"But would you suspect My emotion wandering"

Initially, I had some fairly good plans for posting this week. But sometimes life takes precedence over writing. I didn't even put up a reflection on last week's readings. I didn't because I was busy with my final preparations for a presentation I gave for our parish on the Immaculate Conception.

Heaven forbid that I miss posting a Friday tradito! Well, alright, I miss posting these once in awhile too. While I have discovered my readers don't much care for poetry and personal, theological commentary on poems, I am gratified by the reception my weekly traditio normally receives these days. Given my depressive disposition, Advent and Lent seem particularly fruitful times to post songs.

I've shared this before, but one way I measure certain kinds of songs, especially certain love song and relationship songs, is to replace either the subject or object of the song with God and see how it works. There are plenty of very good love and relationship songs that aren't reversible in that way. Human love, especially so-called romantic love, at its best can serve as something of an analogy for divine love. By the same token the futility, pain, and anguish caused by the love of one person for another is sometimes transferable to our relationship with God, who can, at times, seem quite distant, unconcerned, and uninvolved life. This method, if you can call that, works both ways: you speaking to God or God speaking to you, perhaps even sometimes it can be a dialogue.

Pope Emeritus Benedict, while still pope

This week I read Peter Seewald's final book-length interview with Pope Emeritus Benedict: Last Testament: In His Own Words. I am not going to lie. Reading this book made me miss Pope Benedict. I remember how surprised and disappointed I was the day he announced his resignation- the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes: 11 February 2013. My wife's birthday. While there is much more I could write, I will limit myself for now to sharing the epigraph to his book, which was taken from the talk he have to the Curia at the end of their 2013 Lenten retreat, which followed almost immediately after Benedict announced his resignation to a stunned world: "Faith is nothing other than the touch of God's hand in the night of the world, and so - in the silence - to hear the word, to see love."

Our Friday traditio for this Second Friday of Advent is The Thompson Twins' "If You Were Here"