tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87312935263665891192024-03-13T12:00:56.586-07:00Pluot ... reboot #3. Littleness in all its aspects."It was when he saw how self-importance blocked his way to the crucified Christ that he began to thirst for 'littleness' in all its aspects" (Sister Wendy Beckett, <i>The Art of the Saints</i>, on St. Francis of Assisi). Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.comBlogger722125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-42854095421276599562021-08-03T11:34:00.000-07:002021-08-03T18:44:14.698-07:00Escape hatch<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><i>Pardon a repeat of Feb. 2019, won't you?</i></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Warning! I've recently found out Blogger might be about to go the way of the dinosaurs. <i>Spring cleaning means shutting down features,</i> the tech geeks were smirking a whole year ago. So I've decamped back to WordPress, which is a sight too good for me.<br />
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<a href="https://pluotblog.wordpress.com/">It's still Pluot and I'm still </a>too cheap to buy a domain name. Come and see.<br />
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Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-51857175435418150462021-07-17T05:55:00.003-07:002021-07-17T05:55:57.055-07:00Regarding the Holy Father's suppression of the Latin Mass<p> Wasn't it Edmund Burke who said, the problem with an intellectually driven revolution is that when the common people reject the revolution, its leadership will impose it through terror? </p>Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-20328363753104853232021-07-13T10:34:00.001-07:002021-07-13T10:51:25.827-07:00Okay, it looks like I won't be going to France anytime soon<div class="separator"><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></p></div><p>I wasn't planning to visit anyway, since I don't care for travel. Years ago, after my divorce, I told people loftily "Maybe I'll go to Paris for my 50th birthday," and I am sure they all rolled their eyes while they waited for me to get over my fit. I did. </p><p>Now the President of <a href="https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/france-to-make-covid-jabs-mandatory-for-many-life-totally-impossible-without-covid-passport" target="_blank">France with his tiny firm blue eyes is announcing "You're all</a> either getting the Jab or you can't live or do anything," probably with much the same firmness as Robespierre announced "You're all going for a shave at the National Razor." Any and all events, places, and activities in France involving human beings, including tourists I suppose, will require either proof of Vaccination or a negative Covid test <i>every 48 hours</i>. Unless M. le President is obliged finally with a Gallic shrug to order the needle ....</p><p>As a minor point, a curiosity, note that the address of the President of the French Republic is 55 rue du Faubourg St-Honore, the same address as <a href="https://parisianfields.com/2010/10/29/vile-business-clumsily-done/" target="_blank">the demolished Hotel Sebastiani where the Duc de Praslin</a> murdered his wife, the Duchesse, on a hot, silent August dawn in 1847. (If you are wondering what the hell, I refer you to the great old movie <i>All This and Heaven Too</i>, 1940.) Do bad forces cling to places where bad things have been done? That seems a little superstitious. Or is the problem more ordinary? -- namely that mankind is deformed by original sin, and that we resemble no one so much as our first elder brother, Cain the murderer? The first wrong Cain thought to do, when he felt outraged by Abel, was not to remonstrate with him or even set his hut on fire but to kill him. There must be no power more satisfying than the power to give death. Even in our imaginations we sometimes "string up politicians by their thumbs," don't we. At least my grandmother used to talk so. </p><p>I'm reminded also of a short passage in Walker Percy's book <i>Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self-Help Book</i> (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1983). Percy, who deserves the attention Flannery O'Connor gets, writes of the devolution of language during the same 20th century that saw man's wars speed from technological strength to strength while his personal involvement in war, whether its causes or combats, grew less. Twentieth century people were already far removed from the medieval knights who galloped into the field for a kingdom or for Christ. And battle is gruesome. But modern man tends to drive a train to a camp or push a button somewhere; the dead are numbered in tens of millions. In the new millennium, Percy guessed, when the overused <i>fuck</i> had turned the same as any other word, <i>fish</i> or <i>fowl</i>, emptied of meaning, there would also come "War without passion: one billion dead." </p><p>Of course I am thinking of the people who think this is happening. Dr. Vladimir Zelenko: "this is a war against God." Dr. Peter McCullough: "this is bio-terrorism." Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA technology himself, Dr. Michael Yeadon, former head of vaccine development at Pfizer, Dr. Luc Montagnier, discoverer of HIV and Nobel Prize winner -- all have impeccable credentials and all are not happy with this. The question pops up more regularly now: who is behind it? The depravity of the vaccine campaign seems to find proof in the fact that this experimental gene-therapy, whose prototypes have failed in all previous animal trials, could not have got underway at all unless the human race were persuaded, lectured, screamed at, terrified that, "<i>there is no treatment for this virus! There is no treatment! It is death, it is death!" </i><strike>But what about Ivermectin or hydroxychlor</strike> -- . "<i>There is no treatment!</i>" Dr. Fauci says so himself, baldly and boldly to the camera and to a world and a God he does not fear. </p><p>Is it really just money? Dr. Fauci is over eighty. How many more years can he expect to live and spend money? And he may be a wealthy, aging little mosquito compared to the much younger, billionaire stallions, most of them <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2021/04/06/meet-the-40-new-billionaires-who-got-rich-fighting-covid-19/?sh=4298077e17e5" target="_blank">in this list Chinese, who "got rich fighting Covid 19." </a> Do money and power give that much satisfaction, so that a man does not dream of facing judgment in a few more decades, or tonight? Or are these men true pagans, like Caesar or Cleopatra, who simply could not know of any choices except jungle success or jungle failure? Jungle revenge?</p><p>One more small thing. When I first learned of the SARS vaccine animal trials which failed in previous years, because the ferrets who did well after their two shots died upon the "challenge" of the virus itself -- I stupidly wondered at what point, at what <i>number</i> of animal deaths the trials ceased. As if the ferrets were Disney cartoons, personalities named and heroic. After the tenth or eleventh loss, say, that was too much. Failure. Then it dawned on me. Surely it wasn't a certain number of lab animals that proved it was all too sad to go on with. It was that they died at all. That was the pertinent information. </p><p>Only now human beings die, and the information is not pertinent. Who is behind this? and --</p><p>is there anyone they should fear? </p><p><br /></p><p><img alt="The Immaculate Conception (Tiepolo) - Wikipedia" class="n3VNCb" data-noaft="1" jsaction="load:XAeZkd;" jsname="HiaYvf" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/The_Immaculate_Conception%2C_by_Giovanni_Battista_Tiepolo%2C_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg/1200px-The_Immaculate_Conception%2C_by_Giovanni_Battista_Tiepolo%2C_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg" style="height: 428px; margin: 0px; width: 232.92517006802723px;" /></p><p><i>Notre Dame, priez pour nous</i>.</p>Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-91418461975183050972021-06-29T07:39:00.005-07:002021-07-02T19:01:57.830-07:00Random thoughts <p>I keep vowing to work on my novel really, but then I have random thoughts. </p><p>Just beginning to thumb through a remarkable book, <i>Liberty: The God That Failed</i> (by Christopher Ferrara, Angelico Press, 2012) is enough to give anybody random thoughts. The author's argument seems to be, that since the United States was founded, by cravat-ed and gentlemanly Deists, as the world's first utterly secular state, inevitably its adoration of its own founding will lead to a situation that looks familiar today. Maybe it looked familiar in the days of the Whiskey Rebellion, and lots of other times. Pick your bit of American malfeasance from history. Namely, it is the situation in which "freedom" is god, but paradoxically the government decides what freedom is. Avenues of dissent do not exist. Most especially do they not exist, as it were, running up the nave of the Catholic Church; which is eternal, as nations are not. </p><p>This business of the nations being beloved by God, chastised like Israel, nevertheless not eternal like Israel, seems to me a lesson repeated in those sometimes very repetitive Old Testament prophets. "The burden of Moab, oracles against Ammon," etc. etc. "He has not done thus to other nations -- he has not taught them his decrees" (Psalm 147:20). Ancient Israel's supernatural purpose, as the bearer of God to the world, found fulfillment through Christ's being born to the world through Mary, and then by his one sacrifice for the sins of all. Re-presented every day of history everywhere since, the Mass is therefore the point of life and the foundation of reality. Insofar as modern nations have deliberately founded themselves, absent the Mass, so much do they thrash and suffer. Insofar as the West founded itself from the ruins of Rome and barbarism, upon the Mass, the saints, and the Church, so much did it prosper. </p><p>And it is obviously not a question only of prosperity, of wealth and comfort. I'm grateful for the prosperity of a Protestant/Deist-origin nation. I can look at the world and see impoverished, ostensibly mostly Catholic countries. However I can also see a nation like the United States, which I seem to see with new eyes ferociously, officially devoted to wealth and comfort, clearly disintegrating under a top-down revolution that "liberty" cannot combat much, and that is also creating poverty. If nothing else it's creating a new poverty in paying already morally impoverished people more money to stay unemployed than to go to work. My mother in her nineties remembers the Depression, when the nobility and dignity of work was understood, desperately wanted along with the paycheck. Perhaps she and everyone then remembered the burden of St. Paul: "he that does not work, neither shall he eat" (2 Thess. 3:10). In a troubled moment she said, "I've lived too long." She has outlived all her age group. She can remember when it was safe for young girls to ride their bikes home from one part of Chicago to another at night. "People say it wasn't any different. Yes, it was different. People were different." Reflecting a bit sideways now, I wonder if it's too bad after all we didn't have a monarchy from the beginning. The execution or exile of a royal family, by this stage, would at least have made things gruesomely clear. </p><p>Going on with my random thoughts, I have a question about the creed now recited by any professional in media who values his career. "The idea that the 2020 election was stolen is chickenshit," said a radio host yesterday evening. Not in so many words, the vulgarity I mean, but he made himself plain. All right. Leaving aside all longstanding questions, about vital states changing their election laws for this election, or bizarre turnouts of over 100 percent in the most vital Democrat cities, leaving aside the scope for fraud in mail-in voting to begin with, or the fact of states simply ceasing to count their ballots in the wee hours of the vital night -- leaving aside all that, let's agree a man in dementia got 82 million votes when no one seemed to attend his rallies. While his incumbent opponent drew throngs that caravanned for miles. All right. I can posit that Donald Trump lost fair and square, which is more than the professional media types can posit about my doubts or my view. You begin to see how, in a free democracy, there is no dissent. You are only free to admit the truth. </p><p>Anyway my question is, well and good. If Biden and the Democrat party won fair and square, where is the investigation into the coup attempt on Trump? Shouldn't they be concerned about such an attempt being grievously launched against themselves? </p><p>What coup? I think the last and greatest service Rush Limbaugh rendered to the country and his audience before he died was to explain how the Russia collusion/Ukrainian <i>quid pro quo</i>/impeachment train got rolling. It was early in January 2017, a few days before Trump's inauguration. Hillary Clinton and her team may have "<a href="https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/06/28/tucker-carlson-confirms-stunning-claim-biden-intelligence-agencies-spying-to-take-him-off-the-air-n1458015" target="_blank">conjured up and disseminated" the</a> fake stories for freight, but <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/05/11/discombobulated-obama-got-caught-creating-the-russia-collusion-narrative/" target="_blank">Barack Obama and the FBI started the train.</a> Absurd fabrications, which the flacks mouthing them <i>denied were true under oath </i>on any gray Washington morning, could be injected into the news narrative on any glittering New York night because the new President Trump had been briefed on them. Anything the President is briefed on is news. Even "pee dossiers." Therefore the narrative was pumped into the nation's bloodstream. Poor little classical WFMT began each newscast at 6 am and 7 am, for three years, dutifully reading the script. Russia. Ukraine. Impeachment. In year four it became Coronavirus. </p><p>It's not nice to try and eject an elected president by a coup; it is hard to see what else this was. The present victors' lack of interest in the story seems jarring. We can say it's all over and done with and no good to dwell upon. But the fact that the election itself <i>is</i> the firewall protecting victors with no interest in the past, seems to hint at some kind of fragility. So does the look of the capitol encased in razor wire and patrolled by soldiers; it would be laughable how frankly illegitimate this has always made usurpation look, but again our victors have no interest in the past or in being laughed at. I seem to remember, in the months and weeks before the election, happy Trump bloggers would still worry that Democrats would contest a Trump victory in the courts for years. "If they win they win, and if they lose they win." May I daresay, one never dreamed that they simply would not tolerate the word "if." And would move heaven and earth to see that it did not apply. </p><p>Well, perhaps they won after all. I can be open-minded too. Perhaps the country really is too sprawling for electoral fraud to work. When the election was fresher, radio hosts sensing where their careers lie (I think) would pull up angry callers short by barking, "All right, if you're going to talk fraud, fine, what allegation and what precinct?" And the poor caller would be at a loss because he's just an ordinary person. As Chesterton remarked in <i>St. Thomas Aquinas</i>, "Popular errors are nearly always right." </p><p>But to go back to that remarkable book, <i>Liberty: The God That Failed</i>. We now have an administration just about as divorced from heaven and from the Catholic Church, from what is eternal, as could be, what with its love of abortion and sexual depravity for a start. But then how piquant! that the current President is a Catholic whose obvious non-belief is of no more interest to most of the Catholic bishops who are our shepherds, than a long-running coup against #45 is of interest to #46! Most odd. They know something else, or have pressing matters. Or some other treasure to guard. Perhaps it's liberty. </p><p><br /></p><p>Sources: "<a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/05/11/discombobulated-obama-got-caught-creating-the-russia-collusion-narrative/" target="_blank">Obama Caught Collaborating with FBI to Create the Russia Collusion Narrative," The Rush Limbaugh Show, transcript,</a> May 11, 2020. </p><p>"<a href="https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/06/28/tucker-carlson-confirms-stunning-claim-biden-intelligence-agencies-spying-to-take-him-off-the-air-n1458015" target="_blank">Tucker Carlson 'Confirms' Stunning Claim: Biden Intelligence Agencies Spying to Take Him 'Off the Air.'</a>" Victoria Taft, PJ Media, June 28, 2021. </p><p> </p>Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-53219445984612346652021-06-25T06:47:00.003-07:002021-06-25T06:47:58.955-07:00"this idolization of race and governmental power"<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><p> <i>Is not this idolization of race and governmental power that is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? </i></p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p>Edith Stein, April 12, 1933</p><p>The future Sister and now Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross wrote this to the Pope at the beginning of the Third Reich, just before she entered her Carmel. Nine years later she was sent to Auschwitz and gassed along with her sister, Rosa; flight from a German convent to a Dutch one didn't help because the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940. </p><p>It seems a little quaint that she spoke of only one mass media, the radio. Her feast day is August 9th. </p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hp2boeKDR-c/YNXd_bFeTII/AAAAAAAALSI/dA6FMkmsYUgToj66FvTmrDZuvGP7VubUgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/27296EEA-03C4-4101-A994-FEFCAD4A7ED6.