PBS's Emma is being ordered by the library. Of course, you can watch it online too, simply by going to the PBS website. But, if you want to watch it on a bigger screen...

But the Flesh is Weak

I found this wonderful video through Modestia:



And here's the website:

http://loveyourflawz.com/

This is such an awesome reminder that we don't need to be "perfect" or anorexic or covered in hairspray, airbrushed makeup and WD-40 to be beautiful.

I was talking with a friend recently about beauty. Everyone has a unique beauty all their own.
God is an infinite source of Beauty, and He's poured His beauty into creation. Obviously, because creation is finite, it cannot possibly contain all His Beauty, but God's beauty manifests itself in each created thing-from the smallest flower to the tallest mountain. And, in an even more particular way, in us. God has an infinite amount of beauty, and He's given each of us our own particular way of sharing in His beauty. Each of us manifests the beauty of God in a singular way that no one else in this world possibly could. God has so much beauty to pour out into the world, how could He possibly create something or someone that lacks beauty?

It simply isn't possible.

"You may not think you're beautiful enough, but Someone does. And that Someone made sunsets."---A Wise Woman I Have the Privilege of Knowing

This is a lovely article I was sent this past week. It's from a blog called "To Write Love on Her Arms," and here's a little sneak preview:

In honor of National Eating Disorders Awareness week, we wanted to share a beautiful story written by a former TWLOHA intern, Stephanie Koszalka. Please read it and enjoy remembering that your life and your story are powerful. No self-determined imperfection can change that.

Dear Body,

I’ve always let some imperfection or another stand in the way of me seeing what you truly are, that you are beautiful. You are a divine creation housing the most valuable thing known to the universe, my soul. I’m beginning to realize that a person’s soul has the capacity to radiate light that transcends all the characteristics that I have been conditioned to believe are flaws.

Lord Peter Wimsey

Last semester, I had the beautiful luck of discovering the perfectly delightful Lord Peter Wimsey. Dorothy Sayers' detective novels have been on my to-read list for eons, but somehow I never got around to reading them. Until now.

Since I couldn't find Whose Body?, the first in the series, I got a book of short stories to peruse. Because of all that curricular reading, I wanted something that I could read in short bursts whenever I found a few smidgens of free time, or simply couldn't bear the thought of another reading from Aristotle's Categories (no matter how beautifully logical you are, Aristotle, you can be rather dry and dull from time to time).

And Lord Peter is simply the most wonderful non-existent person I have had the very great pleasure of meeting in a very long time (enough superlatives for you?). He reminds me a little of P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, but with a rather larger endowment of mental acumen. He even has an amazing butler sidekick who is the very model of discretion and loyalty. (For those of you who have not made the acquaintance of Bertie and his inimitable valet, Jeeves, I can but offer my most sincere sympathy. You have not lived.)

As well as the comic genius of Wooster and Jeeves, Wimsey also brought G. K. Chesterton's crime-solving priest Fr. Brown to mind as well. In The Blue Cross, Fr. Brown's child-like simplicity and world-view cloak an astounding understanding of the way in which the human mind and soul work. As Fr. Brown simply remarks, however, "Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?"

Wimsey often wears the same kind of abstracted expression on his face that Fr. Brown wears. In The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran, Wimsey has seen something that has to do with the mystery, but he cannot for the life of him recall what it was. Eventually he puzzles his way through it, an extraordinary mix of abstraction and brilliance.

Lord Peter has often been criticized as being "too perfect". He does have flaws (a fear of responsibility, shell-shock), but they are few, and his list of skills and talents grows as the stories go on. In some ways, Lord Peter does come across as a shallow character, made to meet the requirements of the story at hand without the depth that would be expected of a character in a full-length novel (true, these stories aren't full-length; nevertheless, Lord Peter's character is unusually thin in some stories, even for a genre where character development takes a back seat to plot.) In "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba" , Lord Peter tackles the requisite secret ring of thieves in the necessary melodramatic fashion. A few of the other stories are equally spectacular, but equally enjoyable as well.

It is only when Lord Peter interacts with the various members of his family (nephew, wife, sons) that he seems more authentic. In most stories, Lord Peter is the detective extraordinaire, aided quite capably by his man, Bunter, but still intangible. With his family, Lord Peter is allowed to show more than his merely professional attitudes and abilities. Indeed, in Talboys, the last of the stories, Sayers paints a delightfully full-bodied picture of Lord Peter with his wife and sons, solving a mystery and fending off an over-zealous would-be child-rearing expert at one and the same time. Talboys sealed my fate as a Wimsey fangirl. While reading it, I caught distinct echoes of the often-chaotic events that accompany a family of any size, including my own. Perhaps because this is the scenario with which I am most familiar, Talboys seemed to me the most real of these tales. However exciting and glamorous Lord Peter's previous life as a detective was, the truest adventures are those which take place in the harum-scarum reality of family life.

On the Question of Being

An earnest young freshman: "We can know what something is without it actually existing. We know what a vampire is -- but vampires don't exist. Edward Cullen doesn't exist."
Equally earnest philosophy professor: "What?"

