Matter – Poem by Mary Beth

Matter

by Mary Beth Zeleznik

What does a dream possess
That weakens all aware thought?
With endless means a life is bought
And held over mounting crest
From the very height hued for rest
From steady hand, tightened tress
Dangling, with no ground, you fought
Rope around your breath, caught

Sky and sod remain firm
There is no look beyond the berm
So what is it, what is the matter?
A matter of time and its term
Across the clock face, arms squirm
Their duty could make a glass face shatter
And all the hours filled with chatter
Make the trembling ticking sadder

And in the stark, dewed light of a day
Return in tears to beg yesterday’s- to stay
To convince the invisible that you each are the same
Though they will not even tell their name
So how do you call them to come out and play?
A dream takes time as time takes a dream away
Both are shortened if we strike at their frame
And mistake their essence, then give them blame

But in the wakeful hours, you know the deal
Made without the heart’s consent
But can even the mind be content?
Thought rules the thinking and the feel
The matter around which your life is bent
Forced forward as brute scrapes your heel
From the motion of living your living reels
In the flicker of the dream glimpse what you meant:

To end this slow bodily perish, that happens too fast
And a form never leaves from where it lay
Only childhood’s sweetness for a mind to hast
To come out and play.  To stay, to stay
Make the orange of twilight to last
And linear paths are cut out of the clay
Of the ground which remains the unmoving cast
Of your home, and of the single day.

Copyright 2016 Mary Beth.

Sports over Wisdom

Please read the important article below from a philosophy professor at Gonzaga University in Spokane. He makes the point that to find out what people reveal themselves through their anger. And its obvious by the lives most Americans live that we obsessed with sports. Proof is in the pudding. Stop and listen to nearly any conversation and people will be talking about football or some other inane sport but mostly football. It has become America’s pastime. Catholic schools (if they should still be called Catholic) have certainly become enveloped with this obsession. I wonder how many Catholics are even on these Catholic schools. Certainly not enough to be a witness to the secular pagan culture in which we live.
——————————————–

http://www.thecatholicthing.org/2015/12/12/when-sports-displace-catholic-education/

When Sports Displace Catholic Education

Douglas Kries

Saturday, December 12, 2015

When I started writing this, the Notre Dame football team was ranked so high in the national polls that many people thought it would play in the national championship playoffs. A certain type of Catholic was standing a little taller in those days, sometimes sporting Fighting Irish gear even at Mass. Now, those same people have instead a Lenten-like look, for Our Lady’s team has lost and is out of the running for this season’s championship.

On the rare occasions when Notre Dame loses, those of us allied with other Catholic schools like to tease the “Domers” – a mask for our envy, of course. For we are all secretly jealous of Notre Dame’s athletic success. Our unconscious envy only reveals what everybody somehow already knows but does not reflect upon: Catholic schools in the United States, both on the collegiate and high school level, are now thoroughly attached to and reliant upon sports programs.

To be sure, like all young people, Catholic students have always loved ballgames; but even the most cursory glance at the history of Christian education reveals that what most clearly distinguishes today’s American Catholic educational institutions from their historical antecedents is the prominent position now commanded by sports teams. I have begun to refer to this phenomenon as the rise of the “American Catholic Sports Academies” (ACSAs).

I write from the Pacific Northwest, where the most visible of the ACSAs is Gonzaga University. This school, which has just announced plans for an expensive new “Center for Athletic Achievement,” is much more famous for its basketball teams than its philosophy department, wherein I teach.

In the Northwest, however, ACSAs are more common on the high school level. The just-completed football season was particularly kind to them: Idaho’s only diocesan Catholic high school won the championship for its division; in Oregon, a Catholic high school won the championship for the largest-sized schools; and in Washington state, the largest two divisions went to Catholic schools.

Some of these Northwest ACSAs have conducted marketing surveys that ask parent/supporters why they send their children to Catholic high school. Among the top items on the list is always “activity programs,” at the bottom is always “faith formation.”

