It will be ten years this summer that I set out on the journey of becoming a “priest of the law” — taking the first steps toward my degree, and my career, as a canonist.
It is with considerable ambivalence that I reflect on that decision, and all that followed. My life, and the life of my entire family, has been forever changed by the disruption, the adventures, the travails and the new…
I’ve Been Watching Justified
The early months of 2010 found me unexpectedly living alone in Canada, working hard to distract myself from the fact that my wife was hospitalized in the United States, and I had chosen the selfish route of continuing with my diocesan-sponsored studies instead of remaining by her side and taking charge of our two young sons, who instead I had entrusted to my in-laws to manage until Uxor was…
“We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of The Glory (via herkindoftea)
Oh, snap.
“Tolkien’s ring of power is a plain gold ring, of course, and embodies a series of quite complex valences to do with binding, with vows and marriage. But at the same time as being a blank surface, the ring is also paradoxically (which is to say, magically) lettered. The ring, in other words, is a book. To be sure it is a short book; its whole text is the one ring charm. But a short book is still a book. Looked at this way, Lord of the Rings becomes a strangely self-destructive fable—a book about the quest to destroy a book, a long string of carefully chosen words positing a world in which words have magical power to huge evil. How few books there are in Middle Earth! Indeed, I’ve written elsewhere about not just the paucity of written texts in Tolkien’s world, but the way they keep getting misread. Gandalf scratches his rune at Weathertop; the hobbits misread it. The elven door in Moria, beautifully lettered, commands ‘speak friend and enter!’ and nobody understands its simple instruction. The fellowship find a dwarfish book in the mines, as scorched and battered as poor old Beowulf; but as they read it aloud (‘drums in the deep’, ‘we cannot get out’) it becomes true to them, and they repeat the words as suddenly, horribly, appropriate to their own predicament. The repeated theme is the danger of words; their slipperiness but also the ease with which they can move us directly into the malign world of the text. One ring to bind us all. Books are bound, too.”
So very tired
TFE: So very tired of my social networks –
I am experiencing an acute onset of social network fatigue these days. No discernible single cause, no distinct bad experience that stands out as spoiling things for me. No, I am just tired of so many places to put things, and so many places to check for…