There's an R.E.M. song (called "Stand") that goes, "Stand in the place where you live (Now face north) / Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before / Now stand in the place where you work (Now face west) / Think about the place where you live, wonder why you haven't before..."

Place is a funny thing. Today I left my home in Pittsburgh and traveled to Washington, D.C. It was a beautiful sunny day, and as I drove through the scenic, pastoral hills of middle Pennsylvania and Maryland, the colors of the blue sky and fluffy white clouds, the green and yellow grasses and the brown and red rocks seemed especially vibrant. I had the urge to pull over in a random spot in the country, just park on the side of the road and walk into one of those no-place fields and perhaps sit down or stand and look around and just say, "I am here. Where am I? I don't know the name of it, and it probably doesn't even have a name, but it doesn't matter. I'm just here." I've had this urge many times before when driving through the country. Why does no one utilize the vast resources of space we have in this country?

But another thing about place. I realized while sitting and eating dinner with my aunt and uncle (I'm living in a little apartment attached to their house in D.C.) how much the cumulative "you" is shaped by the places you have been, especially the place where you grew up, and also how much the current "you" is shaped by the place where you are at that moment. By "place," I am including the people around with whom you are interacting—everything that makes up your environment. Anyway, I know this is no incredible insight, but it just struck me strongly the extent to which place dominates our lives. For instance, you don't really realize how deeply you are affected by the house in which you grew up and your particular family culture until you go and live in a different house with a different family and notice all the seemingly trivial but actually tremendous variations. Solely by virtue of being in this place, instead of a place fifteen feet away in the next house over, you have (and are having) profoundly different experiences, and the way you react to those experiences is deemed to be "you." You would have been another you if you had grown up fifteen feet away.

This is reposted from my personal blog (which is private so don't ask for the link), so what's below is a little unfinished and... personal. But it's what I've got for you this fine Tuesday. Hope you all enjoy it.

It's not easy to have faith in your twenties, I have concluded (after almost one year of being in my twenties. Talk about expertise). There is something about religion that appeals to the weak, the broken, the needy. Perhaps it's the offer of unlimited love, or the promise of a glorious Heaven that will make up for the sorrows and sufferings of this world. Christ told us that he came not to call the righteous but sinners, and truly, those who are broken by sin often love the Faith in a way that is not easily understood by those who are comfortably in control of their well-ordered lives.

When you feel like you have it all together, I'm starting to think, it's easy to forget that you need Christ. There are certain times in life when the sacramental vision - seeing the deeper spiritual truth behind every human reality - comes as easily as breathing. For example, as a child, I believed in fairies and in good old Santa Claus. If you truly believe, as I did at that time, that pixies live under the rock at the bottom of your garden and that a chubby fellow wearing red takes trips down chimneys for your express benefit, it's very easy to also believe that God has assigned you your own personal angel to be your friend, and that His pretty mother in blue makes a habit of appearing to children in caves. When a person is old and many of her loved ones have died, that promised Heaven where they are waiting for her probably seems very near and easy to believe in. When a person is in fear or in pain, the act of crying out to God for help - De profundis clamavi ad te Domine! - is a natural, almost instinctive, response. But when a person is young and strong, healthy and successful? It's harder to believe in all the difficult truths of the Faith. Especially if a person is intelligent and used to wrapping her mind quickly around new concepts, the mystery of the Trinity or of the hypostatic union are so hard to accept. It isn't easy to put complete and total faith in things you can't see and understand.