Of course, every philosopher knows that human beings reveal more about themselves through expressing anger than they do through answering marketing surveys. A single sad – if comical – incident will have to suffice to illustrate the point. At one Northwest ACSA, a principal and athletic director recently discovered that major athletic recruiting violations had occurred at their high school. In the spirit of Catholic confession (not to mention league rules), they reported the infractions to conference officials. This resulted in a penance for the school: the forfeiture of games and trophies.

Female athletes depicted in 4th-century A.D. mosaics (Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily)

But this, in turn, led to the formation of an angry mob of athletic boosters, who demanded the firing of the whistleblowers for donning sackcloth. Weak-kneed archdiocesan administrators ran into their offices, from whence it seemed the only way to emerge in safety was to place lesser sanctions on the whistleblowers and ask for an independent investigation of the whole affair. But, alas, the independent investigation vindicated the whistleblowers completely, and with painful precision; the archdiocesan officials are thus left trying to break the bad news to the angry boosters delicately, and with indirection.

In the Confessions, St. Augustine admits that, as a child, he cheated at ballgames and became angry when he was found out; the ACSA parents of Seattle do such as adults.

There is no real parallel to the modern ACSA in the whole history of Catholic education. To find a true analogue, you would have to turn to the ancient “gymnastic” of Greece and Rome – to the Homeric and Olympic games honoring the pagan deities. With the advent of Christianity, however, Greco-Roman athleticism was transformed into asceticism. The two are not completely dissimilar, but the former aimed at comeliness of body, as well as proportion, muscle, and military virtue. The latter aimed only at improvement of soul – even if it meant with some damage to the body, if necessary.

The striking return of gymnastic to American educational institutions, and especially to Catholic ones, ought not be accepted unreflectively, for even the more thoughtful Greeks knew that an education based solely on gymnastic will produce souls as stunted as those of the Spartans.

Plato suggested that gymnastic could be useful within a sort of “bait and switch” educational scheme. You should introduce gymnastic early in the curriculum, he suggested, using it to develop the soul’s nascent spiritedness into love of victory, honor, and courage. The “switch” part comes next: you have to elevate the soul’s spiritedness away from gymnastic and toward a love of truth, wisdom, and the higher virtues. Such a redirection of the soul, in Plato’s view, was to be initiated through musical education, and then, later, through mathematics and liberal education generally. It culminated, of course, in philosophia, the love of wisdom.

The ACSAs seem to have mastered the “bait” part of Plato’s educational scheme. We use gymnastic to instill the desire for achievement in the souls of our students; in the best instances we also instill camaraderie and teamwork, and even courage, which, if it is not the most sublime of virtues, is still among the most foundational. What we don’t do well is the “switch” part. In the Catholic context, this would mean embracing Augustine’s educational plan, according to which Plato’s curriculum is used a stepping stone into the love of God.

Our ACSAs probably don’t have the resources necessary for such a task anymore, but as Augustine himself pointed out, you never know what God might have in mind.

Refashioning Reality – Quote by D.Q. McInerny

From an article written by D.Q. McInerny, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary, FSSP, titled “Refashioning Reality.”

“Protagoras was an ancient Greek philosopher who made the bold claim that “man is the measure of all things.”  No, Mr. Protagoras, man is not the measure, he is the measured; he is measured by nature, by the objective order of things.  And whenever he forgets that, whenever he begins to think that his ideas are the standards by which the world is to be ordered, then he becomes a foreigner to truth.  He may persuade himself, in his pride, that he is the master of nature, the dictator of reality, but what in fact has happened – and he is always the last to see this – is that he has become the deluded denizen of a make-believe world.”

Quote of the Day – Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

Lacking the pleasure of intellectual delight, we tend to seek a kind of pleasure that knows nothing of the intrinsic  purpose of knowledge.  Our minds do seek to know.  What is perhaps unique about Christianity is that it is a revelation that unabashedly  also addresses itself to intellect.   It recognizes that everyone, philosopher or not,  needs to be properly directed to the highest things, that to which we are ordered in the very structure of our being.  We also need first to be receivers, to be open to what is not ourselves so that we are able to respond to what is.

