affect, which sort of worked for me but was a bit distracting; I imagine a lot of people would chalk it up to bad acting even though I'm not sure it really was. It's certainly noticeable acting.

That said, this movie really struck me. It's cringingly funny and poignant, heartbreaking and almost-but-not-quite-defeated, a story about salvage. Ferrell is terrific, completely convincing, and his intensely public rock-bottom really brings home that Mother Theresa line, "There is no humility without humiliation." There's a certain relief to having hidden shames exposed, getting it over with--even when the people doing the exposure are staining their own souls through pride and cruelty--and that experience can also be a path toward redemption. I could've watched several more hours of this stuff. A different version of this is the closing song and it's well-earned. This is a bruised, forgiving, sorry-ass movie.

"IN PRE-RETROSPECT THIS WAS A BAD IDEA BUT WE'RE DOING IT ANYWAY." Pure poetry.

CANTERBURY TALES BOARD GAME. This seemed like the sort of thing you people might like! Via Mark Shea.

A soldier asked Abba Mius if God accepted repentance. After the old man had taught him many things he said, "Tell me, my dear, if your cloak is torn, do you throw it away?" He replied, "No, I mend it and use it again." The old man said to him, "If you are so careful about your cloak, will not God be equally careful about his creature?"
--The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Well I definitely hope so.

BE CAREFUL--TODAY MAY BE THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE: A post about how every sin is like a child.

[This post talks about other people. I'm 100% certain that no one, including both my best friend and the other people described, will be able to figure out what I'm talking about, which is the only reason I'm posting this. I've done a lot of awful stuff in public, because I'm awesome like that, so if you know me just assume that this post is about something worse than the thing you're thinking of.]

On Saturday I went with friends to revisit the National Gallery's “Sacred Made Real” exhibit (see below). It's a sufficiently intense exhibit that I couldn't take too much of it. So for a little while my friends were still in the dark monastic gallery rooms, studded with paintings and sculptures of God in agony, and I was standing in the big sunlit atrium staring out the window at an American boulevard. And I thought about you again.

You and I were friends once. Not for too long. The reasons we're not close now are partly your fault, partly mine, partly just the inevitable nexus of circumstance and personality and nobody's fault but the big pinball machine of life.

But I can still think of scenes, moments, in which I sinned—and I had no idea, at that time, that I was sinning against you and that these sins would form part of the barrier between us later on. I (hope I) would never have done those things if I had known.

The thing with sin is, you cannot control it. You birth your sin and send it out into the world and then it does whatever it wants, to whomever it wants to do it to. You aren't totally helpless (except when you are), just as parents aren't totally helpless except when they are. They can educate their children, and you can try to mitigate your sin. Sometimes you can make some kind of partial amends. (I am not sure I believe that any sins are fully amended in this life. I'm not sure I believe in any real temporal reconciliation.) Sometimes the relationship you damaged heals, and sometimes it's even “stronger in the broken places,” as I think Hemingway said, and that isn't to your credit but you still get to enjoy it. But a lot of the time there is no way to attempt amends without causing your victim further pain. I can think of at least one person (not the main person this post is about) to whom I desperately want to apologize, but I know that reestablishing contact would be more likely to hurt than to help, and the attempt would be more about my guilt than about the other person's pain. I still pray for that person, which is pretty much all I can do now.

You can have high expectations for your sin, as parents have aspirations for their children. In the most vivid moments in which I sinned against my friend, I sometimes expected that my sins would bring us closer together. But you don't control it. You don't get to choose. Sin is not a domino rally, where if you were just acutely insightful enough you could see the whole pattern and predict and direct the repercussions of knocking over that very first domino. Sin is a lit match thrown into a fireworks factory: Sometimes nothing too bad happens to the people you love (I mean, you know, other than Jesus). Sometimes something beautiful happens, as God chooses to make your sin a source of grace for you or for others. But sometimes the catastrophe occurs, chaos come again. And you don't get to guide your sin or make it do what you want it to do or keep it from doing what you most desperately want it to avoid.

Sin is your child, and you are as helpless as any parent. I read once a mother, quoting someone else, saying that your child is “your heart walking around outside your body.” Sin is everything that isn't your heart, or shouldn't be, walking around outside your body—and, once the deed is done, outside your will.