Recent Posts

Most Used Categories

Christian Witness

Reflection for Trinity Sunday 2025

Christian Witness

Reflection for Trinity Sunday 2025

Christian Witness

Reflection for Trinity Sunday 2025

PNCC, ,

Spirits – earthly and otherwise

Abel Pharmboy writes the Friday Fermentable on wines, beers, and spirits and other assorted interesting stuff at Terra Sigillata. In The Friday Fermentable: Wine Authorities Spread the Gospel of Roséism he gives a nod to his days as an altar boy in the PNCC.

There are too many highlights to list but as a former Polish National Catholic altar boy, I particularly appreciate the incensing technique of the Jewish co-owner, Seth Gross, using a bottle of rosé. The nod to Jimi Hendrix at the end was also a nice touch of reverence.

I appreciate the sense of humor here, great information in general. For those who like a mix of science and practicality with a nod to the higher life, his posts are worth checking out.

By-the-by, we can always use a good recommendation for those post synodal dinners. Perhaps a recommendation?

Poetry,

An interview with former Poet Laureate Robert Hart

From Examiner.com, The Berkeley Bard: Robert Hass, rock star poet

I guess a lot of the questions in poetry can only be answered by poetry. That is they can only be answered by dramatizing and intensifying the contradictions which we suppress in everyday life in order to get on with it–Robert Hass

Marin Catholic grad; Stanford Ph.d; MacArthur Fellowship; Pulitzer Prize; National Book Award; former U.S. Poet laureate–this partial list of awards and accomplishments only hint at the intellect and profound engagement with the world of San Francisco native/California poet Robert Hass.

From his Midwest Iowan perch, Michael Judge describes a recent dinner with Hass at “a fancy joint called Yoshi’s” (excertped from the Wall Street Journal Online).

“One benefit of being a poet — as opposed to, say, a politician or talk-show host — is that you can be the most celebrated person in your field, a virtual rock star among those who study, read and write poetry, and still remain anonymous in just about any public setting.

“The thought occurs to me as I stand outside one of this city’s finer Japanese-fusion restaurants (a fancy joint called Yoshi’s) chain smoking and awaiting the arrival of Robert Hass, a poetry rock star if ever there was one.

“Still, for the life of me, I can’t remember what he looks like. So, after approaching a few slightly startled gentlemen in his age bracket, I’m relieved when a pleasant man with a warm countenance, wearing blue jeans and a black windbreaker, extends his hand and says simply, ‘I’m Bob.’

“After snuffing out my cigarette, I tell him my wife Masae awaits us inside and is holding what we hope will be a quiet booth where we can talk. Alas, there’s a speaker above us blaring jazz, and adjacent diners are shouting above the din. Undaunted, we peruse the wine list. ‘Buttery and oaky is the classic California chardonnay that everyone’s gotten sick of,’ says the poet, with a slight grin. ‘But I haven’t!’ And with that we order a bottle from California’s Santa Rita Hills and begin.

“He’s just flown in from Toronto, he tells us, where he attended the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony, and asks that we please forgive him if he ‘fades early. …But before I can ask him for details, he’s on to another topic: a Berkeley-based nonprofit called the International Rivers Network. ‘I’m the only poet on the board,’ he says. ‘It’s an environmental organization that thinks about the ecological consequences of big dams’ and provides ‘real life estimates of the damage done by these big boondoggle projects to the people who are trying to resist them.’ The group has worked in some 60 countries, he says, to help prevent the kind of cultural and environmental devastation caused by projects like the Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze River.

“Suddenly, like a guest who feels he’s gone on too long, Mr. Hass apologizes and peppers us with questions. ‘How long are we here?’ ‘Where are we from?’ ‘How did we meet?’ When he discovers my wife is from Japan and we met in Tokyo the conversation turns to his love for haiku, particularly the poems of the 17th century master Matsuo Basho.

“In the early 1970s, he says, ‘I tried to teach myself something about how to make images from working on haiku . . . I had this real paradisiacal period in my life where I would teach, come home, get out the Japanese dictionary, work on haiku, then go swim laps for an hour, then have dinner and put my kids to bed. . . .’

