Posted on by Kurt Bodling

curiosity or scholarship?

“Curious knowers typically do not want to identify the knowledge they have arrived at as bearing an intimate link to their own persons or idiosyncrasies or place or interests; and they will certainly not wish to claim intimacy with what they study in the sense that a student occupying a world of gift and participation must. The curious, formed by mathesis, are always different in kind from what they are curious about, so their purpose is not to participate in what they study, but rather to isolate their object, and then to display it like a butterfly pinned in a display case. The voice the curious adopt in representing their knowledge will, therefore, avoid the first person, and will avoid, also, laying claim to the knowledge represented as though it were inextricably linked to the persona, charisma, or skill of the knower.”

Griffiths, Paul J. Intellectual Appetite: a Theological Grammar. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009, p. 149.

Griffiths makes a lot out of the difference between being curious and being studious and scholarly. He is in favor of the latter. Curiosity tends to be a mile wide but only an inch deep. Studiousness and scholarship is a mile deep no matter how wide it is.

Look again at his last sentence. He really does not like the stilted artificial voice found in most academic writing. You might recognize it: all third person and passive voice. Griffiths calls us to write like the knowledge we share actually makes a difference. The merely curious keep it at arm’s length.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

why pray?

“Why should I pray? Basically it is for the sake of praying. There is much else we might claim about prayer–it is for the sake of the world, it is for those in need, for the Church, for individual souls–all of which is true. But unless it is rooted in the boundless freedom of love and confidence in God, it is void and crippled. It has some effect perhaps, but lacks the current of grace and graciousness that flows from God.”

Quenon, Paul. In Praise of the Useless Life: a Monk’s Memoir. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2018, p. 5.

My note when I read this in Quenon’s book: We pray well when we are simply praying. It’s one of the things believers do. We don’t do it to get stuff (although that may be the result, or a result). We don’t do it because we are forced to, required to. We pray in order to be praying.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

can unbelievers commune?

“If someone cannot talk or indicate by a sign that he believes, understands, and desires the sacrament–particularly if he has wilfully [sic] neglected it–we will not give it to him just anytime he asks for it. We have been commanded not to offer the holy sacrament to unbelievers but rather to believers who can state and confess their faith. Let the others alone in their unbelief; we are guiltless because we have not been slothful in preaching, teaching, exhortation, consolation, visitation, or anything else that pertains to our ministry and office.”

Luther, Martin. “Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague” (1527) Luther’s Works Vol. 43. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969, page 135.

The Sacrament of Holy Communion both expresses and creates community. Practice today varies. Some err on the side of inclusion (that it creates community), some at the other end of the spectrum (that it expresses an already existing community).

Note that Luther doesn’t refer to church membership but to faith as the thing that admits one to the table of the Lord. I think that he would have to exercise godly pastoral judgement in doubtful cases. While being faithful in carrying out the many duties of his pastoral office.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

grace and violence

“The delicate action of grace in the soul is profoundly disturbed by all human violence.”

Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1958. (pbk ed 1999) (p. 114).

Grace is God’s work and presence everywhere, even amidst violence. But our sinful violence (and I would say that violence is always evidence of sin) makes it harder to notice the presence of God’s grace.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

daily daylong silence

“But it is terribly important to keep silence. When? Almost all the rest of the day. It is essential that priests learn how to silence all their routine declarations of truths that they have not yet troubled to think about. If we said only what we really meant we would say very little. Yet we have to preach God too. Exactly. Preaching the word of God implies silence. If preaching is not born of silence, it is a waste of time.” (8 January 1950)

Merton, Thomas. The Sign of Jonas. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1981, page 266. (originally published 1953)

Keeping silent is a difficult thing for some people. But it is at least as important and necessary as speaking the right word at the right time.

Writing here, Merton was thinking specifically of preachers who speak the sermon or homily in a service of worship. I’m pretty sure that he would agree, though, that all of us regularly ‘preach’ with our actions, and in our daily conversations and social media posts. [okay, so first we would have to explain “social media” to him]

And I would agree that silence is golden. That we simply do not have to always throw in our 2 cents worth. That we do not have to reply to social media. That we do not always need to explain ourselves, defend ourselves, attack the other, or argue our way through the day.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

the love of Christ

“There is no true spiritual life outside the love of Christ. We have a spiritual life only because we are loved by Him. The spiritual life consists in receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit and His charity…  If we know how great is this love of Jesus for us we will never be afraid to go to Him in all our poverty, all our weakness, all our spiritual wretchedness and infirmity.”

Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1958. (pbk ed 1999), (p. 25).

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

the voice of the stranger

“God speaks, and God is to be heard, not only on Sinai, not only in my own heart, but in the voice of the stranger. That is why the peoples of the Orient, and all primitive peoples in general, make so much of the mystery of hospitality. God must be allowed to speak unpredictably. The Holy Spirit, the very voice of Divine Liberty, must always be like the wind in ‘blowing where he pleases’ (John 3:8).”

