1. A blessed Feast of the Sacred Heart, and month of the Sacred Heart!

This is one of my favorite devotions, partly on its own merits, partly because of its associations (though of course, these are not unrelated). What is the heart? It is the core of a man, the source of life, the seat of the soul. The heart is the place of the passions, the distinctly human element of felt truths and felt love. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, therefore, is the very core of the Incarnation, and the furnace of His blazing, masculine love for His creatures.

Traditionally, the Sacred Heart has been set against revolutionary ideas and systems. In the Vendee, for instance, the soldiers bore two symbols: the white cockade of Royalism and the Sacred Heart. For the Sacred Heart reminds us of two things; first, that God is active and present in the world. He is neither absent nor uninvolved, and material matters, such as revolutions love to concern themselves with, are not the only factors. Second, that God loves us with a blazing love that gives all for the beloved, thus exposing the promise of Satan – that God wishes to keep us down and deprive us, and that if we only disobey Him and ‘throw off His yoke’, we will be free and happy and dignified – for the lie that it is. A lie so easily adopted to other areas.

2. All sin, at the end of the day, is a rebellion against the world as God made it. He called us into being with a certain nature, in certain position, amidst other natures of a certain kind. This all creates ‘rules’ as it were of how we can thrive and how we can fail. Just like the way an engine is built determines what kind of fuel it can use and what stresses it can endure. But we don’t like the position we find ourselves in; we would rather have this place, or that pleasure. So we try to grab it, and in so doing we declare that we wish God had made the world other than it is, or even that God Himself were other than He is. We reject what is real, the world God made in all its beauty and sublime order, in favor of our own petty desire.

In short, sin is a matter of declaring that we could do better than God if only we were in charge.

3. To love something in a way not suited for that thing is, in fact, to say that you wish the thing were other than it is. That is, you don’t love the thing itself, you love the imaginary thing you project upon it. Love and respect require the humility to remove our own wishes and expectations and ‘receive’ the subject as it is without judgment or criticism or regard to our own taste. All that can come later as may be, but seeing and recognition comes first.

4. On the way back from Maine we listened to No Bullet Got Me Yet, a biography of Servant of God Fr. Emil Kapaun. It is, unfortunately, a very poorly written book, so disorganized and full of unnecessary and seemingly unconscious repetition – e.g. the author more than once reproduces one of Fr. Kapaun’s letters and then immediately follows it by summarizing the contents as if we hadn’t just read it – that it honestly reads more like a first or second draft than a finished product. It is also full of the kind of exaggerated hyperbolic gushing that second-rate biographers always seem to feel compelled to include (“perhaps the most profound sermon ever preached on the topic”) rather than letting the subject speak for himself.

Fortunately, the sublime and saintly character of the protagonist is enough to shine through these defects (unlike that one book that utterly and hilariously failed to make a convincing case for Jules Verne as a literary giant on par with Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens), making the book well worth reading regardless. Fr. Kapaun is both a shining example of sanctity and the power of Christ even in the direst of circumstances and an embodiment of many of the best features of the American character: practicality, courage, frankness, good-humor in the face of adversity, and so on.

For those who don’t know, Fr. Kapaun was a US Army chaplain in World War II and later Korea, who was captured by the Communists and spent his final days in a POW camp, ministering to his fellow prisoners, providing for their needs, and refuting the indoctrination attempts until he himself died of conditions in the camp (helped along by the Chinese captors).

His example and witness are of a kind badly needed in our day and age, and let’s pray that he’ll be elevated to the altars before long. Fr. Kapaun, pray for us!

5. The book also mentions at one point that General MacArthur, during the occupation of Japan, had thousands of Bibles distributed and did his best to ‘Christianize’ the country. The author quotes someone as saying that MacArthur “did more than any other man for Christianity in Japan.”

My first thought was that that’s rather rough on St. Francis Xavier, the twenty-six martyrs of Nagasaki, the dead of the Shimbara Rebellion, and so on, not to mention the thousands of ordinary Christians who kept the faith alive for two-and-a-half centuries of persecution.

Also, though I haven’t looked into it to confirm, my suspicion is that this probably backfired and was really a bad idea to begin with. All it does is to associate Christianity as closely as possible with the occupation government, meaning that any grievances against the Americans that the Japanese happen to have are also going to be directed against Christianity, which is already considered suspicious and ‘foreign’ in Japan. It strikes me at first blush as a short-sighted policy that probably did much more harm than good.

6. The Union occupiers of the South made the exact same mistake by artificially elevating Blacks to positions of power in the occupation governments, thereby associating Black rights with Northern occupation in the minds of the Southerners and safely entrenching any and all existing antipathy towards the former slaves for decades to come. Americans seem to have a bad habit of this sort of thing.

7. I’m about half-way through Musashi and it’s well on its way to being a ‘golden book’ for me. It is a book of seeking a path of beauty and sublimity amidst savagery and corruption and full of rich insights, as well as wonderfully sketched characters.

I keep thinking “I want a Christian version of this book.”