Franny of "Franny And Zooey," by J.D. Salinger (1955)

Franny:

It is a vivid snapshot of a specific time, place, and social class.  Like a hard-boiled detective novel, Salinger confines himself to what his characters say and do. The characters never directly express their inner life. Initially, I found Salinger's constant mindless enumerating of visual details pointless and annoying.  I wondered if this was merely a story of the manners and customs of affluent college students in the early 1950s.  We learn that Franny is dissatisfied and frustrated with her life.  Perhaps exasperated would be a better adjective.  Moreover, she is apparently in a spiritual crisis.  But oh, the 1950s!  Everyone smokes. They have snails, frog legs, and multiple martinis for lunch.  Franny's fascination with the Eastern religions she has studied echoes a dissatisfaction with herself and her life.  It foreshadows the emergence of the Beats, with Zooey making ironic, sarcastic allusions to her becoming a bohemian.  While the depth of Franny's spiritual crisis slowly emerges over lunch, Zooey does not have the slightest interest, let alone empathy.  Indeed, he cannot think beyond the forms of manners and social manners.  But of the Jesus prayer and the end of the story, I didn't see it coming, didn't see it coming.

Side note:  I never liked Salinger's novel, The Catcher in the Rye.  We learn nothing of the inner life of Holden.  If Salinger's point is that Holden doesn't have an inner life, God save us.  When he grew up, he became Donald Trump.

The Future of the Catholic Church in the United States

My oldest son, though an atheist, does not scorn Catholicism or any other religion.  He has a fairly disinterested, that is, objective view of religion.  He thinks Catholicism in America is shot, has no future.  Indeed as Bishop Barron says, of each religion in America, we have the highest rate of people leaving.  My son says I underestimate the impact of the priest pedophile crisis.  He observes that the religious groups that are currently thriving in America are tribal--the Mormons, Orthodox Jews, the Amish, and the evangelicals.  He notes that Catholicism is the least tribal religion.  But tribalism is not an option for Catholicism, and rightfully so.   

Mercy

Except when confessing my sins, I never understood the concept of mercy. As such, it always intrigued me.  I read Pope Francis's book about mercy; and yet, I still wasn't able to get my mind around it.  I used to ask, what about repentance, don't we have to first repent in order to receive mercy?  But it says in the Bible that mercy is a gift, freely given--unconditionally--no strings attached. Mercy exists first. It is mercy that enables repentance, not the other way around. Repentance can occur only if mercy exists beforehand. My understanding of this only came after listening to a witness by someone who was sentenced to sixteen years in jail in North Carolina.  People like Nomi Network and The Sisters of Life are agents of mercy.

Chehkovian Christianity?

 Michael Sean Winters on Cornell West:

West has styled himself a “Chekhovian Christian.” He wrote that he was inspired by Chekhov because his “magisterial depiction of the cold Cosmos, indifferent Nature, crushing Fate and the cruel histories that circumscribe desperate, bored, confused and anxiety-ridden yet love-hungry people, who try to endure against all odds, rings true to me.” What that has to do with Christianity is anyone’s guess – and West gives no clues. For the Christian, the Cosmos are not cold, they are created and Nature is not indifferent, it is infused with the love of the Creator. But, never mind all that. It sounds so authoritative, doesn’t it?

Michael Sean Winters quoting Cornell West:

“Despite my Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be human - a view that invokes pre-modern biblical narratives,” West writes. “I stand in the skeptical Christian tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard …My Chekhovian Christian viewpoint is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. My sense of the absurdity and incongruity of the world is closer to the Gnosticism of Valentinus, Luria or Monoimos ... My intellectual lineage goes more through Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Rilke, Melville, Lorca, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Soyinka, O'Neill, Kazantzakis, Morrison and above all, Chekhov ... And, I should add, it reaches its highest expression in Brahms's ‘Requiem’ and Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme.’”

-from The National Catholic Reporter, "Cornell West: Idiot-in-Chief."  Michael Sean Winters May 19, 2011.

I am not posting this because I believe in it.  Rather, it sounds rather contrary to the idea that all of reality is a positive.  (Luigi Giussani / Communion and Liberation). But it bears thinking about. 

Cornell West - A Love Supreme/John Coltrane

"All we can do as human beings is to try and inspire one another and encourage one another and enable one another, ennoble one another. And that in and of itself is what John Coltrane called a force for good.  How do I become, based on a love supreme, a force for good in a cold and cruel world?  And a love supreme is not love in the abstract. It's a love of beauty in its concrete forms.  It's a love of goodness in its concrete forms.  It's a love of truth in its concrete forms." 

-Cornell West (Joe Rogan Experience #1325)

On Experience

From, "Disciples Called to Witness," from the USCCB (2012):

Discipleship is rooted in human experience.  It is through human experience that one enters into a dialogue with modern culture.  The human experience provides the "sensible signs" that help us come to know ourselves, one another, and God.  It is through common human experience that the Word of God is revealed to us.  These sensible signs are not abstract metaphysical signs but the concrete actions of the Holy Spirit.

When did God Breathe a Soul into Humans?

I think that when God created the universe, he made the laws of nature with the future homo sapiens in mind.  I think he made the laws such that the soul evolved in parallel with the human body, and I think we had souls prior to our becoming homo sapiens. Of the soul, I include self-awareness, consciousness, imagination, empathy, love, the ability to think in the abstract, to use symbols in communication, plus a sense of the transcendent and a desire for the infinite.