Merton, Thomas. “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra concerning Giants.” (1961) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013 (p. 121).

Someone dear to me regularly reminds us to ‘Pay attention.’ Because you never know, do you, when God will speak to you through another person (stranger or friend), through the call of a bird or the colors of flowers and sunsets, through something you read (particularly even some non-religious thing), through dreams (that happens, at least, in the Scriptures), and so on. It makes sense that God would.

We say God is everywhere, and one thing that must mean is that God can speak to us everywhere. We expect, of course, to hear God in our place of worship, in our private devotional time, in the Scriptures and spiritual classics. But we also should be open to hear God, as Merton writes, “speak unpredictably.” So pay attention.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

depression and a deeper life

“The deeper meaning of these experiences [in context he’s writing about ‘depressive experiences’ and acedia] must be explored and the issues worked through. This means going through these experiences, not trying to get around them. The life of increasing interiority has as its hallmark what I call contemplative knowing. This knowing comes about only by sitting with, and working through, the various experiences of our lives. Both the sitting with and working through are essential to the process, allowing for the development of resilient, open vulnerability, so necessary for our way of life.” (p. 121)

Healey, Bede. “Psychological Investigations and Implications for Living Together Alone.” in Belisle, Peter-Damian, editor. The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2002.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

Commonplaces, part 3 of 3

(In which we take a whack at translating this topic to the digital age.)

I suppose that most of you have been thinking “Yeah, but this app …” or “If you just scanned that …” or something along those lines. True. There’s always “an app for that.” (Sidenote: I just learned that, while Apple trademarked the phrase from their commercial, the trademark only covers using “the phrase in relation to retail store services featuring computer software and services.” Brian X. Chen, in “Wired” 11 October 2010, link.)

I mentioned Obsidian in an earlier post. I got there by way of paper-based note systems I learned in school. Then a long period of just making marks in the margins of my books as I read them. (Really interesting today when I come across a dated marginal note and I think to myself “I read this book 20 years ago? Got no memory of that happening.” But it also tells me that certain themes have been in my thinking for a long time.) Next, there were the years of laptops and my knowing that there had to be a way to use the computer to help with this, but not wanting to start down a path of, say, creating a database and having the software company die or – possibly worse – finding a simpler, better solution and feeling I had to copy everything over. Some time back, I thought I’d found the solution in Evernote.

Evernote does all kinds of great things for note-takers. One thing that really grabbed me was that it would sync my notes between devices. At one time users could sync several devices for free, say your work computer, your home laptop, and your phone. Same notes anywhere! Then, of course, the company saw it needed more income and cut free syncing down to two devices (which also kept larger groups of people, say a company or family, from doing this with a pile of devices). That was still okay with me because I wasn’t using Evernote for work or to share notes with anyone. And I could always copy and paste notes into email on my phone to send myself something at work, if need be. Clunky, but it worked. Finally, Evernote just started to get too feature-filled for me, the antipodes of their target power users.

I added Simplenote to my app collection. Also free. And I could sync my couple of devices. It is, as the name implies, simple. I use it to make shopping lists on my way to the hardware store or to make quick reminders to myself. Basically, I use it as a mid-term memory adjunct. Then I delete these notes. After finding that Simplenote was working for me, I started copying my reading notes out of Evernote to Simplenote.

A long process, yes, but it gave me a chance to do some typo fixing and to add keywords, or tags. It had occurred to me that the way Evernote seemed to be trending, they could either decide that everybody had to ante up for a monthly subscription, or they could be sold to another company that would take the whole thing in some other direction, or – worst case – they could just die and take my notes with them. In short, I was making a backup. At some point I got that done, but then needed to double enter any reading notes in order to keep the Evernote original and the Simplenote backup in step. This would have been easier if Simplenote had an API that could be used by IFTTT or Zapier or some other service that automates actions on the web. (If you don’t know those tools [both companies were founded back in 2011], here’s a sketch of how they work: say you are out hiking the Appalachian Trail and want your Instagram photos also to show up on your WordPress blog … rather than posting twice, you enter some information into, e.g., IFTTT about the two sites you want to connect; then describe the thing you want to happen; and from then on when you send a pic to Instagram it will automagically also show up on your blog. I’ve heard of somebody actually doing that.)

Anyway, the short of it is that a) my process was still taking up too much time; b) I was still concerned about a company making radical and precipitous changes (Anybody like me still sending out Tweets? No, I didn’t think so.); c) I was/am still nervous about putting the work into making all these reading notes and not having control over where they are stored somewhere out there “in the cloud”; d) I’m still concerned about software updates rendering my notes no longer readable or accessible; and e) I’m still cheap enough to think there must be free options available, or at least as free as making paper notes was.

