New Book
Fr. James Martin has published a new book. It looks like a good one: Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life. I read Martin's My Life with the Saints, and I greatly enjoyed it. He strikes me as a liberal, but one of goodwill and honesty and orthodoxy. One can't be sure, of course, but that's the impression I got from My Life.
This excerpt from the book description struck me:
Holy people are joyful people, says Father Martin, offering countless examples of healthy humor and purposeful levity in the stories of biblical heroes and heroines, and in the lives of the saints and the world's great spiritual masters. He shows us how the parables are often the stuff of comedy, and how the gospels reveal Jesus to be a man with a palpable sense of joy and even playfulness. In fact, Father Martin argues compellingly, thinking about a Jesus without a sense of humor may be close to heretical.
It reminds me of the last words of Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Writing about Christ:
Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
Received in an Email
This guy is sitting at home alone when he hears a knock on the front door.
There are two sheriff's deputies there. He asks if there is a problem.
One of the deputies asks if he is married, and if so, can he see a picture of his wife.
The guy says "sure" and shows him a picture of his wife.
The sheriff looks at the picture and says, "I'm sorry sir, but it looks like your wife's been hit by a truck."
The guy says, "I know, but she has a great personality and is an excellent cook."
From Zero Hedge
In the pre-dawn darkness of a chilly LA morning, my day started off with a chuckle. A friend in the reforestation business sent me an email detailing the US Department of Agriculture's new 'Christmas Tree' tax that was approved yesterday. I thought it was a joke. It wasn't. One can only laugh at the absurdity of the government getting involved in such a matter. But it's happening more and more. You see, the United States is on a one-way collision course with its financial judgment day; the country long ago passed the historical point of no return”“ the point at which it has to start borrowing money simply to pay interest on the money it has already borrowed. After this, the next mind-boggling category of taxes that will be introduced are 'social taxes'. In other words, you get taxed on what everyone else is doing”¦ like an anti-terrorism security tax, or better yet, national healthcare where you pay for other people to go to the doctor. During the Tokugawa period in feudal Japan, they called this 'honto mononari'. Village peasants were taxed by the local daimyo on the basis of the entire village's rice yield for that season. Even if you didn't grow a single grain, you still paid. Perhaps the most heinous forms of taxes to come, though, are asset taxes. And at roughly $5 trillion in total value, individual retirement accounts (IRAs) are the lowest hanging fruit that the federal government can grab.
