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Dear Friends,
As summer approaches and the school year winds down with the prospect of vacations or summer jobs or even a search for a 'real' job (for graduates...) looms ahead, we here at the Cornerstone Forum face a transition as well. The building in Sonoma where we have our offices has recently been sold, and last week the new owner gave us notice to vacate by the end of June. We are scrambling to make the move. It's all hands on deck. Gil will be coming up from San Diego the last week of June to help with the move.
Those who recall a short video we produced some years ago in which we gave a little tour of the Cornerstone offices here in Sonoma may remember the cramped but convenient quarters we have occupied for the past eight years. We have been renting space from our friend and CF board member, Bill Shea, who will now be sharing office space with another one of Gil's old friends, also a lawyer. We will share office space at the new location. Our new quarters will be much smaller, but conveniently located on the historic Plaza in Sonoma.
 | | Sonoma's Historic Plaza |
All this means downsizing. We will need to discard the old archived cassette tapes that have already been converted to digital format. We will be careful to make backup copies of everything. During this period from now until early July it is likely that our customer service will be affected, and not for the better. We ask for your patience and prayers as we pack up and reconfigure our workspace. Your support, materially and otherwise, has always been a source of encouragement in our work and is needed even more so now as we will incur the extra unforeseen costs involved with the move.
Sincerely,
Randy Coleman-Riese, CF Executive Director
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P. S. From Gil:  For my part, I can only add that work on the manuscript continues, even as I pause now and again to attend to administrative chores (Randy handles most of them) and make an occasional trip north -- to visit the Girards, attend to my responsibilities at the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology in Berkeley, work with Randy in Sonoma, and, last but most certainly not least, to visit my children and grandchildren in Sonoma.
A friend who has volunteered to peruse the manuscript one piece-at-a-time is now reviewing the first major section, a 50,000 word tome, while I turn attention to the later sections. I had planned to stay at my desk through the summer, but Randy will need my help with the move at the end of this month, and it gives me a good excuse to visit family again.
Lest this newsletter have nothing but administrative news to report, let me share an expanded version of something I posted on Facebook on Memorial Day last week. It begins with something Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote 25 years ago.
"How does the Spirit operate?" asks Joseph Ratzinger. "First of all, by bestowing remembrance, a remembrance in which the particular is joined to the whole, which in turn endows the particular, which hitherto had not been understood, with its genuine meaning."
Our culture today celebrates "the particular," at the expense of both "remembrance" and the "whole." No man is an island, as the poet John Donne famously wrote. That idea seems passé these days. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, to his shame as a mature intellectual, wrote what has become the unspoken premise of our time -- in his opinion in the Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania case. Freedom, he there opined, means "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Tell that to John Donne, or, for that matter, to anyone in his or her right mind. Anyone who lives even for just a few years according to that principle will be miserable.
The reason, according to Joseph Ratzinger, is that the Spirit doesn't work that way, and neither does the world. And to live in a way contrary to either is to tread the path to despair and unhappiness. To live happily is to belong, and belonging means entangling one's freedom with the freedom of others. We belong, not just to our immediate families, communities, and religious and other associations -- which Catholic social teaching calls "subsidiarity" institutions. We belong as well to a culture, a civilization. We are historical beings.
To know the Spirit of which J. Ratzinger spoke, one must of course follow St. Paul's advice and not allow ourselves to be conformed to the spirit of our age. But the spirit of our age is the spirit of non-conformity -- of autonomous individuality -- to which countless millions slavishly conform.
Family, Faith, History and Culture are unfinished adventures, but they are enormously important in our lives. The Jews of old discovered historical consciousness, and for millennia their spiritual heirs understood themselves, in part, historically. Today, we are taught contempt for what has gone before us, and who wants to bother with history so regarded? Modernist and postmodernist historians teach us to be moral and cultural amnesiacs. We cease to belong. Our own precious and particular experience floats without a connection to a greater, grander and more enduring story. We need to be stirred by the Spirit of which Ratzinger spoke, to join the particular to the whole and, thereby, to discover the meaning of our individual lives. The great, crying need of our time is to belong.
I apologize for having gone on longer than I intended.
Thank you for your friendship, generosity, and prayers. You remain in our prayers.
Sincerely,
Gil Bailie, CF President
P.P.S. Our new office, small and modest as it is, will be literally next door to the Irish Pub which is managed and partially owned by my son, Hunt, the best father I know and an all around great human being. It will be nice to be next door. Maybe I'll get a free beer now and again.
 
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