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hp2boeKDR-c/YNXd_bFeTII/AAAAAAAALSI/dA6FMkmsYUgToj66FvTmrDZuvGP7VubUgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/27296EEA-03C4-4101-A994-FEFCAD4A7ED6.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><p><i>Saint Edith Stein. A Spiritual Portrait.</i> Dianne Marie Traflet. Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2008. </p><p> </p>Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-38704606626904557362021-06-24T18:03:00.002-07:002021-06-24T18:08:59.871-07:00The "late vocation"<p>It's amusing to research "late vocations." A late vocation is what occurs to you when you are in your forties or well beyond, and you think gosh, the idea of life consecrated to God, maybe even in a contemplative cloistered setting, seems wonderful. Women especially can peek, through the internet, at monasteries near and far, and observe much the same pictures. Lovely young women in leafy settings revel in medieval garb and charming farm work; and there is prayer, prayer, prayer, candles and quiet, singing and flowers. Their faces are radiant. They wear a crown of roses on their day of solemn profession. </p><p>Yet the helpful websites softly emphasize. Young women who are interested ... for women between 18 and 35 ... 40, tops ... young women who think the Lord may be calling them ... young women. A good article at <i><a href="https://aleteia.org/2016/06/30/fify-yes-older-or-late-vocations-do-have-their-place/" target="_blank">Aletia</a></i> from some years ago tactfully explains the issue to a reader who questioned why a man may become a priest at any time in life, but a woman is usually barred from a convent essentially at menopause. Of course there are exceptions. Many<a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2014/04/15/serving-the-church-through-a-second-vocation/" target="_blank"> seminaries set age limits for</a> men too. For men or women the logic is similar. </p><p style="font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 1.6em; max-width: 100%; min-height: 1px;"><span class="css-pelz90" style="max-width: 100%;"></span></p><blockquote><p style="font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 1.6em; max-width: 100%; min-height: 1px;"><span class="css-pelz90" style="max-width: 100%;">There are many practical and economic reasons for the age limits that many communities put into practice. Yes, health reasons can be one of them. Some communities will not take a woman with children at all, no matter how old her children are.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px;">A large reason for the age factor is that the older we are the more set in our ways we become, making the transition to communal life more difficult, especially when we may find ourselves taking orders from superiors who are 20 years our junior. We’re so used to living on our own terms and having things the way we want them that obedience and conformity become issues… like obedience and acceptance of community-set age limits. *ahem*</span> </p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>I love that "*ahem*" at the end. Wanting to walk into a community exempt from one of its first rules at the outset does not perhaps bode well. </p><p>Of course it's precisely the rural cloisters filled with sweet holy girls that look as if they would be a veritable rocket ship to God. Which leads me to reflect, there must be something very profound in the fact of <i>young</i> women entering these places. The vocation is a marriage, to Christ. The young women look radiant because they are living with their beloved spouse, forsaking all others. A woman in her fifties who didn't think about a vocation at twenty now tends to think, like the reader questioning <i>Aletia,</i> "I have so much left to give and now I have time." She is thinking of a rational decision, of personal enrichment, of a kind of career move. And of God, too. Well and good. The writer at <i><a href="https://aleteia.org/2016/06/30/fify-yes-older-or-late-vocations-do-have-their-place/" target="_blank">Aletia</a></i> assures her, "First off, don't let your eligibility to enter a religious community determine your usefulness to the Church." But it's not the same as the young girl trembling with mystified joy, sitting before an image of Jesus and her voice-over to the YouTube film saying, "Jesus, if you're asking me to marry you, the answer is yes." </p><p>The woman in her fifties, far from being crazy to get engaged to Jesus, might only just be realizing for how many years she has thought only of herself. Now that sounds like a neurotic little truism, worthy of Bette Davis at her most tear-streaked and penitent. But it's true. How many minutes of each hour even, never mind one's own affairs that legitimately require attention, how many minutes of each hour do we spend gnashing our teeth at annoying people? Or, in our imagination, righteously launching thunderbolts of painful justice at the world and politicians? And now you want to think differently? -- now you mope after the cloister? Well and good. The young girl with the glossy thick brown hair who is contemplating marrying God, is not necessarily a better person than you, but her mind has already been filled with different matters most of her short life. Ahem, it's called a vocation. </p><p>That's another thing. When she enters a monastery her head will go on being filled with different matters most of the time, because she will pray five or six hours a day or more. She is still not a better person than you, and you are no less loved and desired by God. But in her fifties she will be, by her experience, as different from you, as you are from her now. Or think of this small point. If you were to walk in and still only encounter her in her twenties, because the traditional convents are attracting her age group, -- you would for example have to deal with her cooking, right? Ahem. </p><p>Perhaps the wistful musing about late vocations, among men or women, is a sort of fruitfulness in itself. Who would dream that there are more important things in life than what we dwell upon -- our eternal work, leisure, entertainment, sports, the state of the world, travel? In their lives as religious, men and women dwell on daily prayer, the Mass and the Divine Office. I believe it's true that if one goes so far as to seek a spiritual director's advice about it, assuming one has gone so wildly far as to get a spiritual director, one is told, test the vocation by going to daily Mass for a start. It's as abrupt a commitment as the potential commitment to someone else's cooking, which would eventually follow. </p><p>And God bless the Internet. The wistful musing about a late vocation can fructify simply through the learning available at dozens of monasteries which keep an online presence, even as the cloistered souls within may have nothing to do with it. You may understand in five minutes, No, I need to be in the world with my children and grandchildren. The writer at <i>Aletia</i> said, the world needs grandmas and grandpas. But at least through fruitful, cloistered portals, one may still learn. Here is a beautiful expression of what prayer is, from a <a href="https://chicagopoorclares.org" target="_blank">Poor Clare community </a>near me: </p><blockquote><span color="rgba(68, 66, 53, 0.8)" face=""Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, Lucida, sans-serif" style="background-color: rgba(209, 197, 186, 0.16); caret-color: rgba(68, 66, 53, 0.8); font-size: 17px;"><i>For many persons the day ends when they retire at midnight. As Poor Clares, our day begins when we rise at midnight. The first of the canonical hours of the Divine Office is chanted at midnight while the world around is sleeping or perhaps sinning. Sin loves the cover of night. Prayer goes out into the backstreets of the night to seek out sinners and reclaim them. The night Office is a torch held in the hands of the Poor Clare as her love goes looking down the lanes of the world for the lost, the straying, the despairing, the suffering, the dying. From this first hour of the morning, this stream of love and prayer flows out and consecrates all the hours of the day, beginning on earth the work of eternity.</i></span></blockquote><p>Sometimes I do go to bed near midnight, especially when I have worked the closing shift and don't get home to settle in and relax a bit until around 10 pm. So when I turn on WFMT's Through the Night program to go to sleep to, I think of the Poor Clares, daughters of 13th-century Italy, scarcely fifteen minutes away in the suburban woods. They are just picking up the torch of the Office, to go looking with love down the lanes of the world for the lost, the straying, the sinning. </p><p>This is a glorious thing for the world to be aware of. This, you know, is reality, beyond panics and politics and vaccines and Great Resets. The newest order that I have come across is the splendidly named <a href="https://adoratrices.icrss.org/en" target="_blank">Sisters Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus Christ Sovereign Priest.</a> These are serenely blue-cloaked sisters attached to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest. They don't seem to keep, quite yet, the very rigorous schedule of the Poor Clares, only starting to pray Lauds at 6:45 am. Still. The theme is similar. </p><blockquote><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Fanwood, Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 20px; text-align: justify;">Lauds is chanted recto-tono. It is the quintessential office of praise; all creatures unite with man to praise the Creator, as in the canticle sung by the three children in the furnace. At the end of Lauds, the sisters stay in the chapel for an hour of silent meditation. According to the words of Dom Guéranger, prayer is for every man the first of goods, his light, his food, his very life.</span></p></blockquote><p>Yes, yes, they are all young. As is fitting. But now you see, even though you may be middle aged -- you <i>know</i>. </p><p></p>Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-74745140051496919262021-06-22T08:39:00.000-07:002021-06-22T08:39:21.786-07:00Their faces move<p>It pleases me to imagine that, in a very small way, I understand the experience of St. Paul in the agora -- that is, in the public square, busy with commerce and sharp elbows and shouting. From his place in heaven I am sure he laughs kindly as I stock shelves at retail on a quiet Tuesday. I think he must say in beautiful Greek something like "Yeah, wow. No."</p><p>But what I mean is only that I too live and work every day in the pagan marketplace. It is a mini-Corinth, a micro-Philippi, where <i>Jesus Christ!</i> seems to be practically unknown except as a sputtered, wide-eyed oath. (Nevertheless not forgetting, who knows? Maybe half the people I meet start the day with a Rosary. Be charitable.) Since we are asked to glorify God by our lives, I ask myself how to make him known, in my small way, without committing two preening mistakes. One is to equate "making him known" with walking around feeling smug among heathens. This is tempting to do because smugness comes naturally to me. And if you doubt you are among heathens, look around. The dogma alone is everywhere. It's Pride Month for example, so rainbows are everywhere. Incidentally we owe a debt of thanks to good Father Simon of Relevant Radio, who told us some time ago the secret that the Pride rainbow is actually the wrong one. It only has six colors, while the natural one has seven. It seems the enthusiasts forgot indigo.</p><p>Another mistake is to equate "making him known," outside the agora too, somehow with some sort of personal fame. This is harder to put aside since envy and ambition come naturally too. And every writer and blogger out there seems to be reaching more people than me, which is <i>ipso facto </i>to do God's work. <i>Query</i>, how do you get invited to join <a href="https://foedus.co" target="_blank">Feodvs</a>? </p><p>At any rate, regarding "making him known," I wonder if pagan coworkers and neighbors, who seem to slip on a face of careful, pleasant unconcern when it comes to anything like church talk, would appreciate a sort of laying-of-groundwork approach. In other conversations they are more free. Their faces move. They acknowledge origins or reasonable assumptions, pertaining to any topic. "I have my filters that I interpret through, like everybody," a man said, as we discussed something serious. If I were to begin to make <i>Jesus Christ!</i> known by saying mildly, "It doesn't have to sound nuts -- there is an interior logic to it," I might try this. </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We're presupposing the <b>supernatural is real</b>; </li><li>also that God did really <b>choose ancient Israel</b> to reveal himself and his moral laws to; </li><li>that the <b>Resurrection o</b>f Christ had to have happened because nothing else explains the might of the first Christian martyrs' witness to it; </li><li>that one of the prime, life-changing demands of the Faith is <b>sexual morality</b>; </li><li>and that it is <b>St. Paul who bridged the gap</b> between Gentile and Jew by clarifying that the God of the Jews, <i>I AM</i>, is the Lord of all in Christ. </li></ul><p></p><p>This last bit of foundation is startling. Without Paul, as Bishop Robert Barron noted a long time ago, our spiritual choices would have been Apollo or Mithras or whatever, or, becoming Jewish. No getting around it. One might be able to get around modern frozen-face pagans by offering this, that perhaps the only vestige of St. Paul's work still looming pretty large in our pagan world is the idea of heaven. Ask them. How many of us go through life vaguely believing in God, and certainly presuming we and all our loved ones and all good people will go there? But only Christ could make heaven, as we say today, "a thing." Heaven must stem from the facts of the crucifixion and the resurrection. If it weren't for St. Paul clarifying this, Christ the Son of God is God the bridge between Gentile and Jew, then this last thing we cling to from Christendom -- eternal happiness after death (after repentance and forgiveness, which we tend to ignore) -- this last thing would logically have to go. Antiquity did not know any "heaven" for certain, not even the Jews. They still imagined the prophet Samuel only among the shades. Today if we are sophisticated we have the new choice of peacefully dissolving atoms maybe. </p><p>But here is part two. Even if we try to lay a groundwork and we make sure to credit Paul fully, it would be helpful to know <i>exactly</i> what he did and said. He had to have walked into the agora one day, as anonymous as we are. </p><p>In fear and trepidation wanting to know <i>exactly</i> what he did, I begin to read two of his shortest letters. I begin with the First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians; they are named for the city of Thessalonica, which appears on a map tucked high up into the Thermaic Gulf of the Aegean Sea, in northeastern Greece. If you travel you know that Thessaloniki is today Greece's second most populous city and its "cultural capital," <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thessaloniki" target="_blank">boasting a million souls</a>. </p><p>Taking up most of these letters is Paul's rhythmic chant, <i>in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, grace to you and peace ... remembering before our God and Father ... to serve a living and true God and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus ... the gospel of God ... the churches of God in Christ Jesus ... our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you ... this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father comfort your hearts .... </i> </p><p>This is a man who, as a faithful and scholarly Jew, would never have dreamed that God the creator could be spoken of as having a Son. Something happened to him. In its aftermath he didn't necessarily <i>exactly</i> lay out attractive groundwork. He had a bomb. They could tell, which is why they beat him up and drove him out of town a lot. </p><p>Another thing that strikes me is Paul the exile's anxious waiting for news of the church he had founded, in that shouting, sharp-elbowed port on the Thermaic Gulf. <i>We were willing to be left behind at Athens ... but now Timothy has come to us from you, and has brought us the good news of your faith and love </i>(1 Thess. 3:1, 6). Can you imagine this man, waiting at <i>the</i> agora, Athens circa 50 A.D., to find out whether his converts still cared? Or whether maybe he and Timothy, and Silvanus, were nearly alone in the world? He had met God, the risen Christ himself. </p><p>It turns out they still cared. <i>And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers</i> (1 Thess. 2:13). Okay, but still, how? How did a face of careful, pleasant unconcern become a face that moved? We know the saints better than their congregations. We know of St. Paul but not the <i>why</i> of Evodia; we know St. Patrick but not so much his fur-clad fourth-century Irish tribesmen, and the individual decisions they made to come in. If we knew what struck them, that might help us witness better in our modern agoras. Okay, it was the word of God. But how? What actually slips through pagans' gracefully acknowledged filters? </p><p>We might as well ask ourselves. Grace and truth, I suppose. The truth part is actually a piece of groundwork we could add to our bullet-pointed list above. Along with "the supernatural is real" and so forth. But it is as difficult to understand as the others. For how long have we assumed, and been taught to assume, religion is a private taste or a human cultural tendency? Instead, St. Paul taught that the risen <i>Jesus Christ!</i> is truth, the foundation of every other truth we live with. Life. Day and night. Gravity. You name it. Love. This is why the Church went forth to teach and still does teach that no one has the right to stand outside it. What a thought.