Just then our waitress brings the ‘Fisherman Carpaccio,’ a flower-like assemblage of raw fish marinated in soy with a dash of karashi hot mustard and sesame oil. We order another bottle of chardonnay, and I attempt to ask another question. ‘That’s a really pretty presentation, don’t you think?’ says Mr. Hass, admiring the dish that’s just arrived. ‘Can we stop?’ He then turns to my wife, who’s a potter and chef, and asks, ‘What do you think about this presentation? And about saying this is carpaccio rather than sashimi?’

“Right about now I begin to feel as if we’re inside a Robert Hass poem. They are known for their playfulness with language, love of long, sprawling sentences, and, above all, a kind of unquenchable honesty, a wrestling with memory and the world as it is. Yet listening to him talk it strikes me that he isn’t self-absorbed. He is, in fact, other-absorbed. His conversation, like his poetry, is full of wonder and horror, two wholly appropriate reactions to human history — or a plate of sashimi-cum-carpaccio…

“In a poem for his friend and longtime collaborator, Czeslaw Milosz (became Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley in 1961)– who died in Krakow in 2005 at the age of 93 after living through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rise and fall of communism — Mr. Hass writes how Milosz ‘never accepted the cruelty in the frame / Of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster, / And the smell of summer grasses in the world / That can hardly be named or remembered / Past the moment of our wading through them, / And the world’s poor salvation in the word.’

“This idea, this lament–‘the world’s poor salvation in the word,’ that language often fails us, yet it’s our only hope for redemption — permeates Mr. Hass’s latest book, which was completed in 2005 at the height of the Iraq war. In a poem titled ‘Bush’s War,’ he conflates 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the brutal history of the 20th century, when the slaughter of civilians and the “firebombing” of entire cities was commonplace. ‘Forty-five million, all told, in World War II,’ he writes. ‘Why do we do it?Certainly there’s a rage / To injure what’s injured us.’…

Homilies

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

First reading: Joshua 24:1-2,15-18
Psalm: Ps 34:2-3,16-21
Epistle: Ephesians 5:21-32
Gospel: John 6:60-69

—The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.
But there are some of you who do not believe.——¨

The club

You might say that we belong to a club – Christians that is. We have Jesus’ words which are Spirit and life. We partake in the meals that I spoke of last week. We follow the club’s rules and its traditions. It is pretty cool to belong to the club. We even have a distinctive name: Christians. The apostles chose to belong to the club. Peter put it this way:

—Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.—

For sure, they joined the club.

As human beings we generally abhor separateness. We like to belong and Jesus wanted us to live as community. Now hold that thought about separateness versus belonging.

Is there a not club?

We could say that those who reject Christ do not belong to the club. That was pretty obvious from today’s Gospel. Those who wanted out left after Jesus crossed the line from interesting preacher and miracle doer to a challenge.

many of his disciples returned to their former way of life
and no longer accompanied him.—¨

In leaving they said:

—This saying is hard; who can accept it?—

As Christians we have a tendency to beat non-believers and those who have left us over the head with this saying. We want to draw a distinction between club members and non-members, outsiders. We call them weak, unable to meet the hard saying, the narrow path. If we are the club and on the path then they must be the opposite — outsiders. We are the ones who accept the challenge of the club and the path while everyone else rejects it.

Is there any hope?

Club versus non-club, the path versus the wide way of corruption. There are tons of distinctives and a lot of Christian history has been an engagement in the drawing of lines. It was thought that we could tidily box in the club and dwell securely. We, on the inside, in the club, on the path — we have our destiny wrapped up. Everyone outside the club, well we made great paintings of hell fire and preached on it extensively. Stay in the club or die. If you’re not in the club it would appear that there’s no hope.

Is there any hope?

Jesus fixes our perspective:

Jesus fixed us but good for our perspectives didn’t He?