In similar news, seminar class this evening yielded a fruitful debate on the merits of Viennese vs. Turkish coffee.

LENT

Ok, somebody had to have this post.

What are ya'll giving up for Lent? Are nursing homes and hospitals finding little angels in them? Will little brothers and sisters/room mates find their beds magically made for them for the next forty mornings? I'm basically doing the following:

No sinning all of Lent. That's it. My goal. Yes, I know what you're thinking. Impossible right, but is it? I mean, when your little brothers mess up the bathroom everyday and you have to clean it, you are completely happy. If a pile of school work is climbing higher than you can see, perseverance is easy. When you realize that high school is almost completely over and you have to move away-bravery is natural. Of course, the easiest thing to do is wakeup and 5:45 a.m. and go to 6:15 a.m. Mass.

Due to the fact that is might actually be impossible to not commit any sins for the entire forty days, I'm giving up treats, TV, and eating between meals. Don't ask me how I'll survive without caffeine when I drive eight hours with two cousins (one is a junior and the other is a senior in high school) to visit a college. More on that to come.....

Adam v. Joseph

We've all heard that Mary is the New Eve. We see her as different that Eve in many crucial ways (and rightly so). Mary said yes to God, Eve said no, etc... but they are similar to each other too for they were both in dangerous predicaments.

Eve faced temptation by the devil. She experienced a moment of weakness and doubt--and subsequent moments of shame and regret--that had and have huge consequences for mankind.

Mary was pregnant out of wedlock. She anticipated the scorn and abuse of her loved ones and friends who could not possibly understand the great thing the Lord had done.

How did their husbands react to their situations? Did they asist their wives or did they fail in their role as a husbands?

Adam stood by. He watched it happen. He didn't say, "Oh, don't eat that honey" or "hey, check out those oranges on that other tree". Instead he weakly imitated her in sin. Talk about a push-over...

Joseph, on the other hand, trusted Mary's account of the incarnation and stepped up to protect her from the possible evil that could befall her. He did not leave her to deal with it by herself, like so many husbands do nowadays. He didn't say, "This pregnancy is your problem. Fix it." He decided to wed her and pretend the child was from their union. He defended her when she was down. He turned a sticky situation into a beautiful act of self-sacrifice.

Who do you want to marry: an Adam or a Joseph?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAxlIbUTlZo

(p.s. Yes, this post was just an excuse to put this link on the blog :-) It's somewhat related, right?? )

Pan's Labyrinth

by Desi & Portia

"What happens when make-believe believes it's real?"

"You're getting older, and you'll see that life isn't like your fairy tales. The world is a cruel place. And you'll learn that, even if it hurts... Ofelia! Magic does not exist. Not for you, me or anyone else."

Or does it?

That is the question posed by Pan's Labyrinth. The film, by Guillermo del Toro, is a mystifying, captivating and beautiful work of art.

The narrator tells us at the beginning of the film:

A long time ago, in the underground realm, where there are no lies or pain, there lived a Princess who dreamed of the human world. She dreamed of blue skies, soft breeze, and sunshine. One day, eluding her keepers, the Princess escaped. Once outside, the brightness blinded her and erased every trace of the past from her memory. She forgot who she was and where she came from. Her body suffered cold, sickness, and pain. Eventually, she died. However, her father, the King, always knew that the Princess' soul would return, perhaps in another body, in another place, at another time. And he would wait for her, until he drew his last breath, until the world stopped turning...

We then meet Ofelia. The poor young girl's being dragged along with her pregnant mother to live with her stepfather, a captain in the Facist army. Ofelia does not actively hate her stepfather, she does not act maliciously towards him, but she refuses to call him papa. Her mother pleads with her, "It's just a word, Ofelia, just a word." but Ofelia knows it is not. There is a man who is her father, and she is his beloved princess. This man is not him. In her innocent youth, Ofelia refuses to tell such a blatant lie.

When Ofelia and her mother reach their new home, an outpost in the wooded mountains, Ofelia immediately discovers a labyrinth in the woods. And from there on out, Ofelia is swept up into other worldly adventures. And we ask ourselves: are they real or imaginary?


Is Ofelia a princess?

Are her adventures real or our they a product of her own imagination?

The movie is brilliant, yet brutal. While it is definitely a fantasy, no one could accuse it of being an escapist fantasy. The parallell worlds of the spiritual/mythological world that Ofelia ventures into, and the harshly real world of the Spanish rebellion are both cut-throat, dangerous places. Ofelia is the only person that we know is good. She is a protagonist that we cling to, because there's no one else to cling to.

For young children (and yes, even adults on occasion), imaginary worlds and make-believe are a definite escape from their problems-they're a release. If the faun is a product of Ofelia's imagination, he is a far from comforting one. While he appears to be a father-figure, a guardian to this princess lost in a cruel, foreign world, there's always a doubt in our hearts: Do we trust him? What makes Ofelia an extraordianry heroine is her innocence and her trust. She never doubts that what the faun tells her to do is for her own good. She trusts. I don't know if you can read it, but the poster above has a tagline at the bottom, which reads: "Innocence Has A Power Evil Cannot Imagine" Ofelia's innocence is her only weapon to combat the evil and cruelty around her.

