The Solemnity of the Ascension. The hardest mystery to understand. None of them can really be understood, of course, but this one is the hardest. I accept the immortality of the soul. It squares with the ontological facts we can discern. But the assumption of the body into heaven, with the concomitant idea that there is a geographical location for it, which telescopes haven't discovered yet? That one is tough. We can pray, we can accept. But we'll never--this side of existence--understand.
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Helping make lacrosse players synonymous with perverts: Thirteen members of a high school lacrosse team have been disciplined for baring their bottoms on which was written a prom invitation from one player to a girl.
If you weren't aware, it has become cool to go through extensive (and stupid) gymnastics when asking a girl to prom. Here are my thoughts on it. Excerpt:
In our culture, we've largely lost the proper sense of the sacramental, and the loss is regurgitating back to the surface, in pseudo-rituals.
Consider other areas where elaborate rituals have taken over special events, like the wedding proposal. A man arranges for a plane to fly by with the proposition in the tail; a man sings the proposition in front of a hundred fellow restaurant diners; a man fakes his death and rises from casket at the funeral and pops the question (okay, I made up that last one, but it could happen).
The birth of a baby has likewise grown beyond all proportion. It's talked about incessantly, plaster casts are made of the huge stomach, the birth is videotaped, family and friends are invited to the birthing.
Wedding proposals and the births are good things – neat things, wonderful things, stupendous things. The wedding proposal leads to a sacrament, and the babies are a normal result of that sacrament.
But they're blown out of all proportion with all sense of their normal fitness replaced by an “event” mentality.
The Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper referred to modern culture's “desacralization.” He said the desacralization leads to all sorts of heresies, and not just theological, but also “anthropological heresies.” He wrote of this:
[A]nyone who fails to realize that there is nothing in man's nature which is “purely spiritual,” but that there is nothing that is “purely physical” either, will in all likelihood be incapable of appreciating or meaningfully enacting that “structure of forms visible and perceptible to the senses” which we call sacred action.
That's a fairly difficult passage, but he's basically saying that people who have lost the sacramental (a proper sense of the intertwined nature of matter and spirit) don't appreciate and can't properly enact the sacred.
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Logical, if nothing else: Sweden is about to introduce a new "Walk" icon at street lights, one in a feminine vein. And of course Chesterton famously observed that the madman is always logical. The madman has a botched set of premises, but his logical conclusions from the premises are normally good.
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New Jersey lawmakers consider sin tax on fast food. For a second, I thought maybe it was an attempt to punish McDonald's for embracing the sin of homosexual activity. Delusional me.
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A story about prison rodeo. It's not what I feared. It's actually a pretty neat story: "Through rodeos and rehabilitation, Burl Cain has transformed America's most violent maximum security prison into its safest."
