honeyloquat

Debility challenges the power of love and care somewhat differently than actual illness and death do. It brings into focus the micro-processes of care. One is left with the day to day reality of who cares: who comes to visit, who has the time and the willingness to clean one’s bedclothes, to provide a bath, … such care is hard to sustain. So while love is central to the ethos of care in Botswana and while many debilitated persons receive an incredible amount of love, the chronic and diachronic aspects of debility can also lead to feelings of scorn that simmer for many years.

on debility and moral imagination, by julie livingston

<In this light, the spiritual sense of the “joy and consolation” that Francis Xavier—the first member of the Society of Jesus to leave the confines of Europe for Asia- experienced upon reading letters from his fellow Jesuits becomes apparent. En route to Lisbon to take ship for India, Xavier answered in turn: “Since I believe that we shall not see each other again in this life (…) we must, during the short time that is left to us, see each other through our frequent letters.”

Far more comprehensible as well is the intensity of epistolary production within an order that departed so strikingly from traditional forms of religious life to facilitate the “apostolic mobility” of its members.

Absent the “material enclosure of a cloister” and the “spiritual enclosure” of praying the divine office in common, the very act of letter-writing became—as Luce Giard has so perceptively remarked—a kind of “liturgy celebrated by Jesuits,” a means of sustaining a sense of communal life against the twinned threat of physical and spiritual isolation.>

thus, the fabulous is that which is absurd, mythical, and legendary, but also astonishing, marvelous, incredible, breathtaking. 

(…) is that which approaches the impossible, which lies beyond the usual range of facts, which makes “leaps into other realms”

ramaswamy’s lost land of lemuria 

DIESIOCHO