Q. 143. Which is the ninth commandment?
A. The ninth commandment is, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Q. 144. What are the duties required in the ninth commandment?
A. The duties required in the ninth commandment are, the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own; appearing and standing for the truth; and from the heart, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully, speaking the truth, and only the truth, in matters of judgment and justice, and in all other things whatsoever; a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them; discouraging talebearers, flatterers, and slanderers; love and care of our own good name, and defending it when need requireth; keeping of lawful promises; studying and practicing of whatsoever things are true, honest, lovely, and of good report.

Westminster Larger Catechism, 1648

A little intellectual help for loving your enemies—and your friends, and your family, and your coworkers, and your political parties (plural), and your national forebears, etc.—because you should.

From the always worthwhile and ever-Augustinian Gilbert Meilaender, in his fantastic essay on the “paradoxes of virtue”—i.e., life.

We are likely to think—I myself often tend to think—that an air of the tragic permeates this discussion. A great man like Regulus serving a false god. An honorable man like Rommel caught up in the wrong cause. The noblest Roman of them all a garden-­variety assassin. A man as honorable as ­Robert E. Lee putting his skill in service of an evil regime. Ulysses’s brave search to see and know what no human being has ever seen stained by a willingness to leave behind those who love and depend on him. Judas’s necessary participation in God’s redemptive handing over of his Son to those intent on destroying him.

There would be something wrong with us if we were entirely unmoved by such examples, but we should not merely wring our hands and bewail our fate. We pay a price for savoring the tragic too much. And the price we pay is that we lose the sense that we are always “on the way” in life—and that to seek virtue is to embark on a journey that requires more than just the piecemeal acquisition of certain character traits. It requires a transformation of who we are. To put the matter more theologically, we might say that the unity of the virtues is an eschatological possibility—the end of the journey, not a rest stop along the way. And it should be no surprise that when we forget this, our public life becomes increasingly shrill, driven by a desire for purity here and now.

Something written back in mid April. A poem, a prose, and a praise—which just sounded like a good combination and a good excuse to cogitate.

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From Robert David Winterfeld, translated from German by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in her biography of Hannah Arendt:

I can’t decide if that’s inspiring or if it’s rubbish. Like that famous quote about those who don’t travel only ever reading one page of the world’s book—it sounds enchanting and revealing, but at some point you realize that the aphorism is mostly trivial and maybe even a trick, if not completely false. (What if it’s the traveler who only takes the time to read a single page of the world’s many books?) I also really don’t know how, or if, it fits with or speaks to a stay-at-home ordered life, but that’s okay.

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From Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:

    We walked north with the lake on our right hand. If we looked at it, the water seemed spread over half the world. The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light.
    But the lake at our feet was plain, clear water, bottomless with smooth stones and simple mud. It was quick with small life, like any pond, as modest in its transformations of the ordinary as any puddle. Only the calm persistence with which the water touched, and touched, and touched, sifting all the little stones, jet, and white, and hazel, forced us to remember that the lake was vast, and in league with the moon (for no sublunar account could be made of its shimmering, cold life).

As Christian Wiman said of “sweet” in Gertrude Stein’s poem “Susie Asado”, it’s that last “touched” that’s inspired.

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Poem anthologies are always a treat. I’ve been picking at Christian Wiman’s Joy a little at a time. (That’s an interesting sentence). I take a poem or two a day and, every few hours, pace the kitchen with the words and paper in my hands, to break away from the computer screen. A favorite one this week is David Ferry’s “Out at Lanesville.” I like several elements of this one. There’s something about a spray-painted and hoarsely uttered expletive being spoken “to the random winds and to the senseless waves” that’s worth both a chuckle and a depth of thought. And like many good poems, the last stanza—that poetic mental ellipsis—reshapes exactly as it should, sending you thoughtfully away and, simultaneously, inviting another reading.

It’s the second to last part that I keep going back to, though, almost with a double vision. I imagine the scene as I suppose I should: a Monet of blue dress pants and white summer dresses, on the rocks and in the boat. But I also see another present and ubiquitous scene, one of empty streets, closed doors, hidden selves—all working it out. 

The voices of some people out in a boat somewhere
Are carried in over the water with surprising
Force and clarity, though saying I don’t know what:
Happiness; unhappiness; something about the conditions
Of all such things; work done, not done; the saving
Of the self in the intense work of its singleness,
Learning to live with it. Their lives have separate ends.

Reflecting on the day’s current events, a friend recently asked me what my thoughts were about “all this.” I wish I had a good answer, but the truth is that I have very few thoughts—or too many; I can’t decide. They vary minute by minute, but not because I’m fickle (though I might be). There’s just too much to keep track of and too many different experiences. Sure, my friends and my family and I are still healthy. I still have a job and I’ll still graduate in May. And being shut up with books and studies and reaching out to people when I feel like it is not exactly a bad week, or even month, for introverted me. But for a friend whose AA meetings have cancelled or for difficult relationships that relied on a certain social distancing, before social distancing shut them up together—who’s to say.

Sometimes it’s best to keep our hands over our mouths. In a way, I think this is what poetry is often paradoxically doing.

From A. R. Ammons, “A Poem Is a Walk”:

My predisposition, which I hope shortly to justify, is to prefer confusion to oversimplified clarity, meaninglessness to neat, precise meaning, uselessness, to overdirected usefulness. I do not believe that rationality can exhaust the poem, that any scheme of explanation can adequately reflect the poem, that any invented structure of symbology can exceed and therebye replace the poem.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change. And the rational critical mind is essential to making poems: it protects the real poem (which is nonrational) from blunders, misconceptions, incompetences; it weeds out the second rate. Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing. If we remain open minded we will soon find for any easy clarity an equal and opposite, so that the sum of our clarities should return us where we belong, to confusion and, hopefully, to more complicated and better assessments.

Unlike the logical structure, the poem is an existence which can incorporate contradictions, inconsistencies, explanations and counter-explanations and still remain whole, unexhausted and inexhaustible; an existence that comes about by means other than those of description and exposition and, therefore, to be met by means other than or in addition to those of description and exposition.

And all this, really, Patrick Kavanagh said in two simple lines: “For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven / from green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.”

Finally brothers and sisters, rejoice. Aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss (while respecting health service guidelines, recommendations, and personal space bubbles). All the saints (in any group size, no matter how small, who love and serve Jesus) greet you.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Sitting around your table
as we did, able
to laugh, argue, share
bread and wine and companionship, care
about what someone else was saying, even
if we disagreed passionately: Heaven,
we’re told, is not unlike this, the banquet celestial,
eternal convivium. So the praegustum terrestrium
partakes—for me, at least—of sacrament.
(Whereas the devil, ever intent
on competition, invented the cocktail party where
one becomes un-named, un-manned, de-personned.) Dare
we come together, then, vulnerable, open, free?
Yes! Around your table we
knew the Holy Spirit, come to bless
the food, the host, the hour, the willing guest.

Madeleine L’Engle

From Albert Barnes’s commentary on Matthew 28:20 (emphasis mine):

There am I in the midst of them – Nothing could more clearly prove that Jesus must be omnipresent, and, of course, be God. Every day, perhaps every hour, two or three, or many more, may be assembled in every city or village in the United States, in England, in Greenland, in Africa, in Ceylon, in the Sandwich Islands, in Russia, and in Judea – in almost every part of the world – and in the midst of them all is Jesus the Saviour. Millions thus at the same time, in every quarter of the globe, worship in his name, and experience the truth of the promise that he is present with them. It is impossible that he should be in all these places and not be God.