Posts with the category “rewilding-the-word”

Yesterday, Saturday afternoon, I went with three friends to a performance by the Oregon Repertory Singers. One of our four is a Tenor in that group. After the concert, we four went to an Italian dinner, where we talked about what we had heard and felt, which interestingly (and I think significantly) ended up becoming a conversation about the nature of Heaven. For some reason, as I looked out from my seat toward Tom the Tenor standing at the center of the top row, I remembered a poignant poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) called “Sympathy”, whose last stanza reads: I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— When he beats his bars and he would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings— I know why the caged bird sings  Read More

A few days from now, on August 28th, it will be my mom’s birthday, who if she had not gone among our Ancestors in November 2009 would have beheld over ninety candles blazing on the surface of a necessarily large cake. August 28th is also the annual feast day of St. Augustine (354-430 CE) , a saint who was the heavenly patron of my home church in Spokane when I was a boy (1954 to 1972). My mother was born on that saint’s annual feast day; my “mother” church was looked after by St. Augustine. What left the greatest impression on me as a boy in that church was its stained glass windows filled with saints, up at whom I gazed as a boy when, often, my attention wandered from what I was supposed to attend to happening up there in the pulpit or at the altar.   Read More

This past week, I went to the home of a man whom I had never met, except through the report of him in the words, and in the expressive face, of a friend who admires him. I was told that the man has been significantly, and irreversibly, disabled for five years by the breakdown of several essential systems in his body. The friend had asked me, “Could you come and visit with him? I know that you will know what to do.” (Words to this effect.) I said, “Of course I will come. When?” And so it was arranged. I went.  Read More

I want to recount a conversation that I had this week. He and I found ourselves, at one point in our conversation, reflecting on the relentless calamities happening inside a formerly distinguished Institution. We had been noticing too many evidences of its lostness, its progressive self-destruction under bleakly vague leadership. when people lose hope.  Read More

A dear and fifty-year friend of mine died in March, on the 14th day, on the birthday of Albert Einstein (1879-1955). The latter wrote wisely such words as: “Imagination is the highest form of research.” And “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” And “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent … read them more fairy tales."  Read More

There was a boy, a native of Alexandria, Egypt, who lost his eyesight at the age of 4. History would come to know him as Didymus the Blind (313-398 CE). But for a man who could not see, he was among the greatest Christian biblical scholars and theologians of his time. He worked in the 4th century, which very few Christian centuries since then can match for the intensity and depth and range of original Christian thinking...  Read More

During the years of my formal schooling and up into my 30s, I did not understand why I could not get access to Poetry; why it would not open to me. My parents taught all of us Ganz children to read, and to read all the time, barring access to the TV that we might grow in affection for books. They taught us well, doing that teaching in the most compelling way by themselves reading all the time. Yet, I could not figure out why Poetry was a locked box to me, the key to which was never placed into my hands. What was such a key?...  Read More

Even as a little boy I noticed the music of a person’s voice working in his or her language. I was captivated by the different ways that, especially adults, sounded English. (It never occurred to me that there were other languages.) Notice that I did not say the way an adult pronounced his or her words. Pronunciation has to do with the correct way of forming in one’s mouth the vowels and consonants...  Read More

A StoryThe word “discipline” has always conjured up for me images of what a person of a rebellious will requires: “That boy needs discipline!” And when we hear a person say that another person “lacks discipline”, we hear a distinct harshness in the voice of the one offering this assessment. The use of the word in this way never, in my experience, heralds the arrival of redemption, of a joyful find...  Read More

During my late 20s, I studied at Regis College (Jesuit) at the University of Toronto, for my Master of Divinity degree. In the fall Term of my second year, I begged Fr. Michael McMahon Sheenan, CSB to break a few rules (for a holy cause of course) and to let me into his Seminar. He made it happen, even though I had not been formally admitted as a student at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies (PIMS)...  Read More

We assume that people who are “gifted” enjoy having those gifts. Maybe. Sometimes. We who have less glory in us imagine that those who have more must be happier, more joyful, and with an easier life. The truth is that they are happier if, and only if, they have good friends (who have defeated the seduction of envy), and they will be joyful if they abide in God – a contemplative in action - through the Holy Spirit given us. Joy has no other source.  Read More

A “wise” person is not defined by how much, or by what kind of, knowledge he or she has amassed, but by how much his or her existence is transparent to, or “magnifies”, the Spirit of Wisdom – the Holy Spirit – who dwells unimpeded within him or her.  Read More