</p><p>What a moment. I would have liked to see when Evodia and Syntyche, Stephanas, and all the others, -- when their faces moved. "Mark" and "Luke" also. The smaller fry we can imagine as ourselves, the faithful. Evodia and Syntyche had some sort of female quarrel, as we might do. Mark and Luke, now! What brings them in? </p>Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-21235758610765365522021-06-01T08:53:00.002-07:002021-06-02T13:32:48.273-07:00Looking at Peter --- and history -- upside down <p>Having spent a lifetime as an amateur Tudor enthusiast, I must say I never understood what was going on until recently. I always simply liked the very female accents of the story. "Obstetrics ruled the English court," as I put it in an essay which I thought was scholarly, at the age of maybe twenty. I liked the family drama, the sumptuous brocades and pearls, the crackling-with-emotion romances. When I wanted to get serious it used to please me to understand the differences between the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Succession. One gave King Henry VIII his place as supreme head of the Church in England; one gave his second marriage, and any children from it, full legitimacy while voiding the first even though the first wife and child were right there. </p><p>However I have learned that you have to be a Catholic to look at history, at the world, upside down -- as Chesterton said St. Francis of Assisi did -- and see it as it is, hanging on the thread of God's grace. ("We hear of the Dissolution of the Monasteries," Chesterton writes, "but never of why the monasteries were created in the first place.")</p><p>Take for example this picture. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J8Ss-C1gmas/YLZRaYvte6I/AAAAAAAALK4/GVxA9OQ_pTEjT612H4krrqSuI04WVY6aQCLcBGAsYHQ/s770/teen%2Belizabeth.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="770" data-original-width="619" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J8Ss-C1gmas/YLZRaYvte6I/AAAAAAAALK4/GVxA9OQ_pTEjT612H4krrqSuI04WVY6aQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/teen%2Belizabeth.gif" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>Or this one. </p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VacZQ0nEMJE/YLZRdRmTTlI/AAAAAAAALK8/CzekMqbN_bITTNKBRcIo6hxbVreBdqEAQCLcBGAsYHQ/s286/baby%2Bedward%2Bvi.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="286" data-original-width="220" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VacZQ0nEMJE/YLZRdRmTTlI/AAAAAAAALK8/CzekMqbN_bITTNKBRcIo6hxbVreBdqEAQCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/baby%2Bedward%2Bvi.jpg" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>We are to look on these, even now -- and imagine if we had been his Majesty's subjects in 1533 or thereabouts -- and we are to say, ah yes. Here are our new and particular Peter(s), the Rock on which I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. The first portrait has the added interest of showing a young lady who came from a marriage which occurred while one party was already married. This in the days when Christendom better grasped that divorce was not just tragic but was impossible to do, because Christ said it was impossible. </p><p>It's these small things you begin to understand. History is not necessarily being a nice, thankfully linear progress to better, more rational times. Whoever said it was? you may ask. Well, maybe no one, but isn't the shock of realizing these portraits represent something baleful, a fairly good indication that we have assumed a sort of linear gratitude in our mindsets for a long time? </p><p>It happens today is June 1, the anniversary of Anne Boleyn's coronation in the year 1533. I also learned that the legal technique by which the coronation could be held and the second marriage legitimated, while the baleful hurry of her pregnancy was underway, was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/The-break-with-Rome#ref482969" target="_blank">the Act of Restraint of Appeals.</a> This cut "constitutional ties" between England and the Papacy so as to cancel Catherine of Aragon's right to "appeal her case to Rome," as movie scripts always have her -- somewhat mysteriously -- declaim. </p>Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-13020971302024019892021-05-25T07:40:00.000-07:002021-05-25T07:40:00.167-07:00Wow, this is just plain crazy! I think WordPress canceled me<p>Are they actually waiting for my crummy $96 a year, to <a href="https://pluotblog.wordpress.com" target="_blank">upgrade my site</a> that no one visits? No offense to the ten people a month who do visit, mostly looking for French Spring Soup when I'm trying to be a serious returned prodigal Catholic; but I did have my "cart" all ready for checkout -- maybe a year ago -- when I read some professional blogger's advice that if you get fewer than 10,000 visitors to your blog annually, it's not worth paying a dime for anything. </p><p>So I never checked out. All along WordPress has warned me in a sidebar, <i>Your cart is awaiting payment.</i> Now I go to attend to a draft, which wasn't much good anyway, and I find that although the blog is still up, I can do nothing with it. No editing, no new draft, I can't even "add a new site." (It was going to be Pluot 2.) Every attempt sends me to a blank page, which just seems to say, "Yeah, wow, no. We need your money." </p><p>I understand the concept of paying for a service, especially one as complicated as a website hosting platform. However, my little free hobby blog is exactly the same as any other little free hobby blog, whose hosting WordPress claims will be free forever, and which has earned precisely zero dollars in "ads" for anyone, ever. All I did was set up a "cart" and then change my mind. Even hitting the trash button for the cart, now, seems to have helped not at all. You can either follow through and pay your money, or you can ignore it -- and perhaps run out of your allotted 3 GB of memory as well. Who knew? </p><p>So does that mean Blogger has memory limitations too? And, what does it mean to "self-host" WordPress? Why does there seem no mercy for those of us who grew up green with envy over Jane Austen or George Eliot, who simply handed an ink-spattered manuscript to a father or a husband, who carried it to the publisher who looked and smiled at the first page and said "Yes, this will do"? </p><p>Astonishing. So I suppose I and my ten readers and my "Potage Printanier" will have to return to the host from whence we all decamped because we thought Blogger was going the way of the dinosaurs. But how will the ten from the WordPress site know to come here, when I can't even tell them that? </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8j0_L258KFs/YK0L6jk0XgI/AAAAAAAALIg/-ALVMORZ-7kRGFyjFcrKbdBGIKBdTrFGQCLcBGAsYHQ/s448/BDDFA875-1CD0-494E-A4FF-CEA17811284A_4_5005_c.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="448" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8j0_L258KFs/YK0L6jk0XgI/AAAAAAAALIg/-ALVMORZ-7kRGFyjFcrKbdBGIKBdTrFGQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/BDDFA875-1CD0-494E-A4FF-CEA17811284A_4_5005_c.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-72829656082072187072019-01-22T19:09:00.002-08:002019-01-22T19:16:57.252-08:00Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, doorstop<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Once in a while you pick up a classic and find you cannot get more than fifty pages into it.<br />
<br />
I was just barely beginning to hack into the two-inch-thickness' worth (paperback, 1994) of Rebecca West's <i>Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia </i>(1941). Already in the Prologue she says most encouraging things.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I knew that in the next war we women would have scarcely any need to fear bereavement, since air raids unpreceded by declaration of war would send us and our loved ones to the next world in the breachless unity of scrambled eggs. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>...the word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is not worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.</i></blockquote>
And, she writes on Fascism, when it was still dutifully understood as some bizarre but horridly recognizable new weed of a political construct totally outside the human experience, and not as what it is, frightfully confident liberalism on frightfully strong steroids:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>All forms of compulsion are practised on any element within the state that is resistant or is even suspected of retaining consciousness of its difference from the dominating party....</i> [Christian wedding cake bakers -- or fill-in-the-blank dissenters -- anyone?] </blockquote>
<br />
The Prologue to <i>Black Lamb and Grey Falcon</i> bedazzled me further, because it reinforced a notion I have had since reading <i>Gone With the Wind</i> at the age of 12, and gawping at its easy references to the Borgias and Thermopylae and the First Triumvirate of Rome. Withal Scarlett O'Hara was presented as a charming ignoramus, because she did not know these things! It was astonishing, what the author and her editors expected the reading public of 1936 to absorb. My notion was that when everyone was better educated, writers wrote better books. That rising tide did lift all boats.<br />
<br />
And here was Rebecca West, same era as Margaret Mitchell, real name -- West's, not Mitchell's -- Cicily Isabel Fairfield (why cloak that?) getting ready to plunge into the Balkans, remembering the three royal assassinations that shaped the wars of her youth and therefore her fate -- hence the talk of being blown to eternity amid the morning's scrambled eggs, it did happen to some -- and French poetry is a part of her life, too! On page one. Before drifting off under an injection preparatory to surgery, West is reading "that sonnet by Joachim du Bellay which begins, '<i>Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage </i>[Happy he who, like Ulysses, makes a good journey]." She is civilized. This, along with most of the books of her era and before, so easily showed it.<br />
<br />
Now I did quickly begin to suspect that the du Bellay wheeze (as Bertie Wooster might say) might be schoolgirl memorization. I took French too, and I could quote, <i>par exemple</i>, Francois Villon in a pinch, just like anybody. "<i>Mais</i> o<i>u sont les neiges d'antan </i>[Where are the snows of yesteryear]?" This Villon is the poet whom Bette Davis' character in the movie <i>Petrified Forest</i> keeps calling "Francis Vill-yun," while erudite wanderer Leslie Howard looks on with pity and adoration (same era).<br />
<br />
After West's Prologue begins the Journey. I was still bedazzled, for where should she begin this but in the city of Salzburg, Austria, in Mozart's house. What a thing to think of. I have actually been there. Rebecca West and I have stood in the same room and looked at Mozart's spinet, perhaps fifty years apart. She visited in about 1936, I in 1983. In fact she died, at the age of 90, just a few days I think before the Icelandair plane took off for my first and no doubt last trip to Europe. Hear me Lord. All I could think of, as the wheels inexorably rolled, was that I wanted to be home for an ordinary evening with my gray cat.<br />
<br />
Upon reaching the Journey after the Prologue, I began to be less bedazzled and more annoyed with <i>BLGF</i>, as the great thick majestic book is called among the citizen-reviewers, whether pitying or adoring, on Amazon. (I love this service, by the way. The negative reviews of any book always contain the most wonderful nuggets of truth and crankiness and wildly unfounded but probably just supposition.) My disappointment seemed the severer because Rebecca West's word-painting is very lovely. Not quite as gleaming and many-prismed as Dorothy Carrrington's <i>Granite Island,</i> but very good. One hates to give up on an 1100-page book, closely printed, after only fifty pages. One stands stupefied at a 500,000 word memoir, and at a lady who can judge in passing that the embroidery for sale in a Yugoslavian village market is inauthentic Slav, only imitation "Victorian Berlin woolwork." Still, when her writing began to drift into the dotty territory of madmen and dreamers and princes lost in the woods, I balked. I met and disliked this style, I am sorry to say, most thoroughly in the work of Elie Wiesel. Oddly, he of all people came to me right away. Central Europe, again. No word painting. But the same era.<br />
<br />
Rebecca West begins the Journey chapter on the train with German tourists, on vacation from Nazi Germany, which is a thing you don't think about. They complain that Nazi party-loyalist tenants in an apartment building can't be scolded or evicted, whatever constant ruckus they make ... " 'the private citizen hasn't any liberty, but the state hasn't any real authority either.' " If you want to vacation you may only go to certain approved places, because when you holiday of course you are taking your money out of noble and needful Germany ....<br />
<br />
But for West the main thing is, these people are tourists. At long last I think I understand what a tourist is, for I have read my share of travel writing by people who sniff at the sub-species. The tourist is concerned that unexpected and disagreeable things may happen before he reaches his destination. Perhaps in that way he is the ghost of a true pilgrim, only with nowhere really significant to go. A real traveler, on the other hand, looks forward or claims to do, to the unexpected. All the hotels in Zagreb are so comfortable and all the food good. If the tourists can't after all get into one or find the other, they will find substitutes just as good. In fact West considers the tourist's worry, paradoxically, to be dithering and "inefficient." <br />
<br />
When the train arrives at Zagreb the real holiday, true foreignness, begins. She looks out the train window to see an elderly man running alongside the tracks carrying an umbrella, in the pouring rain, holding the umbrella well out from himself and getting no shelter from it while he calls repeatedly " 'Anna! Anna!' " Three times he makes this performance, running up and down alongside the train, calling for Anna. Rebecca West, refreshed, now purrs, "I was among people I could understand."<br />
<br />
This is what makes me abandon a thousand-page, twentieth-century classic at page 38. Am I wrong to do so? Remember what Ernest Hemingway said about the mental transformation of the downtrodden husband in <i>The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber</i>? "Fear gone like an operation." In my case, it was curiosity to read more, gone like an operation. Rebecca West's very next anecdote, about her bizarre tour guide at Zagreb, who once wrote a flamingly angry political article, and submitted it to "the censor," but then had to delete all of it because he was the censor himself -- that tale, so to speak, even erased the scar from the operation. " 'In what capacity, as author or as censor, must I be untrue to my ideals?' " she claims he asked proudly. Again our Rebecca swoons at magical foreignness, and purrs, "I am among people I understand" (p. 46). Later she explains this Gregorivitch or whoever in well-sculpted prose. He was heir to a different time, when an office and its responsibilities outranked the man, the man did not do the job to his own satisfaction or convenience, depending on what sense it made to him.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"<i>He must have been conscious, all his life, of the social value of patriotic poets and, for the last unhappy twenty years, of censors. Therefore it seemed to him that he must do his best in both capacities, not that he should modify his performances to uphold the consistence of his personality. That, I could perfectly understand</i> ...." </blockquote>
<br />
And this is where I began thinking of the books of Elie Wiesel. He was not a travel writer but he would write a story like that, and about the umbrella-man too, men who were heroes of some other code, madmen or dreamers who then disappear in the woods. The key is that <i>he</i> understands them. After his first book of terrible witness, <i>Night, </i>he tended to venture into literary realms where no one can follow because he uses storytelling to paint himself as a perceiving subject, rather than to make clear on the canvas what he wants anyone to see. Is that what it means to be a Gnostic? -- to be privy to secret meaning? When he begins about beggars and princes lost in the woods, fine, but I don't know what he is talking about, nor whether he is hiding, or revealing, anything true.<br />
<br />
It's the same for Rebecca West. Having established that of course she is not a mere tourist, looking at things as they are: when she says an old man ran up and down alongside the train doing something that makes no sense, or when some other man wrote and censored his own essay because each act was upright in itself, fine, but I have no interest in reading further because I don't know what Rebecca West is using language for. One hates to be the cynic saying <i>these things don't happen, </i>except perhaps among Slavs, who are mad<i>. </i>I don't like that dismissal when it comes to the Bible, say. "So religious people are mad, so what." Since Rebecca West is not actually divine revelation corroborated by witness, we are left only with her, fascinated by herself as the perceiving subject, restful among people she can understand. Which seems like a bald lie. At any rate it wasn't enough to carry five hundred thousand words.<br />
<br />
