second light snow shower of the morning. Bela sent a jacquielawson proposing paris and javea. Message from Gail Dorval with grandson photo. Phil wants to know about Catholicism.
That doesn't answer my question. Does Catholicism appeal to you at all these days? If so, why or how?
Little factoid: Harvard was established as a Congregationalist school, Princeton was Prebyterian, and Brown was Baptist. Brown was the first to dissassociate itself from religion.... P
Just the other day my 91 yr old retired French prof, Greorge, assured me that the church has
changed greatly and I should start going to services because you can now be an atheist catholic
and no one cares about theologies or such any more, it is all about caring and community. If so
it looks like catholicism has gone full unitarian after all.
Two years ago our dear friend from St Louis, Donald, retired prof of catholic theology at a small.
now closed, college came to visit us in Albuquerque. That December he had gone to St Patrick's
Cathedral in NYC to become a Knight of Malta. In Albuquerque one day he came into the living
room wearing his full knighthood robe and regalia, banner and gold medals. His whole life as
a professor of theology he seems to have had no personal trouble with church teachings---i.e.
he's homosexual, every summer he went to France as part of an entourage of a gay aristocrat
there, parties in Tangiers (Malcolm Forbes et al), gay life all over the continent, no concern for
what the church may have had to say about such things.
Years ago in Chicago a friend from Japan reassured me that no one listens to the pope. His family
dates back to conversion to the church through St Francis Xavier (?), samurai links, etc.
It is, it looks like, a great world religion. Does everyone make of it what they want? Suppose so.
A mayor in a village in Spain was asked why the village that fought for the Republic against Franco
would continue celebrating all the feast days of the church they didn't support. Do you think we're
Moors? (Or did he say Do you think we're communists? faulty memory here ruins the ostensible
punch line!)
Actually the only other person who actually asked me point blank to join their church is the neighbor
across the corner, Doug. Goes to the Unitarian fellowship here in town. Child in a large family of a famous
(in his day) church historian at UChicago Divinity school, raised in the campus Lab school and high school (but
never completed college anywhere, chess wiz-computer genie).
In Bangkok we were taken to see one of the major temples. Va's disability meant they had to find an elevator
that would take us up to the main level. This meant we were taken behind the scenes as it were and
lo and behold the room was full of aspirant monks, teen boys, in their saffron robes, horsing around with
balls and games while their mothers cooked a big dinner for the temple. The basement church dinner, universal once
again.
What is one to do with all of this?
Meanwhile Merry Christmas to all.
The mid-state navigator assured Va the other day that this would be the first white christmas here in 25 years. I don't think it is that long ago, so am polling my sources.
HERE is the passage just read 11:42 in Handke's Across: "Above them, there was not a star to be seen; only a blinking satellite flashed for a moment across a last hole in the clouds. The leaf buds seemed to have blown off the trees, leaving a dead forest of swaying crags; the clumps of MISTLETOE in the branches were abandoned birds' nests. The mountain was now inaccessible; and yet, wide open to nature's grandeur, I thought: This is the world! Together with the beaklike shells of the empty beechnuts above me, the lights on the plain below were its capital city." 55
Of course he has just killed a man with a rock, it seems. The action against him would be a "challenge."
I belonged to the nation of criminals; no nation is more dispersed and isolated."
Card game. His names is Andreas. X shaped legs hold up the table. Maple. "the dark green lanceolate tips of oleander bushes." "Threshold, play on," Priest, painter, master of the house, inn.
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