Pray for those who persecute you

I was working for a bar in Houston, MN.  I walked in mid morning to the regulars watching TV.  Per usual I thought they were watching daytime television, the Price is Right or something, but the owner muttered something about a terrorist attack.  Then I turned and looked.

via Time

Olivier Picard, photo editor and photographer; former Director of Photography for U.S. News and World Report.

 “Since we were based in Washington, D.C., we had no communication with New York for the first couple of hours. The deadline for closing our special issue was the next day. I didn’t sleep. We published an image by freelance photographer Patrick Witty that for me best evokes that tumultuous morning. It is 9:59 a.m. and New Yorkers witness the collapse of the South Tower. Their reaction was mine. Immediate. Disbelief. Raw. Violent.”

9-11: Man In The Red Bandanna

I couldn't get autoplay to turn off so I removed the embedded video. I recommend it and can be watched on ESPN

FirstThings: Bob Dylan must get stoned

Journalists have always been puzzled by Bob Dylan, but the confusion is of their own making. The pattern of treating him as a trickster whose words cannot be taken at face value was established in the sixties, when the rock intelligentsia wanted Dylan to be a political as well as musical revolutionary. He was neither, of course. His radicalness came from a deeply conservative understanding of musical history: He was reading Civil War era newspapers while everyone else was reading Norman O. Brown and listening to Gospel and Blues when music was becoming “pop” in the fifties. But the story of the sixties wasn’t complete without Dylan as its hero. His so-called followers couldn’t take no as an answer: His denials became obfuscations.

Of course, Dylan can be verbally perverse in interviews, but who can blame him when those who should know better seem clueless to what he is saying? Occasionally in these charades of misunderstanding, Dylan gets so frustrated that he spells everything out, revealing probably more than he intended. Such was the case in a Rolling Stone 2012 interview with Mikal Gilmore.

The interview begins to go wrong for Gilmore (and right for the rest of us) when he asks about “Rainy Day Women.” Dylan says that those who view it as a drug song “aren’t familiar with the Book of Acts.” This comment goes so far over Gilmore’s head that he can’t even respond to it.

Which shows he has no business interviewing Dylan, who has always been immersed in the Bible, its language and its theology. “Rainy Day Women” is more about persecution than intoxication. It sounds like a Salvation Army band playing a funeral march, but its words are deadly serious. When Dylan says that “they’ll stone ya when you’re trying to be so good” and that “they’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to go home,” he is speaking straight from the Bible. His comment about the Book of Acts makes the reference more explicit: it’s not just any good man being stoned, but Stephen.

continue at First Things

I should have listened to timman.

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Bellicose by Old Thunder

by Hilaire Belloc

It may be taken as a proof of Original Sin that the chosen continue to hanker for the fleshpots of Egypt. Purgatory is made easier for me by the realization that I did not live long enough to witness Lords Spiritual confuse their function, I will not say with that of Lords Temporal — things are far worse than that — but with the fustian of the Third Estate.

An author I might have read, but did not, a handicapped heretic named Kierkegaard (I have come to know the chap well here, as it happens, and we have taken a turn or two together in the Nona on the unpredictable tides of the Styx) wrote a perceptive essay entitled “The Difference Between A Genius and an Apostle.” Now those of us who have been blessed with the gift of the true faith hold, whatever the sentiments of the objects of our belief, that the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church are, by dint of apostolic succession, the contemporary lieutenants of the twelve chosen by Christ himself. Their authority — or charism — is not due to the cut of their jib, their GRE scores, if any, their theological degrees (more likely than not they are canonists or now, alas, doctores in what are called, perhaps on an analogy with certain diseases, the social sciences), or even the fact, and it seems still to be a fact, that they are of Irish descent. From bishops we do not expect arguments, theological or otherwise. What we expect is authoritative discourse.

Among the pains of purgatory is to be kept apprised of the doings of the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States. Some of my best friends are Americans; my sainted wife was one. The American, as Gilbert Chesterton noted, is one who refers to his use of tobacco and wine as vices. One may perhaps trace so perverted a judgment to the Puritan influence, the Protestant influence in the formation of the country. And lament that the French and Spanish roles seem present largely in the names of rivers, cities, states. It is a comfort to me here to see that soon Hispanics will constitute an unignorable fraction of the church in America, in North America. I cherish the thought that it is their mission to bring back a sense of the manly virtues to a Church which, if it can be judged by its bishops, has become limp and womanly.

But, hold. This may be unfair. In the interests of accuracy, I should perhaps refer to the staff that wrote the draft which was leaked to the press which …. Enough! It is the thought of staffs and committees and bureaus and all the other paraphernalia behind which bishops now hide that I find especially outrageous. Down with ventriloquism. Let the successors of the apostles speak out loud and clear in their own voices and relying on the authority that is theirs by consecration. Committee reports and essays by anonymous hands we can get from a hundred sources. What the Church needs is the voice of the bishop, speaking vibrantly and with the strength of twelve.

When this happy day dawns, we will not get the drivel of draft pastoral letters. Is this too much to hope for in these dark days? I understand that I am little read in the world now. There is the most unkindest cut of all. Some may remember the epitaph I composed for myself. “When I am gone, may it be said, his sins were as scarlet but his books were read.” If you won’t read me, pray for me. And for yourselves.

Source: Crisis Mag

HT ED

The By line says it's Belloc but actually was an anonymous Crisis writer.

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