Mother Theresa

It appears that Mother Theresa of Calcutta was not a “flat character” in the annals of the saints of the Catholic Church. Time Magazine has a major article describing the contents of a new book containing excerpts from her diaries and correspondence over the long period of her adult life, especially from the time of her transition from the community of teaching sisters in which she began her vocation through the period of her ministry as founder of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta.
She documents a lifelong spiritual struggle, much of which takes the form of a “dark night of the soul” where despite an intense desire for intimacy with Jesus who called her forward, she often found silence, emptiness, and abandonment. Certainly this does not make her less, but ranks her among the great spiritual figures of Christianity. Based on the account here, the collection of writings appears to be a truly remarkable document. A spiritual guide, in the truest sense, is not the cocksure figure waving a baton at the head of a parade down Main Street, but rather one who dares to navigate the lonely alleys and deep shadows, drawing forward the lost, the hurt, the angry, the doubting.

Reading update

Finished "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. An apocalyptic story so painful to read that it's impossible to put down. You just have to find out whether the boy and his father live. Why must they? Until the last few paragraphs, they appear to be the last two people who care about others and live on some rudimentary level of principle. All relationships, kinships and taboos, except theirs, have been blasted from the world. (Even the blind prophet in the story isn't very coherent.)

Reading a medieval epic, "The Walking Drum" by Louis L'Amour--his one non-Western, I think.

Still not finished with "Morality Matters."

"Structurally Deficient"

What in the world does that mean?

It is apparently a bureaucratic designation reflecting the general/categorical condition of a particular bridge, according to its age, type and observed manifestations of aging/weathering/usage, etc. It seems to be used to place a bridge on a given schedule of testing and observation. It does not seem to be, by itself, a panic signal to be ignored or not.

I wish the media would begin to grow up about very basic differentiations in terminology. Many reporters confuse a bureaucratic label with some sort of normative statement, as in "the official was dangerously negligent." It doesn't seem that officials of any sort did anything different with the fallen bridge than they do with any other of the thousands of bridge in the same designation: watch carefully, accelerate the monitoring/testing schedule according to the engineering norms that are currently accepted. It may be that these criteria need to be looked at and updated according to what is learned from the collapse in Minneapolis. But that may not be the need--we just don't know. No one has categorically eliminated any possibilities yet, from acts of nature to problems with the ongoing construction to criminal activity.

In case no one's noticed, there are still operations in progress to recover the bodies of victims.