Look at the world — amass in non-club members. I think there’s more outside than inside. Look at the churches on Sunday. Many empty, many filled with the few and the aged. Look at the denominations. They’re out there making every accommodation possible. They’ve changed core beliefs, long held doctrines — perhaps not because of belief in any of it but rather as a marketing ploy. Everyone is running about and is trying to fix the club. But, we can’t fix it, not that way. Jesus is presenting us with a big challenge and He’s fixing our bad habits. The world has changed. We expected folks to join the club just because its a club — but it doesn’t work that way — it probably never should have.

The big club

Jesus challenge is to recognize the big club, the fact that all are entitled to the club. The fix Jesus is looking for is that we knock down the self-containing walls and that we get active — invite those we consider non-members into the club. Our call is to everyone regardless of what they call themselves. Jesus’ message is for all and all are entitled to hear it.

To do that we need to get busy. We need to remove the labels and the classifications of outsider and insider. We need to take the message of the Church to all, to the unbelievers, disbelievers, and believers in whatever else may be out there. We need to say that we are here, this is what we believe, and here’s how we live.

But…

But people will be offended, they’ll resist…

Certainly and we cannot force people into the club. Our membership is free. We have a free association of those who hold the faith. If someone were forced to be here we’d have diluted the truth of the faith — God’s open invitation through grace to be regenerated.

Our message is that the unchurched and the non-believer, the person caught up in a destructive way of living, the lonely, the sad, young, old, the rich, poor, and the in-between, the smart and the ordinary – everyone, everybody, everywhere is invited, that they have a place, a role in the Church. Our job — to invite all, to give them the opportunity to choose to believe as we believe and to uphold charity toward those who choose differently.

The message:

Our saying may be perceived as hard, and we can’t change who we are as an accommodation to the world. What we represent is all Jesus said and taught, the words of everlasting life.

The hard saying is a challenge because it initially confronts selfishness, the comfortable place a person has found, the easy chair of pre-conceived notions — but in the end the challenge is found to be an easy and light burden.

Think of the person who responds to your call by saying: —How can I be a member of the club, I’m too far gone.— At first we might think that sad. Rather than sadness we need to act, to invite: —You’re already a member and you are my brother. Come with me without cost.— We can echo the words of Isaiah 55:1:

come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.

Everyone, everybody, everywhere — our job, Jesus’ challenge, go out and invite them, sometimes over and over, and let them know that they are as much a part of us as we are of them in God’s kingdom. Some may not choose belief, membership, but our job, to put aside separateness and to offer belonging. Amen.

Poetry

August 22 – Madrigal XII by Michelangelo Buonarroti

Lady, as one fancies there to be
A living statue, there, deep down
In the harsh alpine stone,
Slowly found as the stone is cut away:
So our own skin conceals
Beneath its crude overlay,
Tough and yet un-worked, fit things
For the soul that trembles still,
Things you alone can bring
From out my deepest being,
For in me there’s neither strength nor will.

Translated by A. S. Kline

Si come per levar, donna, si pone
In pietra alpestra e dura
Una viva figura,
Che là più crescie u’ più la pietra scema;
Tal alcun’ opre buone,
Per l’ alma che pur trema,
Cela il superchio della propria carne
Co l’ inculta sua cruda e dura scorza.
Tu pur dalle mie streme
Parti puo’ sol levarne;
Ch’ in me non è di me voler nè forza.

Poetry

August 21 – Farewell Tatarness! by Numan Celebi Cihan

Farewell, Tatarness, I am heading towards the war,
My horse’s head already turned towards the next world.
I’ve lived for you Tatarlik, and if I die without you,
How will I enter the Paradise that is empty so.
The mountains turned over and the rivers overflew,
Not only we, but even the angels are shocked at how things go.
The young were shaken and the maidens were battered,
Abandoning their children, the mothers fled to deserts.
A clean life behind me, front of me is death.
I doubt my dark path will last any longer.
Not fearing any danger, not being frightened of shadows,
Stretches out my arm, uttering the word” Tatar” at my last breath.