– Fr. James V. Schall
“The Life of the Mind. On the Joys and Travails of Thinking”

Gable – Poem by Mary Beth

Gable
by Mary Beth Zeleznik Artz

Ordered for life, a blue little place,
The only on the block in darkened space, grown by the sun and held by the moon.
My flying home, I’ll see you soon.

Dwellers have told of, since I was a child, The human weather, as something mild.
At the very first able to hear a fable,
Under the covers, beneath her sum gable.

A mind jarred by wonder, in springs from her bays, Made speechless by her free giving and taking days.
As soon as I caught one, it was gone
As grass grew, I grew, smaller on my lawn.

The atmosphere of this place, and her conditions, are not at all like the human renditions!
Their tale of this world is plastic to the touch, molded by small hands, a place I fear so much.

With a gathered grip, they hold on to small sand, Though breath bequeathed them a fertile land.
I nest in the hour that is hers,
They kick the moments with their spurs.

And pound their stakes into monotony’s rhyme, As though it were theirs, in their mimic and mime.
But allow me to fasten my little bird wing, To your minutes, though they fly, made up of seconds that sing.

I will hold on, though I weep for each drop, Of our time passed in duty to beauty the mop.
It startles my system with how quickly it flees, But the only meaning is from the sight that bleeds.

The scented air chokes a reminder still, Of the senses I try to bind with the will.
The picket bares the name of birth,
that there is still mourning to be had in the earth.

So do settle back and tell me your hurt, I will listen and you will girt.
With those old fleeing hours, that
We will keep under the span of our hats.

Mine is much less significant in size,
Than yours, past the clouds an unseeable rise.
Perhaps there is no top to your arcing dome, You extend beyond our planting loam.

But mine fits under yours in a little stack, Beyond us, stars, in a fabric of silken blue black.
Will the old gold days hurt us the same, up there?
Will we be able to, for once, just sit and stare?

I’d rather, I must, hold fast to your static flight, Where you will lead me into the mildest of nights.
With no threat to interval, under the rise, Will I find that you have been my wild blue in thin disguise?

Then I can finally have you, and all of our days, and my eyes will at last be sufficient to take in your ways.
In lushest green and clearest blue, I will call earthly bluff, back in time when all of your beauty for which my senses weren’t enough.

Copyright 2015

Tin Can – Poem by Mary Beth

Tin Can

by Mary Beth Zeleznik Artz

In the darkened wood grows a fern, its whips as light as breezes.
In a soil feeding not, cracked and mean.
A home to reject water, clutches and seizes.
From the natural world, the planting is coerced to wean.

Get close enough to feel if it plated itself with thorns,
A curious life, I was curious about it not a little.
The unrecognized left alone, meekness adorns.
The small beauty, the dirty air, and me in the middle.

So alone, alone taking in this thing of being,
Something in the tiny leaves would leave me unsettled.
Passers by invade with vacancy, no senses meant for seeing,
Invaded home, I am not sorry I meddled.

Your fronds like wings, kindly and cute,
But none can glean this from afar.
For what can be known when we walk like a brute,
Not the feeding field below nor the upward star.

To put you in that place  where you can thrive,
Suddenly an urge to take you from this ground.
But to go searching holds the chance we won’t survive,
Paradise may not be lost in the lost and found.

I begin to act still, wrap my hands around you,
And in the stillness of that instant I am lent.
I look up and see It matters not to the undisturbed sky of blue
I look back to see my choking fingers, your spine is bent.

A constant weighing of odds as this odd life weighs,
Why do we have to continually decide?
How can one be trapped, motionless by fleeing hours and days,
Begging more from the clock as we hurry our breath to subside.

Dirt under my skin as I worked this over,
And overworked my head once more.
A mind’s constant hunger is a hunter and a rover,
Within the folds you choose an answer and a score.

And in this fleeting moment of a lifetime of thought,
The fern has faded at the tutelage of my hand.
What I have learned, is that what I have taught?
All she wanted was her stake of this embittered land.

The face of beauty falling, across her imperfect lines,
Pack the dirt around her again, frantically I work.
Fight the gross weight pushing you, and read the signs,
Though death appears perfect where life does lurk.