I said that I love the reviews on Amazon. <i>Black Lamb and Grey Falcon</i> gets a lot of five stars, and only a few one-stars. Probably the best assessment is from a five-star reader who thinks that the people who hate this book are hung up on West's sympathy for the Serbs, a nation much admired in her era but not in ours. He assumes the detractors even wade in that deep. I nod at the one-star snorts. " Much too long." "Drivel." "The Britisher abroad in that era." I close <i>Black Lamb and Grey Falcon</i> at page fifty, wondering at the taste of another era, and deciding, No, I'm not being idiotic.<br />
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Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-77932326547154889862019-01-14T01:30:00.000-08:002019-01-15T08:22:15.675-08:00It's probably significant that I like bitters <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
At the same time that I was purring over my Four Complaints about Christmas Eve midnight Mass, and thinking that someday historians and God would see that <i>here</i> was the summation of It All, the wonderful -- I may almost say, the great -- Sister Wendy Beckett died. December 26, 2018, at the age of 88. How fitting that this cheery lady should die the day after cheerful Christmas!<br />
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I own quite a few of her books and I have watched and loved all her television shows. I saw to it that my now-grown children also knew about her. They can quote her on the muscular heroine, in a painting of <i>Judith and Holofernes</i>, "swinging the man's head like an apple," and about Henry VIII's being a "horrible man with little piggy eyes." At the age of six or seven my son made a Lego scene of Sister Wendy visiting an art museum, complete with an entrance arch, green plants, a cameraman and a kiosk with a map of the "museum." He used the black hood and cape from a Darth Vader Lego figure to represent a nun in traditional garb. Yesterday when I told my daughter that Sister Wendy died she exclaimed, "No! That sucks." She remembered.<br />
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Even though the good sister's art writing is wonderful, there are tiny hints from her heyday in the world in the 1990s, interviews and so on (though <a href="https://charlierose.com/guests/1240">not this one</a>), that gatekeepers and purists chafed at her. I wonder if their complaint was, that she does tend to treat painting all a bit alike. She treats it as a coded story -- a kind of play performed, an arrangement of symbols which she elucidates. Almost no talk of brushwork or line, as I suppose the gatekeepers wanted. Still, she decoded art with more profundity than most of us do, who scarcely walk into a museum at all and absolutely don't use the most necessary tool of all in appreciating art. That would be "a chair," as she once quoted someone else saying. In other words we don't stop, look, and think.<br />
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She did. She noticed that the iron scrollwork of an apartment balcony in a Matisse spelled the word <i>Non</i>, and that that had something to do with the angry couple in the painting. She noticed that a young squire's droopy socks in a Gainsborough portrait marked him as a "yobbo." She noticed the seven different flowers lightly incised on the seven lobes of a sea-green Korean ceramic jar, and told what joy it was to commune silently with a great work of porcelain art. If you do go into an art museum you can do that too, in privacy, because almost nobody visits Halls of Oriental Ceramics.<br />
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The gatekeepers who may have found this amateurish also did not approve of a nun looking at pictures of naked people -- a salacious criticism on their own part, she shot back. For my part, gradually after absorbing her art books I came to find her writing on prayer.<br />
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This struck me afresh. She always slipped in a few spiritual comments here and there in her introductions to be sure, or with the voice-overs to her shows. One of the best, from <i>Sister Wendy's American Collection</i>, was "Poverty, whether spiritual or economic, leaves us enslaved to work, either having it or wanting it ... museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom; they take us out of our daily anxieties into the vast and stable world of human creativity.<i>"</i> When she discussed religious art, naturally she could let herself go. Unhappy customers on Amazon to this day who give her books only one star snipe at this. Why is all the art Christian? Not everybody's Christian. Ah well, dear soul, get a chair and let us look at Western civilization ....<br />
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To really settle into her writing on prayer, a much more important matter for her than art she said ("I would die for it") is to settle into much more deep, difficult, and practiced writing and thinking. Here, you might say, she is a professional, interested in brushwork and line. Here you are learning from a "content woman" who has done one thing for fifty, sixty, seventy years. There are gems to be found with her, fingered, turned, set down and looked at again and again in an effort to understand. Over the years I have created a small handwritten prayer book of my own by copying down quotes that seem to me prayerful, or at least very wise, and Sister Wendy has pride of place at the beginning of my jottings.<br />
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"<i>The life of prayer depends completely on believing in the value of prayer. It is a total act of faith, because there is no concrete result to show the world.</i><br />
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<i>"Art is essentially beauty that draws us into the truth of our own being, and whenever we have truth and beauty we have God. ... Art can expose parts of the self I was not aware of, so there is more of me laid bare for God to possess. Art is a way of making me human, and you cannot pray unless you are rooted in the truth of your own humanity. </i><br />
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<i>"Prayer is never an escape but the opposite, an exposure. The real self is held out to the real God, and any pretense or lack of reality makes the whole exercise futile." </i><br />
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All the above are from her art books mostly. From<i> The Gaze of Love </i>(1993) comes<i> "The real difficulty about prayer is that it has no difficulty. Prayer is God's taking possession of us. We expose to him what we are, and he gazes on us with the creative eye of Holy Love ...our concern here and now is the actual time we set aside to grow in truth, to receive love, in other words, to pray." </i>You can spend your work day thinking from time to time of these two tasks, "to grow in truth and to receive love," and consider that this is perhaps, as the Scriptures exhort, to pray constantly.<br />
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According to a fond obituary in <i><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2018/12/27/my-filth-crackles-as-he-seizes-hold-of-me-an-interview-with-sister-wendy-beckett/">Catholic Herald</a></i>, Sister Wendy was, before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, "Sister Michael of St. Peter." One of the many formalities given up at that time was evidently the formality of religiously vowed men and women taking an entirely new name in religion. Remember in the novel <i>In This House of Brede</i> when one of the pre-Vatican II novices becomes "Sister Polycarp"? Just so, our own Sister Wendy bore not one but two masculine names. When in the spirit of the Council she reverted to her own plain Wendy, she assessed it as an act of penance because she did not deserve the strength of the names of the Archangel and the first pope.<br />
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Go back to the beginning. Remember my sneering over my Four Complaints about Midnight Mass? What I mean to say now, in remembering our delightful art- and yobbo-critic nun, is here is someone who has carried on and done the work of God in obedience and joy regardless of, shall we say, small penances, or her own small observations of things outside her control. (I can't say "sneering" because it's impossible to imagine her sneering at anything. She might laugh at a person in a painting who is sneering.) She would have gone on doing her real job, prayer, whether the BBC ever discovered her or not, or whether a lot of artists made bad modern art or not. "I shake my head over much of it." Just as, after her television programs were famed but she declined to make any more, she still arose every morning at one a.m. to begin her true work day.<br />
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There are so many like her. You can sit and snort in derision at shortcomings at this year's Midnight Mass, or you can open the journal Dominicana or Word on Fire to see real work done. You can learn of <a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/fssp-sees-growth-10-years-after-summorum-pontificum?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NCRegisterDailyBlog+National+Catholic+Register#When%3A2018-11-7+14%3A24%3A01">the startling growth of the Latin Mass in United States parishes.</a> You can read about the canonization causes of people you've never heard of, whose lives are beyond belief. <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/12/27/vagabond-of-god-the-beatification-cause-of-john-bradburne/">John Bradburne,</a> lay minister to lepers in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), martyr, 1979. Much like Sister Wendy, these men and women are pulling treasures from an inexhaustible store, riches that are so wonderfully the opposite of ego that you cannot imagine you will ever reach that fount, because the trick is by the time you know of these exemplars they are already famous, and so you think the path to get to the treasures is to go on being as cute as possible and waving at the world from the back of the room. You also want, by the by, to spend time congratulating God on his good taste in you. After all there are so many other things you could be doing. " 'You ought to be thanking God on bended knee you get any vocations at all,' " fumes one angry mother in <i>In This House of Brede</i>. " 'We do,' " the Abbess begins calmly.<br />
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So I have thought a lot about what drives these people away from ego and into the treasure house from which they they end up drawing personal accomplishment yes, but more importantly obedience, contentment, and even the much-vaunted "joy." What drives them in is truth, of course. Either he rose from the dead or he did not. Deciding he did not turns out to be the more ridiculous decision.<br />
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What keeps them there, or at least an added benefit of their staying, is a way of looking at people untwisted by the ferocious loyalties and purities of politics. By politics I don't even mean civic involvement or voting or following the news, all of which matter. I mean the looking at people only through the lens of human judgment and for the sake of (what somebody will airily call) human needs. <i>I</i> will shape you in truth. I know best what is right for this world, and your getting on board matters. The idea of our both turning to worship God as sinners and as loved -- ridiculous! And when you displease me I will unfriend you on Facebook, which is not a minor act. Nor is my neighbor's son taking her to see the latest propaganda film, <i>Vice</i>, and then asking her cannily what she thought, a minor act. The son was politically indoctrinating the mother. She told me she was shaking with rage after, and spoke of the main character burning in hell. She got on board. Non-political ideas -- of original sin, of mercy, of common humanity, of redemption -- are ridiculous there.<br />
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And when I snort, really politically, at what I fancy are outrages of my expectations at Mass, and then I see the joyous, anonymous labor of a Sister Wendy or a John Bradburne, I think -- here are people who have moved into a different mindset. They would pray for the choir warbling bad music and for the son and the neighbor and me and Dick Cheney and the moviemaker -- "he's a comedian but he's really intelligent and he did a lot of research" -- and themselves; and then they would open another art book and take more notes, or go help the next leper in line. They are really alive. <br />
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Sister Wendy in another of her prefaces to an art book says, most people want to become important by doing something different, new, how else but in other people's judgment, and that it takes a long time to unlearn this natural if sterile human trait. She also, being a nun, writes very plainly of the things <i>that work</i> to make a human being; the things that still embarrass the political personality. In tribute to a great lady who is an antidote to the desire to snort and judge, to wave ridiculously to the world from the back of the room, we learn: <i>Sister Wendy on the Art of Saints</i>, 2011:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>We are all born and each of us will die: Those are the two certainties of life. In between these certainties God has given us the gift of time so that we may grow into the fullness of what we are meant to be. This fullness is different for each of us, but the ways n which it is achieved are the same. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Since God made us in his own image and we know what that image is through the historical actuality of Jesus, each person's fullness is an attainment of a likeness to our Blessed Lord. When we are as God wants us to be, we will have within us what St. Paul calls 'the mind of Christ.' We learn it through reading the Scriptures where God reveals himself in his son, and, complementary to that, we come close to Our Blessed Lord in the books written by those who have understood the Scriptures. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Yet prayer, worship, and reading are only a part of our day (though, literally speaking, everything is or should be prayer). One of the most neglected truths is that we learn to become like Jesus through the actual process of living. God is giving himself to us all the time; but all too often we do not see it. He gives himself in human relations, in nature, in literature, in music, in art.</i> </blockquote>
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Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-78449190578928688712019-01-10T20:29:00.000-08:002019-01-11T06:46:17.943-08:00Marginalized <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A strange experience the other day.<br />
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Once or twice in the week I attend daily Mass. (Never would have dreamed I would, but there it is.) Once in a great while, but more frequently of late because of the shortage of priests, Mass is said by an elderly and very delightful Father who is too frail to descend the altar steps to receive the offered gifts, and too frail also to distribute Communion himself. He leaves it to the eight or ten lay ministers who "rush the sanctuary -- mostly females," as other and crabbier bloggers snort, while he sits and contemplates either from the chair beside the altar or from his tall hidden stool just behind the altar.<br />
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Ah, well. The Church permits communion from "extraordinary" ministers, even though I call them lay because they are laypeople and they are not extraordinary, they are routine. It's the priest who is extraordinary. Was it really our own late<a href="https://churchmilitantblog.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/13_05_13_no_communion_hand1-jpg/"> Cardinal Bernardin who was responsible</a> for creating <a href="http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2014/03/truth-about-communion-in-hand-while.html">Communion in the hand </a>received <a href="https://onepeterfive.com/liturgy-tops-usccb-meeting-agenda-communion-hand/">from lay ministers</a>, and is it owing to him that this one-off "abuse" became the norm around the world?<br />
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At any rate my difficulty is that when good Father W. says Mass, it is not possible to "get in the priest's line" as I always prefer to do to receive Communion. We must all get in one of five lay ministers' lines. For a short time I used to receive in the hand from either, not wanting to seem conspicuous or holier than thou upon first returning to Mass a year or so ago. Then I thought better of it -- plus I learned a little about the danger of the Host "fractioning" the more people handle it. I resumed my childhood practice of receiving on the tongue, which, from a lay minister, is rather a ridiculous proposition except that at least one is not contributing to any more fractioning. I have seen ridiculous things all round when it comes to the whole business of mostly badly dressed retirees and communion in the hand. I have seen lay ministers themselves, on the altar, receive communion on the tongue (then why are they distributing it?) and I have seen them cross their arms and bow the head to refuse, say, the Precious Blood, but still distribute that. I have seen Mass-goers kneel to receive the Host on the tongue from a fellow retiree. Basically it's a right old mess, as Basil Fawlty could say.<br />
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What I did not know is that it is possible to refuse Communion from a lay minister, and to wait for the priest, no matter how frail he is. (One reads of firmly progressive priests refusing to do anything <i>but</i> distribute in the hand, but this is a "grave offense against canon law," so says the internet source I suddenly can't find even though I just saw it ten minutes ago.) The lesson that the faithful may turn the tables has been shown me, twice now.<br />
