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Here’s another podcast!

This podcast (see below for a popup link) focuses on the Patristic selection for the second reading in the Office of Readings for Saturday of the 2nd Week of Lent.  I read some of the Latin, but I provide all the English text and some comments.

Here are the texts.  Enjoy!

 

 07_03_09 Ambrose De fuga saeculi [11:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ex Tractatu sancti Ambrosii episcopi De fuga saeculi

Ubi cor hominis, ibi et thesaurus eius est; non enim solet bonum datum deprecantibus Dominus denegare.

Ergo, quia bonus Dominus est et maxime sustinentibus se bonus est, ipsi adhaereamus, cum ipso simus tota anima nostra, toto corde, tota virtute, ut simus in lumine eius et videamus eius gloriam et delectationis supernae fruamur gratia; ad illud igitur bonum erigamus animos et in illo simus atque in ipso vivamus, ipsi adhaereamus, quod est supra omnem mentem et omnem considerationem et pace utitur perpetua ac tranquillitate; pax autem supra omnem mentem est et supra omnem sensum.

Hoc est bonum, quod penetrat omnia, et omnes in ipso vivimus atque ex ipso pendemus, ipsum autem nihil supra se habet, sed est divinum; nemo enim bonus nisi unus Deus, quod ergo bonum divinum et quod divinum bonum, et ideo dicitur: Aperiente te manum, implebuntur omnia bonitate; per bonitatem enim Dei, nobis universa tribuuntur merito bona, quibus nihil admixtum est mali.

Haec bona promittit Scriptura fidelibus dicens: Quae bona sunt terrae manducabitis.

Mortui sumus cum Christo; mortem Christi in corpore nostro circumferimus, ut et vita Christi in nobis manifestetur. Non ergo iam nostram illam vitam, sed Christi vitam vivimus, vitam innocentiae, vitam castimoniae, vitam simplicitatis omniumque virtutum. Cum Christo resurreximus, in ipso vivamus, in ipso ascendamus, ut serpens calcaneum nostrum quod vulneret in terris reperire non possit.

Fugiamus hinc. Potes animo fugere, etsi retineris corpore, potes et hic esse et adesse ad Dominum, si illi adhaereat anima tua, si post ipsum cogitationibus tuis ambules, si fide, non specie, vias eius sequaris, si ad ipsum confugias; est enim refugium et virtus, cui dicit David: Ad te confugi et non sum deceptus.

Ergo quia Deus refugium, Deus autem in caelo et supra caelos, utique hinc illo fugiendum est, ubi pax, ubi requies ab operibus, ubi epulemur sabbatum magnum, sicut dixit Moyses: Et erunt sabbata terrae vobis escae. Epulatorium enim et plenum iucunditatis et tranquillitatis est requiescere in Deo et eius delectationem videre.

Fugiamus sicut cervi ad fontes aquarum; quod sitiebat David, sitiat et nostra anima; quis est ille fons? Audi dicentem: Quoniam apud te est fons vitae; huic fonti dicat anima mea: Quando veniam et parebo ante faciem tuam? Fons enim Deus est.

From the treatise on Flight from the World by Saint Ambrose, bishop

Hold fast to God, the one true goodWhere a man’s heart is, there is his treasure also. God is not accustomed to refusing a good gift to those who ask for one. Since he is good, and especially to those who are faithful to him, let us hold fast to him with all our soul, our heart, our strength, and so enjoy his light and see his glory and possess the grace of supernatural joy. Let us reach out with our hearts to possess that good, let us exist in it and live in it, let us hold fast to it, that good which is beyond all we can know or see and is marked by perpetual peace and tranquillity, a peace which is beyond all we can know or understand.This is the good that permeates creation. In it we all live, on it we all depend. It has nothing above it; it is divine. No one is good but God alone. What is good is therefore divine, what is divine is therefore good. Scripture says: When you open your hand all things will be filled with goodness. It is through God’s goodness that all that is truly good is given us, and in it there is no admixture of evil.These good things are promised by Scripture to those who are faithful: The good things of the land will be your food.We have died with Christ. We carry about in our bodies the sign of his death, so that the living Christ may also be revealed in us. The life we live is not now our ordinary life but the life of Christ: a life of sinlessness, of chastity, of simplicity and every other virtue. We have risen with Christ. Let us live in Christ, let us ascend in Christ, so that the serpent may not have the power here below to wound us in the heel.Let us take refuge from this world. You can do this in spirit, even if you are kept here in the body. You can at the same time be here and present to the Lord. Your soul must hold fast to him, you must follow after him in your thoughts, you must tread his ways by faith, not in outward show. You must take refuge in him. He is your refuge and your strength. David addresses him in these words: I fled to you for refuge, and I was not disappointed.Since God is our refuge, God who is in heaven and above the heavens, we must take refuge from this world in that place where there is peace, where there is rest from toil, where we can celebrate the great sabbath, as Moses said: The sabbaths of the land will provide you with food. To rest in the Lord and to see his joy is like a banquet, and full of gladness and tranquillity.Let us take refuge like deer beside the fountain of waters. Let our soul thirst, as David thirsted, for the fountain. What is that fountain? Listen to David: With you is the fountain of life. Let my soul say to this fountain: When shall I come and see you face to face? For the fountain is God himself.

We continue our Lenten journey through the prayers of Holy Mass with today’s

SUPER OBLATA:
Miseratio tua, Deus, ad haec peragenda mysteria,
famulos tuos, quaesumus, et praeveniat competenter,
et devota conversatione perducat.

Per… prae… per.  Interesting.  con-petens… con-vers… Miseratio… devotio.  This all should get your attention immediately.  Someone put a lot of thought into this.  Nothing is here by accident.