I feel something sharp, but it also shines,
The created is supple, what is made can only hurt.
But which substance will it end up being that binds?
There on my knees, pushing down the crumbling dark earth.

The thing has pierced my flesh as I try to save a life,
A sting in an instant, then follows, a  longer flow of blood.
Pulsing out a code, forced to read what is rife,
The liquid life within blends with the dirt to make a mud.

There beneath the shine is a rusty old tin,
A jagged and buried home in which she grows.
The gleaming rim in the ground, it gashed my skin
As I balance on this greater rim, searching an explanation to expose.

And grateful for my wound, my friend to be, the fern,
Her face of beauty asks and rises tall.
Somehow, I want to thank her in turn,
She is the countenance of sadness, at rest in the restlessness of the fall.

And then in the fall, she withdraws from us and from living,
Where will she go, those months when she hides from our sight?
A mystery supreme in the thanks  and the giving,
Lucky little fern, she escapes the ballast and the blight.

A notion that cannot seem to leave me alone,
that she is somewhere, even when she goes away.
And like those that others hoard in their homes,
leaves me alone to play hide and go seek with a day.

And most hours and minutes I do not know,
this mud of blood and dirt, I do what with it?
They reap and so I sow and I sow,
Disarm my arm, the instrument of failed physics.

But now I know the friend who gives the very breath to my lungs,
And strange to learn my breath goes back to her in the thicket of the wood.
A mother doesn’t rest until she finds her young,
Our deal struck in nature is for good.

Oh so many leaves that line that spine of those long whips,
you search for your rare and dire drink, but are left as pulp.
For another planting has but one leaf on a stem that slowly sips,
your multitudes demand multitudes of breathless gulps.

But do not fear the aloneness amidst the company of your leaves,
there is friendship you have forged inside your waking slumber.
Can you observe the tireless builder who plans, lifts and heaves?,
Count your leaves and compare with His, your end number.

And even though you go unnoticed still,
You were at some time planted by someone, into that can.
A corroded container holds the whole of a moment’s perfected will,
A refusal of meaninglessness, a meeting of beauty and man.

Is it that the rate of survival is to be slow indeed?
Your ever near death on this ground to give your life it’s ever after?
The planter works not on whim, nor just the easy growing seed,
But the delicate, and the deluge of tears to water the final laughter.

Copyright 2015

This life, is but a Day. Toothless Stuntmen and the “Outside Wave” Goodbye.

by Mary Beth

What is the worst four-letter word in the English language? Ask a poet and they may answer “Time.” A poet is a philosopher with a heavy heart and what can weigh on the heart heavier than time. This is why so much poetry deals with time in one form or another. How many aspects are there to the fact of our fallen natures? Countless. How many of them can be defined through our words? Many can, but not time. Nevertheless, I will try.

Thoughts and Us

We can put a great deal of thought into the meaning of time in its three forms in one; Past, Present, and Future and yet it is difficult to aptly describe the deep frustration of time. All three are essentially forms of the past, a thought that can swamp the mind with great sadness. However, these thoughts regarding time cannot be depleted even with the passage of time. This is due to the eternal nature of the soul. Boethius spoke of something similar in his “Consolations of philosophy” naming philosophy and thinking (ordered to God) as what got him through his imprisonment as he awaited an unjust execution. Our earthly time is a pervasive wound ubiquitous to every part of us, that won’t let us forget. Even in the midst of laughter or joy. Our hopes for our eternal time, or lack thereof rather, occupies so much of our thought. But why is that? Not merely because we aspire to heaven, but because what goodness we have here on earth is marked by the arrow of time which is aimed squarely at our foreheads.

Where are you now that the Wrestling Match is over?