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We have a Polish lady who attends Mass frequently at the parish. She used to come with two friends, whom I have not seen in a long time. One Palm Sunday they all arrived wearing red cloaks with a painting of Christ the King on the back, and the white eagle of Poland on one side. I looked it up and found out that a few years ago Poland dedicated itself to Jesus Christ King of the Universe, and those are the cloaks you wear to show allegiance. And then, months later when she was alone and frail Father W. was our celebrant, and I had learned his habits and was idly wondering how she must feel at being compelled to take the host from a lay minister, because of him -- she refused to do so, and waited. Boy did she wait. <br />
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She got in line, bowed politely to whoever it was when it came her turn, firmly shouldered past her and went and knelt actually on the altar steps, in front of the Crucifix. I thought she might be going to say a prayer of spiritual communion and then return to her pew. No such thing. She knelt and waited. Everybody finished Communion. She knelt and waited. It began to be very embarrassing. She knelt and waited. The hosts and ciboriums (ciboria?) were returned to the Tabernacle. She waited. Then good Father W., at some point before ending the Mass, exclaimed that he hadn't seen her and toddled back to the Tabernacle, got a golden bowl, got a Host, and gave it to her, on the tongue. She returned to her pew with a small smile of triumph.<br />
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More months pass. The second time that life's lottery put this combination together, a few days ago, was more serious. There the Polish lady was in her pew, <i>sans</i> cloak, and I thought, good grief, I hope it isn't Father W. again. What if it is? Perhaps she will rethink her severity.<br />
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Eight o'clock. There arrives the frail priest, in white because it is still Christmas. He grips the handrail and climbs the side steps. Oh God. It's Father W.<br />
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Mass goes on and on. It's really only a few minutes to the climactic moment, but Father introduces everything with short, folksy, and thoughtful comments, so it seems like forever. She gets in line. Of course he sits again at the altar and contemplates. She bows politely to the lay minister, and kneels at the steps before the Crucifix. I think, Lord have mercy, I don't have her courage. Besides, this is the custom of the community, it seems rather prideful to snub it. I had said as much to a scholarly friend after my first go-round with this experience, and he answered, <i>This lady comes from a very traditional country -- and besides, we are talking about receiving God himself!</i> <br />
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She kneels and kneels and it just goes on and on. The good Father does not look to right or left, from his position behind the altar. No lay minister approaches him and whispers anything in his ear. The Polish lady is stuck behind or to the side of a largeish poinsettia tree. It may be he cannot see her. But it goes on and on. Communion is finished, everyone is back in their pews. All the Hosts and the golden bowls are in the Tabernacle and the rest of the Precious Blood has been "reverently consumed" I suppose in the hallway near the exit. Near the table of hand sanitizer pump bottles. Father W. finishes Mass, blesses everyone and begins the frail singing of "Silent Night."<br />
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I am no moral warrior but I do find this outrageous. Not a single person breathes a word of support -- and we yammer, or we're yammered at routinely, about "the marginalized in our society." Bullshit. No gay, immigrant, or trans is as marginalized as this woman, and there she goes on kneeling, like a character in the old <i>The Lottery</i> movie that we were all made to watch in high school to learn about the hypocrisy and jungle cruelty lurking uniquely beneath middle-class American life. She was kneeling in a church, during Mass, at communion, ignored by her fellow suburban well-meaning open-minded Mass-going Catholics.<br />
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I'm no moral warrior, in fact I resent this woman making a spectacle of herself and me too, but during "Silent Night" I left my pew, went up with trepidation and knelt beside her. I said to her quietly only that I lacked her courage but respected it, and after a pause I said I hoped God would bless her. She seemed to be almost crying. She seemed to make a slight sibilant sound that might have meant "thank you" or might have expressed annoyance at my interrupting her prayer. Years ago I had a German neighbor lady who used to hiss at the birds and squirrels as she drove them away from her garden with a golf club. I returned to my pew and somehow she got her communion. So the good priest is not that frail. It all took, on my part, hardly more than a minute. I left flustered. The same gaggle of older men chatted in the narthex after, as if nothing had happened.<br />
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Strangely, in the succeeding few days I have had positively zero desire to return to weekday Mass. I am sure I will do so, but meantime I have known that complete, satisfied, not bitter but totally dismissive, suddenly-gelled carapace of confidence that one might feel after a bad first date or a failed first two weeks at a bad job. <i>Wow. Not doing that again.</i> That is not what I go to Mass for.<br />
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And yet the carapace must crack, one must go, even if it should be Father W. and the Polish lady at every single one including Sundays for as long as one lives. After all Mass is a thing unto itself, regardless how you feel about it. After all she showed the courage of the Christian martyrs, in a new and awful sort of arena. Witnessing this experience, you must face whether religion is a pleasant little interior hobby, to be caressed and played with like a kitten but put down when it scratches, or whether it is truth to face embarrassment for. I don't know of much that is harder to do than defying your peers. The foreigner, the missionary, kneels alone. <br />
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Having knelt for half a second also beside the poinsettia tree, I can testify that it was not big enough to hide her. She was clearly visible from the altar. </div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-37572191449170534112018-12-27T09:54:00.001-08:002019-01-02T19:02:10.220-08:00Four complaints about Christmas Eve Midnight Mass<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
You cannot call yourself truly crabby unless you complain about Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. So here are some things.<br />
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Of course the good people of the choir, who have been practicing since October, would not dream of singing traditional carols for the half hour "choral prelude" before midnight. There were ten songs, many of which began with a few bars of a familiar melody, and then veered off into the narrow shallow well trod ruts of the "contemporary." Not a single one of these little tunes will live beyond the minutes it took to sing them. Because why on earth would it make any sense to sing ancient carols whose whole point is their association with the season, once a year, for the enjoyment and edification of a church packed full of people who only attend once a year? I know right?<br />
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Then there was the matter of the chant, that I have only heard twice in my lifetime, once in high school and once last year at this very parish. I used to think of it as a sort of litany of creation, but it has a name: it is the Proclamation of the Nativity, and was regularly chanted before Midnight Mass until Vatican II dispensed with it. Pope St. John Paul II revived it, and because the world saw it on t.v. once a year at his Christmas Eve masses, parishes around the world have sometimes revived it too. In an authentic literal translation of the Latin, it recites the stupendous events of spiritual history preceding the birth of Christ according to Biblical time, that is, yes, as if creation happened six thousand years ago and as if we know the precise date of the Exodus from Egypt, and so forth, thereby. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops provides a kinda-sorta version, with timid and jarringly faux-scientific "untold ages" or "several thousand years" standing in for the robust proud dates of the original. A musing, faculty-lounge worthy "around the thousandth year since David was anointed king" replaces "the one thousand and thirty-second year from David's being anointed king," for instance. The point of this polite avoiding of dates seems to be to not appear fundamentalist, which is quite hilarious when you think about it. The sophisticate whose judgment we fear, on that score, already thinks we're fundamentalist because we're at Midnight Mass worshiping a doll anyway. Why not enjoy the poetry of the robust dates?<br />
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Anyway my complaint is that this year my parish didn't provide the proclamation at all. Disappointing. Maybe next year.<br />
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Then there was the matter of the Prologue to the Gospel of John. We changed that too, because of course we're more advanced than the saint and Beloved Disciple who also wrote Revelation. Just a tad: where the great line reads, <i>through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race </i>[really originally, <i>men</i>]<i> </i>(John 1:4)<i>, </i>the lector -- a woman, a lectress? -- carefully and pointedly intoned, "this life was the light of the human races." Ho ho, I chortled bitterly in my pew, but wasn't the joy of it all, once, that all men are one in Christ Jesus? What races are we talking about? Isn't "what divides us" usually bad? Or, have we circled back in our lofty and open-minded wisdom to 1930, or perhaps 1830? And shall we start measuring skulls again, and deciding who is better?<br />
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Then came the great moment. Mind you, all along I am from time to time asking God to forgive me for sneering even in the middle of Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. The good deacon read the Gospel, and he got confused -- I thought -- and read the wrong one. The ruffling of pages from the pews, where people were trying to find his place in the worship booklets, must have alerted him, for after fumbling through something about Joseph deciding to take Mary into his home anyway, the deacon paged through his own lectionary at the pulpit and then finished with Matthew 1:25. <i>He had no relations with her until she bore a son.</i> <br />
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This was something of a minor tragedy. An actual knot of tension seemed to collect and then fray out in the air. The church was full of people who will never come again to Mass until next year if that, and they heard one of the most problematic texts there must be in the Gospels, heard it flatly proclaimed in what, to the English ear, can only be language that said "of course St. Joseph, foster father of the Son of God, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, had sex after, like normal people."<br />
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I looked up this line in both my two Bibles, the Douai translation made by Englishmen in France in Tudor times, who knew they faced hanging, drawing and quartering if they snuck back into Good Queen Bess' realm to say a Mass in a private home, in a nation that had been Catholic until the day before yesterday; and I looked it up in the New American Bible, translated by scholars who I think are careful above all of the opinions of sophisticates. The Douai translation for Matthew 1: 25 lays out the line in almost exactly the same English. <i>And he knew her not till she brought forth her first born son. </i>But the fathers of Douai added notes about the truth of faith, which the fathers of the New American Bible do not. There are "divers examples," the former say, that this word <i>until</i> represents a manner of speaking in Scripture, to denote what is done regardless of the future. God says <i>I Am till you grow old</i> (Isaiah 46:4). Does this mean He then ceases to exist? King David's wife Michal <i>had no children till the day of her death </i>(2 Samuel 6). Did she have some after?<br />
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The New American Bible fathers simply say "the Greek word for <i>until</i> does not imply normal marital conduct after Jesus' birth -- or exclude it."<br />
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Those are my four complaints for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Purblind music, no proclamation, giving St. John what for, and dropping on unsuspecting people what seemed like the bomb of news about Joseph and Mary's postpartum sex life. One more thing I was puzzled to know, and so I looked up this too, is where the good deacon flipped ahead to, to find that Gospel reading from Matthew. I thought he may have found some random Sunday. It turns out he was in the right place all along, he just omitted a lot, or perhaps our Mass booklets were printed wrong. His reading really ended exactly where it should have done.<br />
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In my grandmother's old Missal from the early 1960s, the Gospel readings for the three Masses of Christmas Day, midnight, dawn, and daytime, are only from St. Luke or St. John. Could the fathers of the Church have once understood that problematic texts from St. Matthew, while never hidden, are also not to be hurled at once-a-year visitors on Christmas Eve? -- especially in this modern era when the faithful, researching notes in a modern Catholic Bible, will find no help there? Who decided to impose the difficulties of Matthew on Christmas, and why? My first impression of it, bitter and crabby and ho-ho-ing in my pew as I had been and then alone by lamplight, ignorant as I am, -- was, this was malicious. And I should know, right? </div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-18345818376658936102018-11-14T07:04:00.003-08:002018-11-14T07:13:23.302-08:00Incredible that I forgot lemon bars<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>My daughter wants the recipe for lemon bars. There is only one recipe, of course, my own. I thought it would be the work of a moment to rummage among the 600+ posts I had to upload overnight, into Pluot, when poor old At First Glass went kaphut at the loss of the domain name. And yet lo! Search though I might, it seems I forgot to import "At First Glass turns four -- and bakes those classic lemon bars," which first swam into our ken on New Year's Day, 2012. </i><br />
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Now we might think lemon bars are too ordinary to be worthy of discussion. Who has not learned to make them in a long-ago junior high school home ec. class? Who has not enjoyed them at dozens of Fourth of July picnics and PTA bake sales ever afterward? Here we are, on At First Glass's fourth anniversary, mucking about with (appropriately enough, to be sure) preschool-level treats while <a href="http://orangette.blogspot.com/">grander blogs are fishing ("crabbing") for their own Dungeness crabs</a>, making <a href="http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/green-lentil-soup-with-curried-brown-butter-recipe.html">green lentil soup with curried brown butter</a>, or serving up <a href="http://www.dessertsforbreakfast.com/2010/02/potw-orange-clove-chocolate-chip.html">orange-clove chocolate chip pancakes with coffee-clove syrup.</a><br />
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Yet I submit them, for a variety of reasons. They are simplicity itself. They are a delight to prepare, requiring the use of only one mixing bowl, which can do double duty for the preparation of both crust and filling. There is no need to fuss with softening or creaming butter, nor with greasing a baking pan. Made with fresh squeezed lemon juice, they are the most scrumptious morsels imaginable -- as with so many delicious things, it is their great buttery richness which satisfies you and prevents you from devouring the entire plateful.<br />
<br />
And why else? Once upon a time, I made these for some evening PTA function. They lay, all anonymous and humble and ready for any hand to choose among them. People milled about in the blaringly lit, crowded gymnasium, mothers, fathers, grandparents, children. Preschoolers. I happened to be standing chatting with someone, when I saw a woman pick a lemon bar, take a bite of it, pause, and then throw it in the closest garbage can. <br />
<br />
Witnessing that, I could only guess that this poor soul had never tasted good, properly made lemon bars before. Are they available in a box mix? Probably. Was that all she knew? Perhaps. It must have been the intense, unaccustomed flavor that put her off -- or perhaps she didn't like lemon and didn't realize until too late what these were. But how could anyone not know? Had she missed that day in Mrs. Pemberton's home ec. class? Is her name legion? All the more reason for me to do my small part today in getting the word out, to dear poor souls everywhere, about this great, commonplace, origins-lost-in-the-mists-of-culinary-prehistory cookie bar.<br />
<br />
<b>Lemon bars</b><br />
<br />
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Have ready two 8 x 8 x 2 baking pans, ungreased.<br />
<br />
Mix together in a large bowl:<br />
<b>2 and 2/3 cups flour </b><br />