"I've had so many names. Old names that only the wind and the trees can pronounce. I am the mountain, the forest and the earth. I am... I am a faun."

An interesting component in the film is the labyrinth. While "labyrinth" and "maze" are often used as synonyms, they mean and imply vastly different ideas. A maze is a human puzzle, as it were. You try to get from one end of the maze to the other-you are presented with choices: you can either choose to go to your left or to your right. One of these choices will lead you further on the right path, the other will lead you to a dead end.

But in a labyrinth, you only have one path. It leads you to the center, and then out again. You have no idea where you are going; you simply have to trust that you will make it to the middle, through the middle and then out again. That trust is a huge component of the film. Ofelia trusts the faun, she believes that she will get through this dark time in her life, and reach the kingdom she is destined for.

But can we really trust anyone?

And yet, what happens to us when we trust no one. We turn into a Captain Vidal. If we close ourself off from humanity, distrusting all our fellow men, we cease to become human. Ofelia battles bizzare and frightening monsters in her imaginary land. But the real monster is the man she refuses to call father; and she defeats him, though it costs her a terrible price.

Whether the labyrinth, the faun, and the magical world that Ofelia finds is real or not, it doesn't matter. Ofelia wins. She has the power of an innocent, which is unfathomable to those twisted and soured by their own hardened hearts. The blood she spills has the power to open the portal-she joins her mother and father, and spends an eternity by their sides. What more has she ever wanted?

"In darkness, there can be light. In misery, there can be beauty. In death, there can be life...."
G.K. Chesterton writes that "there are some who cannot see a simple truth without calling it a paradox." Paradoxes are beautiful, because they are the Truth. How can God be both God and Man? Yet He is. How can there be Life in Death? How can some something be both Real and yet Not-Real?
Yet they are. Paradoxes are the fabric of our universe-and they are beautiful. The Truth is inscrutably and piercingly simple, and yet it is a beautiful, unfathomable mystery.

On Chuck Norris and Mr. Darcy...

I've officially created the most cosmic title ever, and I don't think this post will ever be able to live up to it.

Nope. Not a chance.

Anywho, to get on with it:

I love me some Chuck Norris.

And I'm an Austen freak/a teenage girl/a Romantic with a literary bent, so I think all you intelligent gentlefolk can gather what my sentiments are concerning that literary hero known as Mr. Darcy.

I was in the throes of some bizzare and strange mood, and I decided to type into the Google search engine: "Chuck Norris Vs. Mr. Darcy." Don't ask me what my impetus was. Some Sudden Fit of Madness had overcome my psyche and was pulling me down into the Vast Wasteland of Insanity, and all that sort of thing.

But, lo and behold, I struck gold.
(^Is that a Seussian sentence or what?)

I found an excessively diverting website full of "Mr. Darcy Facts"!!!


Be still my wildly beating heart.



But soft, what words through yonder computer screen break?



I never had known bliss until that sight.


A silent, girlish shriek of pleasure and delight sounded in my mind when I beheld these "Mr. Darcy Facts."
(You know...like Chuck Norris "Facts"?...see 'cause its Mr. Darcy-- instead of--it's all clever and...stuff)

Who was the genius who thought these up?

Who could possibly be cosmic enough to contain such monumental geniosity?

The answer to these questions was clear. It's the supreme answer to all questions:


Chuck Norris.

Oooohhhh yeaaaah.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and Mr. Darcy declared they were "tolerable."
(Oh no he di'n't! I can't decide if this is horribly blasphemous, or just plain amazing.)

Mr. Darcy was once accosted by a gang of ruffians. By the end of the tussle all involved had given him all they had, and gone out to get him more.

Mr Darcy made up the last digits of pi.

Mr. Darcy is the reason why Mona Lisa is smiling.
(PHF=100)(DCF=550)

Like Vin Diesel, Mr. Darcy killed a man with his teacup. Unlike Vin Diesel, Mr. Darcy had his pinky up.

These completely disarm me.

All I can do is laugh like a snurge and cry out: "More! More!"

P.S. This is a snurge.

Awesomest video ever

Watch it. Love it. That's all. (It's called Parisian Love)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU

Truth is Beauty

"As soon as we begin to explicate the poem, analyze the picture, classify the architecture or dissect the music we lose what we were enchanted by, and it is this enchantment through beauty which matters....Why should we take time and spend money to make our churches beautiful, our liturgy beautiful, our music beautiful, our art beautiful? Because it is through this beauty that we are taken into the heart of the divine order of all things. This is so difficult to communicate in a world of useful things. We have come to regard beautiful things as only so much luxurious ornamentation. We regard expenditure on beauty as wasteful--boors that we are--but this is not only boorish, it is spiritually bereft."

Fr. Longenecker on why churches should be beautiful.