The vocabulary of this prayer, which originates in the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary but not the pre-Conciliar Missale Romanum, is supercharged.  In the Gelasian we have percipienda rather than peragenda. First we have the problems inhering in praevenio.

Praevenio is "to come before, precede" and thus it is "anticipate".

The word praevenio will remind us right away of the theological distinction made when speaking of actual graces.

You recall that God gives us habitual grace, also called sanctifying grace. This is in us as a habit is in us, in a stable and abiding manner. Actual graces are given to us according to our needs here and now, in this or that circumstance. Theologians identify in this category of actual graces something called gratia praeveniens, or “prevenient grace” and sometimes even “preventing grace” (defined by the Council of Trent, cf. Session VI, ch. 5 – we will leave aside for the sake of brevity the erroneous use of this term in some Reformation theologians).

God made us with a free will, though that will is now wounded from the effects of original sin. When we are in need, especially when we have fallen into habitual sins and our will has little strength to extricate ourselves from our dark path, God gives the actual grace that, in a sense, “goes before” other graces, such as the actual graces we can receive, such as the sacramental graces from a good confession and absolution. He helps us to repent and be strong to confess before we take action. He does not constrain or bypass our will, but strengthens and cooperates with it through a freely given gift. We find examples of preventing or prevenient graces in the pages of Scripture as, for example, with a reluctant person hears the voice of God (e.g. Jeremiah or the person described in John 6:44).

The patristic formula that describes this is Gratia est in nobis, sed sine nobis, that is, grace (as a vital act) is in our soul, but it does not comes from the soul; it is a salutary act coming immediately from God (cf. (who else?) St. Augustine De grat. et lib. arbitr., 17, 33).

Competo, "to seek again, go back to" also has a strong baptismal connotation.  Competentes were those being prepared for baptism at Easter and who were thus "asking [for baptism] together".  

We have seen conversatio many times as not just "conversation", but rather outward behavior, the way one conducts oneself even with an element of how we behave towards others (con-).

I think for kicks (animi causa in Latin) I will let you all take a shot at this one:

LITERAL RENDERING….

I am reather devoted to St. Frances of Rome for reason of personal history.  Thus, I took a trip to her church today, S. M. Nova on the Roman Forum.  Here are a couple shots.



And some vestments?



The music for the Mass was Gregorian chant.

On Wednesday I concluded the day with everything functioning perfectly.  On Thursday I found only error pages and I could get to my server using FTP.

I called support.  Happily I have an internet w-fi phone through Vonage, so it did not cost a patrimony.

Geek after geek gave me different answers.  Then suddenly the blog came back and I had FTP access again, but two things were wrong.  First, as you saw everything after 26 February was gone – that represented a lot of work and links back to this blog.  Second, I could see that the plugins in my plugin page in Wordpress admin did not match the plugins in the plugin directory on the server.  As a matter of fact, the blog page showed plugins I had uninstalled before I migrated to a different server.  You see… even if some old database was now in use, the plugins picked up by the blog should be coming from the plugin directory.  Since they weren’t…  they were coming obviously coming from some other source.

Hmmmm…

I concluded that to fix my problem, the geeks had simply pointed the site back to the OLD server I had been on back in February before I migrated to the new server we are supposed to be on now!

I was right, but it was even more complicated than that as it turned out.

Leaping into action, and suspecting that my data was in reality intact somewhere back on my proper server, I got on the phone again and wrote more mails.  Again I got stonewalled.  I was told everything was fine.  There were no problems.  It was all working.  I had no problems.  The data backups were going.  Oh yah… sorry about that.  Nothing we can do.  Etc. 

Then one fellow told me I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing on my server and, then, that I didn’t understand what I was seeing… well… that’s when I got mad.

After calming down and making screenshots of the discrepencies between the plugin page and the plugin directory on the server, I called support again.  At that point I began some slow and very serious verbal chewing on some poor kid to whom I had already spoken to a couple times.  He produced the number of one of the co-owners of the company. 

This in turn produced results. 

We had a good conversation about my experiences that day. 

After being on hold for a few minutes, the co-owner came back to explain that the server (called it Z-2) I was supposed to be on had momentarily kak’d and had been rebooted.  So, we defaulted back to the old server (call it 67).  However, that server was, it seems, coincidently being worked on and everything had been shifted to a third server (call it 99).  Thus, the automated notification system couldn’t notify me of a problem because when it defaulted to 99 (because 67 was being worked on), the server didn’t know my e-mail address and couldn’t send a notice.  Thus, I was told by geeks that everything, all backups of db’s etc, were gone and couldn’t be recovered, because they didn’t take a look at the subsequent line of action after checking Z-2 and 69.  The co-owner got the ball rolling in the right direction and once all the various addresses and pathways had repropagated WDTPRS was once again pointed back to the proper server, Z-2, which had remained exactly as I had left it on Wednesday night, thanks be to God.

However, during the process of many hours, I had been both lied to once (and I had the e-mail to prove it), given incorrect information several times, and treated with no little measure of condescension by one techie.

When the co-owner heard my story he was very interested to know the names of people I had dealt with.  I made sure to give positive feedback about the poor fellow upon whom I turned my verbal wrath (which was up to about 85% of its potential fury at that moment).   The co-owner told me to contact him if there are any other problems.

In any event, it was an object lesson in the realm of hosting in specific, of customer relations in general, and in patience overall.

I want to thank all of you who offered help and support when it looked like I had lost all those entries.  Indeed, I thought they were destroyed, and had been told several times that they would never be recovered.  I learned a good deal about cached pages.

Now I am learning about cron jobs and automatic backups to be downloaded to a completely different place!! 

Hey! Remember that Ferrari I am supposed to get? 

I’ve changed my mind.