urbantrappistblogastery

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and get on with their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
—Billy Graham
I’m not talking about unbelief. I don’t even think that statement is true anymore (the [...]

In The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton recalls a ballistic inquisition from his friend Robert Lax:
What do you want to be, anyway?
Merton fumbles and murmurs some humble triviality unworthy of being remembered or cited. Lax, in a retort as brief and violent as his name, challenges:
What you should say is that you want to [...]

Although I wash the dishes frequently, I tend to lead a dirty life. Running, yard work, and listening to non-Christian music leave me filthy. So do my assorted vices. Shame cometh, and right often.
In these guilty moments, I scrub a gamut of cleansing efforts, from justification to vows to rationalization to amnesia. [...]

(things that are ruled)
In quintessential Catholicism, a nun at a college assembled a list of rules for her art department. But unlike indulgences or purgatory, these are good ideas. If you have any interest in creative production, you should read them.

Better yet, you should make them. For as much as I approve [...]

This year’s Easter Email:
On this day of rising, I’m waiting for my hot cross buns to plump. Yeast takes time. So does resurrection. We call it Lent and now it is finished and he is risen. (Note that I’m glad my pastries don’t need 40 days of preparation.) It may [...]

Thanks to Netflix (the greatest thing in film since technicolor), I watched Into Great Silence, an experience of the Grande Chartreuse Carthusian monastery, an austere order pitched in the French Alps that happens to make delicious liqueur. It’s so good (and chromatically distinctive) that the grassy yellow elixir inspired a crayon. You [...]

In an aberrant moment of responsibility, I locked the door in my euphoria for buying materials for brewing. The only problem was that the items I so carefully secured in our apartment included my keys. So I could get neither the elements of beer nor into my residence. After some unsuccessful efforts [...]

(the 2007 Christmas email, for virtual posterity)
In the beginning, there was art. There were sunrises, nocturnes, landscapes, still lifes. Finally, The Eternal Artist fiddled with figures and formed a pair fit to express His image. He saw that they were good and so decided to be fruitful and multiply, expressing Himself uniquely [...]

“I am an invisible man,” declares the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s only finished novel, Invisible Man. He elaborates in the Prologue, retelling times when he went unseen. While he quashes all sci-fi notions, I still read it too literally my first go-through. I interpreted “invisible” as “ignored”, believing the point was [...]