<b>1/2 cup sugar</b><br />
<br />
Work in with your fingers until the mixture is moist and crumbly:<br />
<b>1 cup (2 sticks) butter</b><br />
<br />
<b></b><br />
Divide the dough in half simply by taking it up in fistfuls and putting it alternately in the two pans. Pat the dough down and bake each pan 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from oven.<br />
<br />
While the dough is baking, mix in the same mixing bowl<br />
<b>4 eggs</b><br />
<b>1 and 1/2 cups sugar</b><br />
<b>4 Tablespoons flour</b><br />
<b>6 Tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice </b><br />
<br />
Pour the filling over the partially baked crusts. Return to the oven and finish baking for 18 to 20 minutes, until the bars shrink away from the sides of the pan and the edges toast just a little. Let them cool before sprinkling with <b>powdered sugar</b>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lKKruFK2eCQ/S00cvNCnNUI/AAAAAAAADoY/GFCmFhQk51M/s1600-h/lemon+bars.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426024723331364162" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lKKruFK2eCQ/S00cvNCnNUI/AAAAAAAADoY/GFCmFhQk51M/s320/lemon+bars.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 187px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 250px;" /></a><br />
<br />
Postscript: do we dare mess with such beauty? Years ago, as Chicago Baking Examiner, I shoehorned this recipe into Examiner.com's random "Vodka month" theme by suggesting a vodka icing to replace the dusting of powdered sugar the bars usually receive. A plain sweet icing starts with 3 Tablespoons of hot water in a bowl, to which about <b>2 and 1/2 cups powdered sugar is added</b>; you beat the mixture until it reaches a good consistency for spreading or drizzling. Any liquid may be substituted for the hot water, depending on the flavors in the baked treat you plan to glaze. And so, -- vodka with lemon? Or gin ....<span style="font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-8783593884135953632018-11-12T07:17:00.000-08:002018-11-12T07:17:17.617-08:00First time at a Latin Mass<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I attended a Latin Mass for the first time, at St. Joseph Church in Rockdale, about half an hour east of me, a tiny old village caught up on some very steep hills between the I-80 expressway and the Des Plaines River, south of Joliet. A small, old church, in the old, spangled-ceiling and Corinthian (golden) capital style; about 150 people, of the same wide variety of ages as in any parish, including quite a few obviously growing young families. Many women and girls wore chapel veils, even little toddler girls in pink. Each (somewhat rickety) pew had large missals full of golden-bordered photographs, not only of priests at various parts of the Mass, but also of ancient illuminated manuscripts; at the beginning of this <i>Saint Edward Campion Missal</i> was an exhortation from the publishers hoping that many more houses would take care to reprint these ancient and beautiful testimonies.<br />
<br />
We were celebrating today, bizarrely but for a sound procedural or calendrical reason, the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany ... there was an altar rail. Everyone knelt by fives and sixes. No one says "Amen." There is no question of a chalice and communion in both kinds. Ten people indifferently dressed do not pump hand sanitizer beforehand, and do not then drink down the last of the "Precious Blood" in a hallway after. No cell phones rang, although I imagine they must do sometimes.<br />
<br />
Above all else I was impressed, not so much by the Latin, which after all does cloak meaning, and not even by the invisible and modestly talented choir (though that was a relief). I found myself impressed by the altar servers. They were four young men, plus a boy and an even smaller boy, and what I think is a "subdeacon," a man around fifty who stood and simply faced the congregation a lot. So much for the Novus Ordo caterwaul about girls "stepping up to serve" because the boys won't. The boys will serve, I daresay, if the job is serious and they are treated seriously about it. They were dressed in the old style, black cassock and white surplice, not the vague sort of baptismal shift <i>a la</i> <i>Jesus Christ Superstar </i>in 1972, that looks all right for boys and for girls with their hair hanging down their backs, and they had full jobs to do: much kneeling, incensing, bowing, and holding out of thick beribboned book. One young man corrected a boy's mistake with just one flaming eye, it seemed to me. Here is continuity, it seemed to me: at least a chance that these are tomorrow's priests, whereas the altar girls can only be the mothers of tomorrow's altar girls -- which is exactly what they brag about on FaceBook.<br />
<br />
And I don't for a moment hold that the Novus Ordo Mass is not the same as the "TLM," the Traditional Latin Mass. Clearly, behind the Latin, they are essentially the same, especially since more traditional translations have been put into use in the last ten years or so. What must be done away with next, I hope, is the excessive lay participation. The six altar servers today were like a liaison between the priest's work at the altar, and us. They left us free to <i>be</i> the faithful. Incessant lay participation is oppressive and the seedbed of irreverence. They gum up the work because where they want to serve, the work must be altered for them. If nothing else, they alter it by their appearance, their attitude, and their numbers.<br />
<br />
All that aside, I can begin to appreciate why so much of the Mass used to take place behind a "rood screen" in English churches for example, for it may as well do so. The men at the altar -- climbing the mountain, facing east with us and for us -- need scarcely turn around at all. And I can understand why Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and other woolgathering types would have exchanged love notes scribbled in their very Psalters during, or why young Italian dandies in particolored hose might have wandered in whenever they liked, to see who was there. Yes, the vernacular was a good thing, for it had to have refocused comprehension. <br />
<br />
This experience also makes my grandmother's old Missal all the more useful, for it is the English-language "TLM," for the full year, forever. I wonder if "our Lord" -- as today's Father only ever called him during his homily, and as my own father only ever called him -- he was never the casually familiar "Jesus" -- would permit me to read those Masses whenever I like, and if he would count them as such. <br />
<br />
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Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-91964767717333560242018-10-19T15:16:00.001-07:002018-10-19T15:21:27.350-07:00I think I made someone angry (but first, let's try to rescue an orchid)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<br />
I am quite stupid -- you should know this about me right away. In fact I tell the good Lord this all the time, and I am only occasionally guilty of false modesty. For example, regarding the corporal works of mercy -- feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, and so on -- I tell the Lord, "I have not done a single corporal work of mercy in my life, but I am very stupid, so you must now show me exactly <i>how </i>I may do them. One can't simply walk into godforsaken neighborhoods with fruit, or into prisons and say, here I am to help. Although <a href="https://aleteia.org/2016/10/17/the-inspiring-story-of-the-great-catholic-woman-who-was-a-twice-divorced-nun/">saints do (see Mother Antonia Brenner, here)."</a><br />
<br />
And God has been kind and has shown me, plainly. Recently when I was at the church, on my way out of the narthex, a man who helps run the St. Vincent de Paul society happened to be busy in the St. Vincent de Paul kitchen, arranging foodstuffs. So I knocked on the half-open door and talked to him for a few minutes. It was exactly as if God were saying, <i>This is the St. Vincent de Paul kitchen, d-----t</i>. I learned, "We could use more canned fruit." So I bought some.<br />
<br />
It's the same with orchids. A few years ago I bought <a href="http://atfirstglasspluot.blogspot.com/2016/03/my-maxillaria-sanguinea-is-blooming.html">this <i>Maxillaria sanguinea</i>, above</a>. It flowered precisely once. One time, one flower. When well kept, the plant should display a knot of little green bulbs sprouting fine, lush grassy foliage, with soon an abundance of full-lipped, maroon lady's-slipper-like blooms. After its first and only show, I put mine outside on the porch of my apartment for the summer. Rain, fresh air, and humidity are said to be good for orchids. In the dark wee hours of one summer night, I heard in my sleep a strange, juicy, loud sort of <i>crunch-croil-crunch</i>. The next morning, all but two of <i>M. sanguinea</i>'s plump little green bulbs were gone. Eaten.<br />
<br />
I thought I might nurse it back to life, and so after some dithering I eventually planted it in a large safe pot with some other specimens, in fact the usual supermarket <i>Phalaenopsis. </i>The poor remnant stayed barely alive, but that was all. I never dreamed that <i>M. sanguinea, </i>trim fine boat<i>, </i>might have different watering needs than three huge <i>Phalaenopsis</i> floating like ocean liners in that sea of processed bark chips (which I might douse at the kitchen sink once in ten days) that inexperienced growers like to use for all orchid re-potting needs.<br />
<br />
Today was the day the light broke. <i>Of course</i>. They're different. Pot it in some tiny pot and water it much more often. Who knows what might happen? <i>D-------t?</i><br />
<br />
Who knows what might happen, also, with the angry lady who snapped, via email, "Please take me off your subscription list. Thank you."<br />
<br />
This has nothing to do with orchids.<br />
<br />
Regarding this I thought, mercy, good woman, I have no control over anyone's mailing list. I got on it myself months ago, I think by saying "Oh! Sure," to some person I actually knew and was speaking to, in another room just off the narthex. It happened that when I had a question for the people on that list this week, about how one does that peculiarly modern corporal work of mercy which may encapsulate and promote all others -- I'm talking about praying to end abortion -- I reasoned, Why not ask them all in general? And I plainly wrote,<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<i>Does anyone have any experience just going by yourself to pray outside a PP* site? I went to the Flossmoor location one Saturday recently because the 40 Days for Life site showed someone else had signed on for that hour. When I got there, a man was there praying but he said he had just stopped by to pray because he had the time. Whoever was scheduled didn't show.</i> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i><br /></i><i>A little later, some parishioners from St. Laurence O Toole arrived and said it was better not to go to PP clinics alone for personal security reasons. </i> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i><br /></i><i> The PP clinic on LaGrange is 5 minutes from my house and I could easily spend an hour there on my days off (which are random because of my work schedule). Does anyone do this or is it not safe?
I found the experience of praying at the Flossmoor site rewarding and I am just looking for other thoughts.</i></blockquote>
<br />
And I received a few helpful answers and then, today, the cold command. Take me off your mailing list.<br />
<br />
Who knows, it might not be my short letter to forty or so acquaintances and strangers which prompted that command. Perhaps somewhere in the addressee list is someone else whose name my lady suddenly caught sight of, and remembered she loathes. Or maybe my lady is just busy cleaning up her spam folder, and is still polite enough to say "Please" and "Thank you" about it.<br />
<br />
Or else she is outraged at the idea of anyone's standing athwart, even in prayer, a woman's "right to choose." For myself, I would not even argue that point anymore, nor any of the usual points regarding abortion really. The legal and political ships have long since sailed. The commercial ship too. You cannot live in the modern world and not support companies who support Planned Parenthood. Not to mention your taxes. It's almost comical. I go to the grocery store after an hour of vigil and find even my eggs have a "Susan G. Komen for the Cure" stamp on them. So I am there outside PP* for me. I'm not completely stupid. All I can do is eventually stand before God and, when he asks me, "What did you do about the worst evil of your time and place?" say, Well Lord, I stood and prayed outdoors.<br />
<br />
There were about fifteen of us. Quite a few people driving by on a chilly, blowy Friday honked their horns and flashed a thumbs-up. Later I got an update through my email telling me that this morning was less busy than the usual Fridays, but that Tuesdays seem to be picking up. Perhaps the women are being forewarned.<br />
<br />
Shall I cheerfully report all that to the email list, and accidentally forget to expunge my lady's name beforehand? That seems rather mean and self-regarding, perhaps prayer is better for her and me too.<br />
<br />
<br />
*Planned Parenthood </div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-87359507902989142642018-10-12T17:36:00.000-07:002018-10-13T05:44:33.189-07:00Laughing in five hundred years<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's always a good day, don't you think, when you learn one interesting thing and one annoying thing, and <a href="https://relevantradio.com/listen/our-shows/go-ask-father/">both from the same source (Msgr Swetland at Relevant Radio)?</a><br />
<br />
The interesting thing was that "my yoke is easy and my burden light" means that what you are inclined to do or have a vocation for, is the easy yoke and light burden. Now I don't think the church marks out every old predilection we enjoy as a vocation, certainly not, say, bank robbery. Blogging, maybe. I'm pretty sure there are only two major ones, either marriage or the religious life; but still the yoke as the hand-carved harness fitted to the individual oxen, and therefore very right to wear, is an enlightening image. We wear that yoke in order to better follow Christ, yes?<br />
<br />
The annoying thing was the claim that one must accept all the gospel, even the aspects one doesn't like. All right, but it seems to me the instant political slant fails here. "The leftist Catholic social justice warrior must accept that abortion is wrong." "The conservative Latin Mass wannabe must accept social justice, a living wage and so on." I notice that our good radio host did not mention leftists also accepting the death penalty, which the Church tries to avoid but admits is sometimes correct. I hope he would not simply say "Pope Francis changed that," because I don't think the dear Holy Father can.<br />
<br />
But that is a digression. What annoys me about the argument that You Conservatives Must Accept Social Justice because it's Gospel is that it's not. There is no way the monstrous egg of "social justice" can be disentangled from the modern, deeply anti-religious and yes Marxist nest where it was laid. <i>Sell what thou hast and give to the poor and come and follow me </i>is Gospel and is a command given to the individual. It tends to his conversion. Social justice looks at people as things, and cannot help but say instead "this thing, x, has too much and has no right to it; it must be confiscated for the good of the poor -- more things -- so we get justice." Running through it all is original sin itself. The claiming of the divine prerogative, to judge right from wrong regardless of following Christ ourselves.<br />
<br />
Even so holy a person as Mother Teresa includes the great modernist social justice mistake in her Constitution for her Missionaries.* Here is someone who lived a life of total love given out to the poorest of the poor, to the dying and the sick in Calcutta and now, all over the world. But her charter says, "no one has a right to a superfluity of wealth while others are dying of starvation."<br />
<br />
And there is the social justice rub. Who ever said anyone had a right to their wealth? In order to make this judgment, and condemn the money, the money had to be earned first, by people whom Mother Teresa did not know and would not have condemned had she merely met them on the street. And the background for her ire has to be the universal human conviction (my economics book bluntly said "peasant," not human,) that the rich man is rich at my expense: he has not created, but has robbed me. If, say, Bill Gates' wealth is therefore a wrong, then there are two options, to confiscate it, or to see that a world is built such that no one else is able to amass wealth. Neither reaction is Gospel or useful for filling the stomachs of the poor. A third option, to preach the Gospel to Bill Gates such that he and his wife convert, and <a href="https://illinoisfamily.org/uncategorized/gates-foundation-philanthropy-cloaked-abortion/">give less of their money to promote abortion</a>, has apparently not been tried with much success. <br />
<br />
No, I don't have to accept that social justice, modernly defined, is in the Gospel. That kind of justice never involves love but always rather committees deciding who is to be hunted and how to divide up their things. If the Lord ever said "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need," I would be glad to know chapter and verse. Far from it, I think he told a story in which the owner of the vineyard asked, <i>"Am I not allowed to do as I wish with my own money?"</i> You see that's the odd truth: the Bible is perhaps "conservative" all the way through, which is why the modern world, having crowned man lord of all, hates it. And yet, as someone once said of the U.S. Constitution, it may be that the principles it conserves are very radical indeed.<br />
