{mostly on fiction, poetry, spirituality, biblical studies and theology}
In the wake of the Pope’s retirement, we have a brief interlude where no human being is claiming infallibility outside of North Korea and psychiatric institutions.
I saw this in Third Way’s regular ‘Agnostics Anonymous’ column. And yes, as the reference to the Pope indicates, I am still behind in my reading. This quote is from the April 2013 issue.
A meal is supposed to be a place where you can laugh, even if you get a chunk of food in your face when someone spits on you!
Thus Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities, in which people with and without intellectual disabilities experience life together as fellow human beings. The quote is from an article entitled ‘The Fragility of L’Arche and the Friendship of God’, which can be found in Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness.
Having looked forward to Alain de Botton’s book On Love, I did not find this as inspiring as I had hoped at first. However, now, half-way through, I have to say that the book is growing on me. Thus far, the chapter entitled ‘“I”-Confirmation’ has easily been the highlight. Consider, for instance, the following reflections on labeling:
the labeling of others is usually a silent process. Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mold they have assigned us.
De Botton speaks about ‘shaping according to preconceptions’, adding that:
Children are always described from a third-person perspective … before they gain the ability to influence their own definitions. Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories. But the struggle against distortion continues beyond childhood. Most people get us wrong, either out of neglect or prejudice. Even being loved implies a gross bias – a pleasant distortion, but a distortion nevertheless. … No eye can wholly contain our ‘I.’ We will always be chopped off in some area or other, fatally or not.
Looking at it from the other perspective, he notes:
Though I felt myself attentive to the complexities of Chloe’s nature, I must have been guilty of great abbreviations, of passing lightly over areas I simply did not have the empathy or maturity to understand.
To love someone is to take a deep interest in them, and by such concern, to bring them to a richer sense of what they are doing and saying.
Once again from Alain de Botton, On Love
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing; that we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying; that, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
Alain de Botton, On Love
Here’s another thought-provoking little snippet from Fifty Shades of Feminism, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach. In ‘When It Started for Me’, Gillian Slovo notes that, in the women’s groups she used to attend, ‘we questioned the subordination that came not just from outside but also from inside ourselves’.
Another review from Third Way Jan./Feb. 2013. This time by Nick Spencer, who discusses Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, which tells the story of a Renaissance bibliophile. I’m not sure that I’m that interested in the book, but the concluding lines of Spencer’s review really made me laugh. Here they are:
the book’s line on the charges read against Pope John XXIII at Council of Constance is worth its cover price alone: ‘Fearing their effect on public opinion, the council decided to suppress the sixteen most scandalous charges – never subsequently revealed – and accused the pontiff of simony, sodomy, rape, incest, torture, and murder.’
Now, what else could he have possibly done?
Brief thoughts & quotes … 