Translated by Mubeyyin Batu Altan

Crimean Tatar

Savlikman Kal Tatarlik, men ketem cenkke,
Atimin basi aylandi ahret betke.
Senin icun yasadim, sensiz olsem,
Bilmem nasil kirermen bos cennetke.
Avdarilgan altavlar, tamular taskan,
Bu islerge biz tuvul, melekler saskan.
Hirpalangan menlikler,xorlangan kizlar,
Balasin taslap anaylar collerge kackan.
Artima baksam ak omur, aldimda olum,
Kop uzamaz belliymen karangi yolum.
Karsambadan havetmey, kolgeden urkmey,
Son nefeste Tatar dep uzanir kolum.

Poetry

August 20 – A Kiss of the King’s Hand by Sarah Robenson Matheson

It wasna from a golden throne,
   Or a bower with milk-white roses blown,
But mid the kelp on northern sand
   That I got a kiss of the King’s hand.

I durstna raise my een to see
   If he even cared to glance at me;
His princely brow with care was crossed
   For his true men slain and kingdom lost.

Think not his hand was soft and white,
   Or his fingers a’ with jewels dight,
Or round his wrists were ruffles grand
   When I got a kiss of the King’s hand.

But dearer far to my twa een
   Was the ragged sleeve of red and green
O’er that young weary hand that fain,
   With the guid broadsword, had found its ain.

Farewell for ever, the distance grey
   And the lapping ocean seemed to say –
For him a home in a foreign land.
   And for me one kiss of the King’s hand.

Bonnie Prince Charlie by John Pettie

Poetry

August 19 – Funny by Anna Kamieńska

What’s it like to be a human
the bird asked

I myself don’t know
it’s being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity
being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity
being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful
being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat
breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly
it’s being on fire
with a nest made of ashes
eating bread
while filling up on hunger
it’s dying without love
it’s loving through death

That’s funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh

Jak to jest być człowiekiem
spytał ptak
Sama nie wiem
Być więźniem swojej skóry
a sięgać nieskończoności
być jeńcem drobiny czasu
a dotykać wieczności
być beznadziejnie niepewnym
i szaleńcem nadziei
być igłą szronu
i garścią upału
wdychać powietrze
dusić się bez słowa
płonąć
i gniazdo mieć z popiołu
jeść chleb
lecz głodem się nasycać
umierać bez miłości
a kochać przez śmierć
To śmieszne odrzekł ptak
wzlatując w przestrzeń lekko

Poetry

August 18 – Someone Else by Artur Międzyrzecki

A tyrant’s proclamations (in whatever era)
Are merely words

Someone else must translate them into a manhunt
Someone with a knack
Someone who likes his work

Someone adept at getting the right people
To the right place at the right time
To pound on the door with a crowbar or a fist

Someone who draws up the timetables for raids
As if they were crosswords in the Sunday paper

Someone who doesn’t bother with whatever’s coming next
it’s no longer his affair
He’s not responsible
Hell’s humble servant
An exemplary employee an adroit technician

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Poetry

August 17 – Song of the Cancer Patient Watering Geraniums by Andrzej Bursa

Cancer’s an incurable illness
Death’s an irreversible phenomenon
In ridiculous clothing in striped pajamas
I water the geraniums

Geraniums red as blood
Geraniums white as milk
On the hospital balcony
In summer twilight’s azure drone

Birds forecast dew dear Doctor
Dew forecasts heat’s white fury
I water our geraniums
Dear wise white Doctor

Cancer’s an incurable illness
Life’s the invincible essence
On sweltering days you have to be careful
The geraniums don’t wilt

Translated by Kevin Christianson and Halina Ablamowicz

geranium

Rak jest choroba nieuleczalną
Śmierć jest zjawiskiem nieodwracalnym
W śmiesznym ubranku w piżamie pasiastej
Podlewam pelargonie

Pelargonie jak krew czerwone
Pelargonie białe jak mleko
W błękitnym brzęku lata o zmierzchu
Na szpitalnym balkonie

Ptaki wróżą rosę doktorze
Rosa biała furie upałów
Ja podlewam nasze pelargonie
Mądry biały doktorze

Rak jest chorobą nieuleczalną
Życie jest treścią niezwyciężoną
Trzeba uważać w dni upalne
żeby nie zwiędły pelargonie

All Right Reserved © 2005 - 2023