Thank you, Jules! (I think...)  Teresa, I agree completely!

 

Feb. 22 at 4:07pm | See in context

Thanks, Teresa. I really enjoyed the book. Easy to listen to, and a great story beautifully told. I find George (and hid father) a tad too romantic to be the ideal man however. He may be religious in way. He certainly has depth and passion. But unlike Mr. Beebe, he does not seem to hold any definite doctrine. And without that no religion can be strong or profound.  But I now have a much deeper appreciation of the passage you quote above. It really is beautiful and in true. I love especially the 1st and 3rd paragraphs, about the impossibility of loving and then parting, and about love being "of the body." (That last bit reminds me, by the way, of Christopher West's resistance to prudishness.)

Feb. 22 at 1:54pm | See in context

Deceit is a "deliberate assault on human beings." It's the most subtle and most effective way to keep people in bondage, to keep them  bamboozled and ignorant such that they cannot be free.

Feb. 22 at 10:12am | See in context

Only Jules has the ability to make me laugh out loud when I am reading comments on my phone in an environment where it is absolutely essential I remain silent!

Feb. 22 at 8:47am | See in context

 We'll do our best to make it a real penance!

Feb. 22 at 7:12am | See in context

Teresa: Thank you for your kind words - and your very perceptive thoughts re: resistance to the reality of one's "creatureliness" to a certain extent, one's imperfection;a most necessary but often absent balance between acceptance and acquisence.

Gregory:  Thank you for enlarging on the context of your post!  Pride, in its many guises, bewitches us and robs us of the strength that is at its best in weakness.

Katie: I couldn't agree more that the "forgiveness issues" approach is pernicious; it smacks of a sort of blanket amnesty wherein *everything* is forgiven and *nothing* is forgiven simultaneously.  I got a bellyful of 'non-judgmental' Carl Rogers technique in my 1970s undergrad psych degree...Such 'acceptance', it still seems to me, violates the subjectivity and uniqueness of he person while it denies him/her the dignity of taking responsibility for his/her own actions - to the fullest extent possible.

(I'll be *here* during Lent, while 'abstaining' from several other favorite spots on the 'Net...Thanks for the refreshment and spiritual/mental exercise to all!) 

Feb. 22 at 12:08am | See in context

By which I mean, in general, I should add--if the nature of language itself is sacramental, then Derrida does not really have any thing to say about its nature, even if he wishes (which I doubt, seriously) to talk around what he really means even if he doesn't know it.  I suppose I'm positing that there sometimes if not always is a difference between what "we" mean and what "language" means, even without buckling to our fallen insistence that we be in charge of the joint.  It's kind of Moby Dick's Ahab for me that way.  Ahab is free, to be sure--even to the extent that he is the Captain of his own soul and its destiny.  That's an option.  But he's not free to change the nature-of-which-he's-not-the-author.  That, of course, is what maddens him so . . . .And it's what the white whale represents.  Even as he utters his curses, he employs a form that he did not invent--language--and, in so twisting them to his own purposes admits that he does not own them.  If language, then, does not stand apart, then howso do we distinguish a lie from a truth?

Feb. 21 at 8:32pm | See in context

Thank you, Josef--well met.  But I must protest.  And I mean that in the warmest way possible.  You posit categorical statements about the nature of language as if they are obvious and true.  But on what grounds do we say that a "fairy tale" is incapable of making what it says to be?  For, a fairy tale exists to create not some philosophical truth about some reality that stands apart from itself, but to make some unique experience possible through its peculiar utterance.   That's the truth of fiction.  And since the reality we exist within is a divine fiction, miraculously brought about by the Godhead whose nature is to give and utter into being by His Word . . . well. That gives me pause.   Especially since I undersand that nothing I can do through my own power can alter the nature of the Divine Word, I must accept that, though fallen, as a wholly contingent being, I cannot,  through my own design, will, or act, alter my own nature (though I can harm or wound it) either--and that means that the way I am, in language (to co-opt Heidegger), is to exist sacramentally—even if only through a scar (as it were).

Feb. 21 at 8:16pm | See in context

Dear Gregory! Thank you for your very kind reply and explanations. I still continue to have some of my difficulties, however, and think that even in a less rigorous discussion we should not say false things, for example that Derrida intuited, though he did not utter it, “the sacramental nature of language itself--as that ‘sign which effects that which it signifies.’" If that is now what you mean by sacramental (which a Catholic does indeed believe to happen in sacraments such as in the words of consecration), it does not  happen in all language; for example if we tell a fairy tale, our words do precisely not effect what they signify and while they present events as if they were real, they are totally incapable of making them so. Or when we utter a wish, ask a question, make a  petition, describe a newborn child, our words precisely do not in any of these and innumerable other cases “effect that which they signify”, as they do in some cases outside of sacraments, such as in a promise or wedding vow.

Warm regards,  Josef

Feb. 21 at 7:37pm | See in context

Hi Josef!  First, let me say I appreciate your thoughtful comments.  I wasn't thinking so much, in writing about Derrida, that I was participating in a philosophical debate (with what rigor that demands) as trying to sketch out --in the sense of musing--my thoughts on my difficulties in reconciling what I've read about Derrida's writings by others with what I seem to intuit in them when I read him (difficult as he is for me).  I am thinking of the word-in-the-mouth as the miraculous; not the word divorced from the mouth (as it is in writing and to which Derrida has focused his considerable attention).  The word sacramental was used quite deliberately on my part however.  What seems to me to be intuited by Derrida, but which remains ever un-uttered, is the sacramental nature of language itself--as that "sign which effects that which it signifies."  Of course, you are right that to speak of language in fallen man's mouth in such a way is to conflate it with what is reserved, in Catholic thought, anyway, with those gifts given through the Church by her Groom, Christ.  My language was perhaps more poetical than rigorously philosophical in expression, to be sure.

Feb. 21 at 5:46pm | See in context