That’s where Obsidian comes in.

It’s free software. Instead of storing your notes up on their servers somewhere, they’re stored on your own computer (so making the regular backup is on you). Your notes aren’t kept in some format that’ll be difficult to move to another platform, they’re text files – specifically Markdown files so you can easily input basic formatting that plain text files don’t allow for. If you need syncing, that’s possible. Linking notes to each other is really simple. Searching for that one note you need is also very simple. And, yes, you can use tags to collate notes (this is the 21st century after all). You don’t need an Internet connection to use it. Obsidian is one of those apps that can be either simple or complex, depending on what you need it to do.

My bibliographic references go into a note, each of the reading notes goes into its own Obsidian note. They’re linked to each other. No indexing needed, because it’s all searchable. Which means I can do this: search my whole commonplace collection for a term; among the results I spot a reading note that’s particularly apt; click back to the source bibliography info; see a list of all my reading notes taken from that source. And then click backwards through those steps to check other results. Or jump ahead with another search.

And in the end, for me, it’s just the tool I need to keep my Commonplaces handy, sortable, searchable, copyable … usable.

Commonplaces. Notes from your universe of sources kept in one common place.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

Commonplaces, part 2 of 3

(In which we continue to extract text from Theodore Graebner’s The Pastor as Student and Literary Worker.)

“The commonplace book may vary in size according to the purpose which it is to serve. Any note-book will do if the literary task is limited to a single object. … Since, however, the preacher and theologian does a great amount of reading which has no immediate objective; and since it is impossible even for the best memory to retain the vast array of facts and data that, in the course of systematic reading, pass through consciousness; and since not only the facts but the sources and authorities from which they are derived are frequently of the highest importance,–it is an absolute requisite of fruitful reading that significant data be retained by means of some mechanical device. And the mechanical device which will serve every literary purpose, whatever it may be, is the commonplace book. … Its single purpose is that of serving as a repository of facts which, though we have no present intention of embodying them in a paper, essay, etc., yet appear worthy of preservation in such a form that they will be available whenever the occasion arises.” (pages 98-99)

So, what’s the process? Graebner explains his well-thought-out technique:

“Get a large blank-book bound in stout boards. It may have its pages lined, if the owner so prefers. On the title-page write: ‘Excerpts A,’ or any other title which will render easy later references to it in your Index Rerum [index of things]. Write only on the right hand pages, leaving each opposite page blank. What shall go into this book? Anything that occurs to you as possessing such value that you can imagine some future necessity of reference to it.” (page 99)

A little later he describes the book this way: “A common-place book should not be too small, nor, again, too bulky. A volume of one to two hundred pages, about 8×10 inches in size, will prove most convenient. Needless to say, the paper should be good enough to permit the use of pen and ink.” (page 100)

“Take the time to copy out the portions that are of value, writing at the head the complete title of the book, and opposite each extract the page on which it is found.” (page 100) Copy them out of whatever resource, book, article, and so on is at hand. Copy these extracts out in whatever order you read them.

It’s notable that Graebner directs his readers to use their commonplace books to extract information from books that they do not own. This is for books you borrow from a library, a friend, a co-worker. If the book is on your own shelf, if the journal article is in your own filing cabinet, you don’t need to spend the time copying it out. How then do you capture information from your own books? You use your “Index Rerum.” Let Graebner explain:

“All lines of literary endeavor meet in the Index Rerum. Proper indexing alone preserves for future usefulness the results of study and research. What the most powerful mind is unable to do,–to record the data of any department of knowledge and their sources,–the Index Rerum will do, and do it unfailingly.” (page 122)

“Our object must be to index every volume to which we have devoted study, and to index it with a minimum expenditure of time and energy. The most practical method is not that of continuous indexing. By this I mean the making of entries during the reading of a book.” (page 124)

He then goes on to discuss the comparative advantages of using a card index or a blank book. Using a blank book as your Index Rerum of course means that it’s impossible to interfile terms in absolute alphabetical order, but Graebner assumes that it won’t be a heavy time burden to scan down a page of references – such as: Grace; Gospel; God, Attributes of; Government; Greed; Grief; Glory; … to find where you’ve indexed the concept of Gentleness.

So even though Graebner comes down on the side of a blank book over a card index, he allows as how if he were starting over he would use a looseleaf notebook as a way to combine the advantages of both systems while overcoming many disadvantages of either.

Here’s how it would work in a looseleaf notebook. Write the subject word at the top of a page. Under it enter the brief reference to either your commonplace book volume and page number (for extracts from books and pamphlets you don’t own), or the book title and page number (for items you own). The big advantages of the looseleaf notebook are that you can get your index terms in strict alphabetical order, and that you don’t have unused pages wasting space.