<br />
I learned one more thing but it's so unsavory that all you can do is shut the laptop and go to bed, saying to yourself "it's too much information and I'm sure randy stuff went on during the Renaissance too." Some aged and horridly elfin-looking cardinal was <a href="http://wdtprs.com/blog/2018/10/certain-sins-bring-infestation-of-demons-horrid-parties-close-to-the-most-important-places-in-the-vatican/">presiding over a (homosexual) sex and drugs</a> party in the Vatican when a guest overdosed and the cops were called. They saw to it that the cardinal 'skedaddled' before arrests were made. If only these men also patronized great art, people could laugh in five hundred years. <br />
<br />
*See <i>Something Beautiful For God</i>, Malcolm Muggeridge, 1971 (1986). </div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-58036351445597494102018-10-10T21:18:00.001-07:002018-10-15T06:56:08.968-07:00Still sitting at the counter at Schwab's<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Oh God. I have this thing where I just balk at shelling out $27 a month to "join" wonderful Bishop Barron's Word on Fire Institute. Granted, that's a cheap fee for all the scholarship and the on-line video wizardry he and his team do, but still. I think at bottom we nobodies are just waiting for our blogs to be discovered, so we can become "Fellows," never mind forming real communities and actually meeting each other, like, in our houses and stuff. (What a bore. "No American feels really free unless he is alone." I read that somewhere recently.) And all the Fellow positions have been filled, by Ph.Ds who are already famous anyway.<br />
<br />
Isn't that a terrible attitude? What about the joy of hidden-ness and humility, a la the Virgin Mary and all the saints? Then again, what about other paths and streams of scholarship, besides those laid out by the Word on Fire team? Not that the team aren't very, very good and noble.<br />
<br />
But one has to weigh it all. Thirty bucks a month, for there must be taxes, is thirty bucks a month. What do you really want, and how can you really serve? Is your "community" not exactly where you are now? -- and <i>not</i> trapped in the dream of influencing and catching the eye of someone else, who cannot say to you, <i>he that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life for me will find it</i>?</div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-41509761164212127992018-09-25T06:18:00.000-07:002018-10-15T08:08:42.700-07:00"... the sheep moreover are insolent" <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"So you wish to stray and be lost? How much better that I do not also wish this. Certainly, I dare say, I am unwelcome. But I listen to the Apostle who says: <i>Preach the word; insist upon it, welcome and unwelcome. ...</i> However unwelcome, I dare to say: 'You wish to stray, you wish to be lost; but I do not want this.' For the one whom I fear does not wish this. And should I wish it, consider his words of reproach: <i>The straying sheep you have not recalled; the lost sheep you have not sought</i>. Shall I fear you rather than him? Remember, we must all present ourselves before the judgment seat of Christ."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>From the Second Reading for Sept. 24, Office of readings of the Liturgy of the Hours (Monday of the 25th week in ordinary time) -- St. Augustine's Sermon on Pastors: "Insist upon the Message, whether it be welcome or not"</i></blockquote>
<br />
Driving home from work to see the full moon reflected in a glimmering slash of silver-gray in the dark gray waters of the local slough, itself a shadowy depthless presence in the surrounding forest night; you know how the mood of a lake changes, especially if you have vacation memories of marveling at water that was a sunny sparkling blue playground in the daytime, become a strange flat dark disc ringed with mysterious impenetrable vegetation, and possessed by sounding crickets at night; with the nice medieval music playing in the car (the library was literally giving unwanted CDs away, so I got a trove of Gregorian chant, some medieval Christmas, the odd Schubert and Debussy), -- doing this, I felt the Jeep was a more sacred space even than the church had been the Sunday morning before. Very wrong of course, but music will have effects, and the music for Mass had been more jamboree-like than usual. A small crowd of sympathizers, I won't say Commie-pinko plants, turned and clapped and whooped appreciation at the end, as usual.<br />
<br />
The nice young seminarian, thank God there are still some, gave a talk. He said he would be with us on weekends for the next five years of his discernment. He welcomed calls and emails from any of us, looked forward to getting to know us, and said his email address would be in the bulletin. I won't be crabby and uncharitable, and say how tempting it is to take him up on his offer and write, Dear good young man, I do hope when you get your own parish you can make some sort of inroads into the ghastly music we all must hear and have heard for fifty years. Why does Marty Haugen, Protestant wunderkind, still govern the liturgy? (I have an ancient, slightly saccharine book called <i>St. Michael and the Angels,</i> Compiled From Approved Sources, which tells me for example, "St. Michael offers to God the prayers of the faithful symbolized by incense whose smoke rises towards heaven ... his name is mentioned in the confession of faults made by the priest at the foot of the altar, and by the faithful in turn ... St. John Chrysostom, among others, states that 'When Mass is being celebrated, the Sanctuary is filled with countless angels who adore the Divine Victim immolated on the altar.' " Who knew? What incense? What Divine Victim? To think that this was the sort of thing got rid of for the sake of contemporary relevancy, and bongo drums.) ...The whoopers at the end are not the majority. I judge this by the grim, clamped-mouth silence of most of the congregation. Most of them are, at best, offering up their suffering to God. They don't want to clap in unison with the happy blonde at the podium, either.<br />
<br />
But I won't be crabby and uncharitable, for what do I know? Can't sing, can't read music, can't play an instrument. It's very wrong to suspect that musical people are oddly authoritarian. "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness," and so on. Why not ask to join the choir and make changes from within? Can you imagine the new person, unable to carry a tune in a bucket, suggesting to the seasoned performers and the professional choir director fresh from his role in the off-Broadway show in the next suburb over, that we start singing Hildegard of Bingen? Perhaps I should write a novel in which a crabby -- but musically able -- old woman does this, or at any rate writes that letter to the visiting seminarian. She could be formidable but elegant, and perhaps solve parish mysteries (who killed the blonde?), and have two cats named Sassicaia and Egypt.<br />
<br />
The CD in the Jeep, which made the moonlight on the water seem like something eternal and sacred that God himself and all the communion of saints were looking at right that moment, also has the word ancient in it. It was <i>Ancient Music for a Modern Age</i>, by an ensemble called<a href="https://www.sequentia.org/"> Sequentia</a>. They have been doing God's work for forty years. They have even recorded everything by Hildegard of Bingen, nine discs. Who knew?<br />
<br />
We began with St. Augustine telling his parishioners in Hippo around the year 400, that -- yes -- he and they were obliged to bring in straying sheep, even if the sheep were insolent and did not want to be retrieved. What an amazing thing. I'm just adding, at the risk of beating my own bongo drum that I may go on beating for a good long time, good music would help.<br />
<br />
<br />
<img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61p8FGaUfCL.jpg" /> </div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-63052260404261394382018-09-21T05:59:00.001-07:002018-09-24T19:46:49.736-07:00Prayer before rapier wit<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have an uncharitable habit of imagining how I may reach people through lofty and rapier-like intellectual scolding. The young things at work were outraged, yesterday, by whatever videos they had seen on some correct and outraged political site. "She interviewed this Trump supporter, and the guy didn't even know what a refugee was! He just kept saying, 'I don't believe that.' "<br />
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"Oh my God," the other young person said. She may have said oh my Jesus fucking God. "Oh my God. Kids are dying because of this asshole." And she stormed off, speaking in the asshole's voice. "Yeah, just fuck the kids, who cares."<br />
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These (mostly polite and good) young people have a raging passion for justice but would of course not dream of marrying their significant others, settling down, and having any children of their own, for a start. Never mind the college 101 indoctrinations, defining justice in very narrow terms, and still as fresh as yesterday. Naked but sterile evangelical outrage simmers beneath every dewy-complexioned surface.<br />
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And I fancy pondering how to correct them through gently startling rhetoric. Then I heard a caller on Relevant Radio, a lady marking the feast of the Korean martyrs, say that she brings a prayer journal to work and writes down in it the names of people whom her co-workers have asked prayers for. And I realized, that is the much better way. As with the Gospel reading of that very day, in which the Pharisee Simon loftily notes within himself that Christ cannot be a prophet, or he would know the truth about the sinner touching him, in other words he would see interior lack, and Christ responds to his thoughts -- she loves much because she is forgiven much -- so it would be more to the point for the outraged young people to know the offer of prayer rather than an offer of what I consider probing intellectual correction. Love first, in short.<br />
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The downside is that one must consent to be the sweet (I suppose) religious middle-aged lady at work, who says she will pray for you. Then again, if <i>it's totally crazy but you do kind of start noticing good things happening to you, it's so weird </i>-- maybe they would also think a thought, and crack open a book. </div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-48859468963036274712018-08-30T18:42:00.002-07:002018-08-30T18:42:35.301-07:00Serving<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For those of us who care, events are falling thick and fast. I wondered if perhaps we who care are living in a tiny self-referencing bubble. It seems to me all the people around me would simply blink at this, looking on the Church herself and Christianity in general as irrelevant, and so finding scandal within her, especially about homosexuals, a smirkingly comical irrelevancy within an irrelevancy.<br />
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But I may be wrong. There the headlines are, not shrieking but present, out in the world at Drudge and Yahoo. "Pope refuses comment." "Cardinals named deny," etc.<br />
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The events as they came to my attention, in order over the weekend (<i>and now we are approaching another weekend</i>), were:<br />
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Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan will investigate Chicago diocese: Cardinal Blase Cupich welcomes. <i>The hen investigating the henhouse</i>, I thought; these two liberals will come to a very satisfactory understanding.<br />
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Then that story vanished. Vigano says Benedict tried to discipline McCarrick, Francis rehabilitated him, and then for whatever reasons, McCarrick essentially appointed Cupich and Tobin (of Newark). <i>Ho ho, Cupich in the hot seat. Maybe</i>. Tobin, who in some pictures looks unfortunately a bit like Wolsey brought straight back and infuriated from Tudor England, now off to a synod on young people, the faith, and vocational discernment. I hope that will be the last tone-deaf thing the American Catholic church does for a while. <br />
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Then Father Robert Altier's magnificent homily at St. Raphael's in Minnesota from a few days ago, run twice in two days on Relevant Radio. I listened spellbound in the car before going grocery shopping and then listened again the next day (today). "Do you understand why all you hear is fluff 'n' stuff instead of good homilies?" he asked. Men who don't live Catholic morality will not teach Catholic morality.<br />
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But "the Virgin Mary's work has begun," he thinks. "Jesus is sending his Mom to clean the room."<br />
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And we must join her army, Bishop Barron agreed. He must be thanking God, if Cupich shooed him, conservative Thomist evangelizer, out to wacky California to make the best of it, that the best of it has been good. His Word on Fire ministry grows from strength to strength as far as I can see, and he in obedience has Chicago in his rear-view mirror.<br />
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And what do we do? "Join her army," "become the greatest of saints, to tower, because of these times, over the greatest saints of the past"? That was Father Altier's message. How to become so? By staying put, of course, or joining, by prayer and fasting and raising voices. But always be measured and charitable, as Bishop Barron's example shows. The Lady cannot make use, I don't think so anyway, of meanness and griping and interior wrath that does nothing. Like mine.<br />
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Amid all the stew of news and reports and ideas about launching committees and streams of comments on the Catholic websites' comment boards, I had a thought which is probably sterile and wrathful so I didn't put it out there. I'll put it here, where no one will see. I thought, a purge of the Church could start, and could make extraordinary progress in two weeks, in one: only let the Holy Father order that all priests in all parishes all over the world preach a homily, next Sunday, averring that homosexual activity is sinful. Not the people, not the inclination, the activity. We live in a secular culture for which homosexuality is the helmet of faith and the breastplate of salvation. Let the Holy Father command such preaching, and in two weeks you would see weeded out the men who can't choke out the words, and the faithful, soldiers (maybe unknowingly) in a different army, who can't choke down the message.<br />
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But here I'm being wrathful and proud. How do I know? Maybe lay-led committees investigating McCarrick -- even though he has already been truly found out and set aside -- are better. Maybe Cardinal Tobin is a very fine man whose prayers I am not worthy of. <br />
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And I was thinking at Mass this morning (the feast of St. Augustine -- our good Father skipped any homily at all, maybe he is planning a bombshell of some sort of his own for Sunday and desired to save his energy) -- I was thinking, you really cannot decide<i> how</i> you will act to become a greater saint, to "tower like a cedar of Lebanon over a shrub," as Father Altier quoted Louis de Montfort. That alone is ego. You must still yourself, somehow, to a core of obedience to a Master, and to right action and right words. The Divine Office, for the hour of None, has this Psalm,<br />
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My soul is weary with longing, day and night, for your decrees (Ps. 118 (119): 17-24</blockquote>
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Another thought. Years ago I remember hearing of veterans of World War II, that they tended to look back and say, of course in those days everyone either joined or knew they would be drafted. But whatever your anxiety, you didn't want to sit out this fight. "Everybody was going -- you didn't want to be the one who missed out." I think this may be like that. </div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-9031607399523049462018-08-14T17:42:00.004-07:002018-08-18T06:44:07.004-07:00The majesty of the package<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Don't be put off by the way this starts. It has its origin, you will see, in the comments board below somebody else's writing; so I had in my mind the same material everyone else was addressing, and I could plunge right in, having come to some of the same conclusions and naturally taking up the same aggravated tone they did. This is what we moderns call an "online community." I began to type ...<br />
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I notice the drumbeat of prayers for migrants at Mass has stopped, at least in my parish for the last few weeks. Coincidence? The effect of a new pastor? The hierarchy somewhere in a Chicago high-rise, deciding for a while not to rub the wounds of a conquered people, just while the newest homosexual abuse scandal now reaching up to the cardinals' level unfolds? But if migrants needed prayers last month, don't they still? Do you turn off God's attention and power based on a sort of Lenin-style assessment of who is more useful when?<br />