That's why I rejoiced to read the Holy Father Benedict XVI's address to young people before World Youth Day earlier this month. In it he talks about how he had doubts as a young man - doubts about what was true and doubts that he should be a priest. Can you imagine that the pope once had doubts about whether God was calling him to the priesthood? That blew my mind and gave me so much more respect for him. We have a brave and honest Holy Father all right.**

And I knew just where he was coming from. Because I do have doubts. I do struggle to believe. Some days I look at my faith and think, "How can anyone believe all this crazy, contradictory, paradoxical stuff?" Faith means standing on the very cliff's edge of your human intellect and looking out at what seems to be an endless and terrifying abyss - and jumping. What happens after you jump is only between you and God, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that some days I'm afraid to take the leap. Some days, of course, I look at my faith and see that it is the only way to make sense of this life. That it's the one thing in our mad, mad world that is entirely reasonable and beautiful and true. But the thing is, faith is a gift. I can't entirely choose which days I'll believe and which days I won't. What I can do is ask for faith, and there are many, many days when I pray, like the father of the possessed child, "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief." Because even on the days when it's hardest to believe, I want to have faith. And that, I think, makes all the difference.

**(He is also completely freakin' adorable.)

The lovely shan't be choosers; and shan't choose
To while away their days in nothings, tiny somethings, of a "Fine, and your day?" nature.
The lovely-minded lovers of the Sun, those non-cave-dwellers sometimes

sink

A little lower than where they used to be.
Into normalcy.

And blood burns hot in kindled thoughts and veins
Less frequently.
(Can we ever truly lose it?  Did we ever truly own it?  I am your memory.)

Will I become who I chose not to be?

And will the cobweb minutes stick as clearer thoughts grow slow and thick amidst the rush of "tick, tick, tick"-
Here comes your future.

Oh, no-
Maintain your open eagerness of mind.
Despite the ready force of rushing times,
the lovely shall not choose a life
Costing them less than everything
(And that's no choice at all.)

But in the maw of mundane this or that,
The order's tall.

-LC

Hi everyone, Tess again.

I wanted to share with you all the very beautiful and inspiring words of our beloved Holy Father Benedict XVI, which he has directed especially to us, the young people of the church, on this occasion of World Youth Day 2011.

It's pretty much breaking my heart that I'm not in Madrid for it, but being able to read this message is a great opportunity to participate in the festivities from afar.  If you are so inclined, this message might be a nice thing to take to prayer with you.

I hope you all enjoy it, and I would love to hear what you think of it in the comments.

About a year ago I was playing with my nephew Emmett.  3 years old, blond hair, blue eyes and the sweetest smile you've ever seen.  We were playing with a playmobil set on the floor in my brother's family room.  There were knights, cannons, horses, kings, dragons, battle axes, swords, spears and helmets  scattered all around as we engaged in an epic battle that rivaled those of the Trojan War.  There were heroes on both sides and the tide of the struggle ebbed and flowed evenly, but every once in a while one of his soldiers would miraculously gain the power of flight and knock down all my defenses in one fell swoop.  After about a half hour of drama, courage, self-sacrifice and brief respites from the action to drink our respective beer and juice  Emmett set his playmobile knight and horse on the ground, put his tiny hand on my shoulder and smiled a curious, thoughtful smile; the kind you would expect Shakespeare to wear as he wrote the last line of one of his sonnets.

"Uncle Jack," he said softly.  "Why camels?"

That was it.  There was no follow up.  No additional clauses to the question.  There were absolutely no camels in sight.  It was simply a thought that came from Emmett's wonderful little brain, and he took it as seriously as any one of you takes questions involving how to balance the contemplative life with the active.  So, naturally, I did too.  Why camels?

The only answer I have come up with so far is this.

Why not camels?

-Jack

I've thought a lot lately about balancing the life of the mind with a practical career (business, law, medicine, etc.).  People often comment with surprise on the contrast between my artsy (in their eyes, impractical) major and leisure reading choices, with my prosaic consulting job.

I begin to see, though, that they are a perfect balance.  Even T.S. Eliot worked in a bank, and wasn't it Wallace Stevens who spent his career at an insurance company.  I wonder if they were better workers for it?  Poets have to eat, too.

LC

We often say that the soul exists in the body, but isn't it better to say that the body exists in the soul?

(Yes, Joey I know that this might belong under the discussions section, but it has been a while since somebody posted. Plus you did say that a pensees can even be a single sentence!)

-Conor