There is a video on Turner Classic Movies  called TCM Remembers. There is one from the year 2007 in which everyone from the film industry who died that year, is honored. It is impossible to watch it and not think of the fleeting nature of time for every soul. It is beautifully done. Imagery of muted dusk skies with falling autumn leaves serve as the backdrop to the images of our recently passed on brothers and sisters of the human race. The video is set to the song “Promises” by Badly Drawn Boy. Quite a fitting title, Promises as the sadness of this piece is made a little milder by the remembering of the “Grand Promise” of eternal life. (By the only one qualified to promise) The piece captures but a fraction of what I feel deep in the recesses, not of my spiritual Catholic self, but my very human self. When I look at this video, I find I am very aware of the fact that I don’t know where any of these people have gone on to. I only know what I hope and why I hope it. I know what our faith teaches and I am not naive. But this life is hard, a grand wrestling match, that often seems so long and yet is shorter than any of us can bear. And so it is my wish when I look at those faces, they have by the grace of their Maker, gone on to that place and time where place and time are obliterated.

Toothless Stuntmen

In the video, several things are striking, but what hits me the hardest are the clips of two men in particular. Ironically, or perhaps not so, both men are stuntmen. As neither are actors, these appear to be excerpts of their real selves in interviews. The first thought that occurs is that being a stuntman would be about the best job on the planet! (after being a swordsmith) These men have stories. And though we can’t hear their voices, it is clear they were just telling some of them! Both men are smiling as they tell them, and there is no need to hear their words because their meaning can be read in their faces. But there is too a tangible sadness in their eyes and in their movements.  Particularly in the way that both men turn their heads to the side at a point in their laughter. They are the only two to do so in the entire sequence.  This contains an arresting bit of meaning.  And it is then that I noticed the underlying sadness in their eyes. And it brings tears to mine.

Why am I making such a point of these mere turns of the head when they could be simply inadvertent bits of body language? Because I think they are more than that. To turn your head away while recounting a memory, a piece of your life, implies a struggle with no small bit of pain.  It looks as though in the midst of their joyous memories, in the middle of their laughter, that click in the head happens and that arrow hits. That incessant wound reminder. Is this why happiness, normally fleeting, and occasionally pure, always contains the accompaniment of sadness? And why often it is the good memories that are more painful than the bad? These two men are, undoubtedly MEN’S men; tough, strong stuntmen who get punched in the gut for a living. Yet even they can’t escape that wound and the vulnerability it creates. Their bittersweet laughter across their faces with missing teeth, tells us two things: Life is tough.  And that it is so very brief, is tougher still.

Wishing that today was yesterday
-Promises (Badly Drawn Boy)

There is a scene from a 1950’s movie called “The Catered Affair” about an older devout catholic married couple of very modest means. They are not always happiest as life is very hard for them, but they are dutiful, good and humble. At the end scene they have a heart to heart as they prepare to go to their daughter’s wedding. The husband, Ernest Borgnine, remarks that they have been married a long time. His wife, Bette Davis asks “too long? Has it been too long?” To which the husband replies, “To know a person? It’s like a day.” Life is shorter than any of us can take.

Customs Lost to Time

We have very dear Catholic friends with whom we spent not nearly enough time with when we lived in Alabama(isn’t it funny how we refer to it as time “spent” as this denotes a deficit). One night after dinner at their house, I was hit with a wistful reminder of a bygone custom. A custom my father’s parents practiced after most visits. Our friends came out into the yard after we had said our goodbyes inside, and continued to do so, waving goodbye as we drove away. It occurred to me that no one does this anymore. There is a comfort I can’t quite describe in looking in the rearview mirror and seeing your friends or your family still standing there watching you leave. Sure it is partly because it’s always good to be loved, and because the human trait of real warmth is a rare one these days. But it is perhaps even better to know that other people hold on as we do. Just because that particular and all too fleeting bit of our time together is over, it isn’t over inside.  Nor is it, God willing, in the next life. When I see my loved ones in the rear view mirror waving outside I see that all of us are holding onto a mutual hope in that promise of never having to say goodbye again. The defeat of time.

These are the human reasons why I wish that wish; for each of us to have the fortitude to will Heaven. So we can all be together in the place where time can’t hurt us anymore. Let us stand on our little patch of this earth and wave goodbye to those we love as they drive away.  And let us help each other to will the everlasting yard, full of the softest, coolest grass to ever lay beneath our bare feet, together.

Copyright 2015

Contemplative Occupation and the Fight to Think

Contemplative Occupation and the Fight to Think.