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"Conquered people" is a strong term, perhaps unfair. It occurred to me because of an unrelated issue, namely music. Once again on Sunday we were permitted only the "traditional Caribbean folk melody" for the Alleluia, which is all we ever get, and which sounds just like the preschooler's foot-stompin' beach dance tune you would expect. <i>Holl-lay, holl-lay, holl-lay, Looo-oooo-yah! </i>The recessional was a "traditional South African" song which no one knew, neither the good (Ugandan) priest nor the deacon nor the people nor, I think, even the man playing the piano in the choir loft. Interestingly, he had played <i>Panis Angelicus</i> during communion, when it could be safely hidden as background noise. The recessional therefore proved a mostly silent fumble. This is what conquered people are made to do: sing songs not their own. It's a natural and an age-old political move. Whereas at the close of a blessedly silent weekday Mass the celebrating priest, or even a member of the congregation, has only to begin the Lourdes hymn ("Immaculate Mary") and everyone joins, with no guidance from the piano at all. We react naturally to our own music. I might almost dare say ... we are ready to be led home, by and with our own music.<br />
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I chronicle and I express crabbiness about all this because [here we go] I am still thinking about <a href="https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/the-church-and-clergy-in-crisis-7-practical-first-steps-we-must-take/5872/">Elizabeth Scalia's article a few days ago at the Word on Fire blog. I </a>don't think it's worthwhile my being the fortieth commenter on a piece that is, very naturally, already being bumped down the roster of the blog's main page as new things are published there. But it got me to thinking in terms of <i>natural</i> and <i>unnatural</i>.<br />
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It was natural for almost all the thirty-odd commenters there to come up with simple, strong responses to it. The man in the street tends to do that. Never mind, they scoffed, Ms. Scalia's advice to the laity to form "investigatory panels" and "become the Church you want to be by being a conduit of love." Being a conduit of love (I scoff) won't stop the propagation of cheap music for example, which affects us in our official, public worship life, as whatever went on at a cardinal's beach house decades ago does not. Not that it does not, however: we do feel this week's dark news personally. Is there a Latin way to say "hard to be a Catholic," and capture the rueful endurance of<i> <a href="http://religiondispatches.org/its-hard-to-be-a-jew/">schwer zu sein ein yid</a></i>?<br />
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But to stop that, I mean bad music, takes power, and <a href="https://www.crisismagazine.com/2009/the-hidden-hand-behind-bad-catholic-music">after fifty years of other people's folk tunes, it looks like no one has that much powe</a>r. "I'm not giving the Church any more of my money" was a natural response too. So was the great call, the frightening call, the repeated call throughout the comments board, which perhaps cannot be answered in the man in the street's lifetime, or yours or mine -- because it means really facing Satan, all tolerant, loving, funny, and with great taste in the finer things -- "The bishops need to say homosexuality is sin." For it is not natural that a man should lie with a man as with a woman.<br />
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It's not very natural that Catholics, buffeted now by witnessing a resurgence of '90s style immorality among their priests and bishops plus the Pope choosing this moment to change the catechism, -- it's not natural that they should be comforted or strengthened when they walk into a Mass of bad off-Broadway music, of a dozen "extraordinary ministers of communion" including young girls in miniskirts and hairy-legged middle aged men in shorts and t-shirts, and of the whole congregation reflexively adopting the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/orans-posture-at-mass">hands-upheld "orans position" </a>when the priest does, because no one has ever told them not to. That was new to me when I walked into my parish church last summer for the first time in thirty years. I thought it made everyone look like ecstatic, village idiot snake-handlers. Then I did some of my usual crabby research and found out you're not supposed to do this "orans posture" wheeze at all. All I can figure is that our good bishops, who don't dare call out a fellow who preys on boys, are certainly not going to speak out on something so minor in the face of people and offertory-makers far too culturally Protestantized to accept rebuke. And who can always now rejoin, "Really? You're upset about <i>this</i>?"<br />
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Ah, to rejoin. The rejoinder -- the come-back. The coming back. The answer to all this mess is not investigatory panels, or being a conduit of churchly love, or even fasting as such. The answer is to make the Church and its Mass seem like something that is above and outside and truer than time or the world or men or sex or anything. We cannot do that, our leadership must. They do that by returning somehow to the majesty of what it was, to the package it used to show to anyone who walked in the door; the package unchanging no matter where it was found or no matter what poor sinner or downright creep briefly kept the door. The package used to say: "we have to do this, and say this, because it is true and our 'colossal Master' (G.K. Chesterton's phrase, about Whom Joan of Arc obeyed) -- because He commanded it. Yes even of us sinners." Returning somehow to the majesty of the package ... what, shall the College of Cardinals (minus McCarrick) admit it is all really dreadfully traceable to Vatican II? Shall they say, sorry, we lowered some bars there and it was a mistake? That really cannot be. If the Holy Spirit presides over other Councils <strike>it </strike> He must have presided over that one.<br />
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Perhaps what will prove to save everything will be that great Council's rumored exaltation of the laity and our responsibilities and rights. I don't know, I'm the man in the street, I never read the documents. Anyhow what previous Council ever insisted that the faithful, busy at loom and plow, should bestir themselves to "read the documents"? But suppose the laity now do take that responsibility, given from the Holy Spirit, seriously, and do read and do find their power, and start asking for old things? Unless of course they just demand validation for the new things they have been doing anyway, like getting divorced and taking the Pill. A hierarchy which can't condemn homosexuality may have a hard time pressing "Church teaching" on any other matter.<br />
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It may be that with my thirty years' absence I am insufferably behind the times. It may be that in fact the new and the young, starved of Catholic meat, have been asking for old true things and getting them, long since. It may be they are now middle-aged and making waves themselves. There are jokes on crabby online forums about Ugandan and Nigerian priests, doing missionary work among the suburban soccer moms of the U.S.A., pronouncing words like <i>magisterium</i>. Our own dear Father G. makes the sign of the cross after his homily, which is just what you can hear being done at traditional Masses on YouTube, Masses celebrated even sometimes by priests of those mysterious stern "Societies of St. Peter" (or Pius). They sign themselves before and after. Perhaps it had a meaning once. Wonderful Bishop Robert Barron comes to mind of course, talking of younger clerics feeding the starved.<br />
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But he's got these bloggers working for him who still seem to bar the gates, even emotionally, against the fuming man in the street, and the man knows it and that's why he responds with comments not remotely assessing her ideas, but simply brushing them aside. As if he is a force of nature, and knows that too.</div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-30863298524383651892018-08-12T19:46:00.003-07:002018-08-17T18:40:41.713-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i><span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Updated, August 17, 2018. </span>I have been unjust in doling out the word <a href="https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/praying-in-crisis-the-sorrowful-mysteries-of-this-moment/5880/">anodyne. Elizabeth Scalia's latest set of prayers and meditations is very good indeed, </a>much better than I could do. </i><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">What an amazing set of responses to <a href="https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/the-church-and-clergy-in-crisis-7-practical-first-steps-we-must-take/5872/">Ms. Scalia's article</a> at <a href="https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/the-church-and-clergy-in-crisis-7-practical-first-steps-we-must-take/5872/">Word on Fire.</a> They mostly utterly ignore her points, every one of them, and speak instead with almost one voice in what amounts to the writing of another article: whose theme is, "dear bishops, can you gather up your courage in both hands and say something less-than-glowingly-'accompanying' about homosexuality?" For if it's not to be said, because that's hateful, then what did ex-Cardinal McCarrick actually do -- besides predation maybe -- that was wrong? </span><br />
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<span style="color: #2a2e2e; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I read the article partly because I do believe Ms. Scalia has developed a following of readers who read her to ignore her, and to play among themselves in the quiet sandbox of the comments board below all her pieces, and I wanted to judge -- after a hiatus of a few months -- whether that is still true. I think it is. They see through her, and find themselves more interesting than she is. She is a talented word painter, but after a strong start at Bishop Barron's website about six months ago, turned rather anodyne</span></span></div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-75283942357240426522018-07-21T03:00:00.000-07:002018-10-15T06:54:44.193-07:00If I were texting my (adult) kids about organic wine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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My adult children and I do group texting. Today, if I were to give them my news of the day, it might go like this. </div>
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"SO I'm at a seminar and the nice man is talking about his organic winery and how they used to farm 75 acres with evil Monsanto pesticides and the vines all got crappy roots because pesticides wreck the soil and now they farm 35 acres with egg-laying wasps to kill the leaf-hoppers (bad insects -- and I'm thinking, how long does THAT take) and now the soil is all lush and they have sheep and cows to eat the grass, and poop for fertilizer. And I'm thinking <i>ooohhh-kay</i>, who collects all the bull shit (literally) and how long does THAT take. </blockquote>
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"And the winery now has gardens inside the rows of vines, taking up a lot of space that used to be for grapes but that now provides habitats for the good wasps that eat the bad insects. And I'm thinking, <i>ooohh-kay</i>, what if some of the bad insects still survive and cause a problem? And how are you staying in business when you have cut your productive land by more than half, plus use payroll to maintain the gardens? Plus they spray pulverized amethyst crystals on the vines every spring, because that's what the peasants of old used to do. It helps focus the light on the grape leaves and leads to desired nuances of flavor. </blockquote>
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"So I was going to ask what the hell BUT then somebody else asked 'oh don't you make Wine X, also?' And the nice man said Yes. 'And is that organic?' Um, no, but they hope soon it will be. </blockquote>
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<i>"Ooooh-kay</i>. So you have a Plan B winery that makes wine (and money) in the usual way, so you don't go bankrupt while you are slowing production to pre-modern levels, adding gardens and experimenting with cool, Pleistocene epoch-looking bull species and amethyst spray.</blockquote>
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"THEN I get back to work and my co worker who has been in the business for decades asks about the seminar and then says, 'Oh, I wish I had gone! I know them. Such a nice family. They sold the winery for sixty million dollars a few years ago.' </blockquote>
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"And I'm like 'OOOHHHHH-KAY so this is how you afford your Marie Antoinette Hameau farm with the egg-laying wasps and the cows and the sheep and the gardens taking up space in the middle of the vineyards. I <i>totally</i> get it. And I'm <i>really </i>glad you totally don't control actual farming of food products, because if you were in charge we would all starve. You wouldn't, but we would. And it turns out old Strom Thurmond got the sulfites warning label attached to wine, as tit-for-tat because the crusading lefties got the death label attached to cigarettes! (He was a Senator from tobacco-land, North Carolina.) I say good for him." </blockquote>
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And then I thought, all along at this seminar I had been gazing at a multimillionaire. In the flesh. I don't think I have ever really seen one. God bless him, may he and his family live and be happy for a thousand years. But let us be honest, too, I was in the presence of a multimillionaire, -- and a delightedly confident missionary priest. A totally untruthful one, but from his perspective, why not?<br />
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Earlier in the day the nice host on Relevant Radio played an old tape of (atheist) Penn Jillette talking about a fan who had given him a Bible, and of how he, Jillette, was touched and impressed by the man's sheer goodness, his exemplary concern for someone else's eternal welfare. He said believers, if they are serious, should do more of this. Even though their doing it means nothing because there is still no God.<br />
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Now the host of the show, the graceful and excellent Patrick Madrid, offered the old tape as something for all of us to think about. At first I was impressed, but as the day went on, I found myself less so. The main "pull quote" from it was Jillette complaining, 'How much hatred must you [the Christian] have for someone, to <i>not </i>tell them of eternal truth, of the fate of their souls, if you really believe what you say you do and you really believe the atheist is in danger?'<br />
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Mercy, you silly man, quite hateful yourself, I don't hate you. Not approaching the Penn Jillettes in daily life is not hate. It's still wrong, but it's weakness, not hate. It's our tacitly agreeing with the modern world's dictate that faith is personal and not something you bother other people with. And it is the fruit of a long faithful experience in history, that example counts more than anything.<br />
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But maybe we should send him Bibles. His fame now seems to be all about his dramatic weight loss; he tweets about not having consumed a single calorie in the last 81 hours. As for others, like the nice millionaire who believes in organic wine as Marie Antoinette believed in her lovely <i>Hameau</i> and admits equally as little of its absurdity, I said he was essentially a missionary priest. Did I walk up to him afterward and counter-offer a Bible, or a little fake-leatherbound copy of <i>Day by Day with Augustine</i>? I did not. I did ask about the insect population at the winery, and about whether he uses the "natural" copper spray called the Bordeaux mixture, which is pre-modern, non-synthetic, non-evil Monsanto, and toxic to everything. "That's illegal," he answered. I wish I were faster on my feet.<br />
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Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8731293526366589119.post-19987155437836859452018-07-06T08:14:00.001-07:002018-07-06T20:57:50.889-07:00Are you just visiting or are you a regular adorer? <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Heaven knows what calls a person to the Adoration chapel at a parish. For the last year I have gotten into the slight habit of going there at around noon or one in the afternoon, on my day off. It is just then that a little window of time seems to open, between morning chores and afternoon errands. I stop in for Adoration, for perhaps fifteen minutes. Sometimes I almost spend the full hour, if I take down a book from the shelves, and get lost in that. You can read St. Therese of Lisieux marveling at the "poor savages" who don't know Christ -- and people think her sugary? You can read St. Thomas Aquinas on how fast the angels move (instantly, from one end of the universe to the other at the speed of thought). Some books sneak their way into the chapel, as it were,without an imprimatur. You will find collections of "saints' lives" which include Gandhi or Martin Luther King. It only means somebody was cleaning out Aunt June's condo and tossed into the donation box any and all of her old vaguely religious-lefty books.<br />
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My dear atheist daughter, who doesn't know I go to Adoration but who is aware of what the blessed Sacrament is, opens wide her scientific eyes and says, "it's a <i>cracker.</i> You're kneeling to a <i>cracker.</i>" Mind you, she is also the one who is moving into her new apartment at medical school, on the very feast day of the saint I more or less joshingly chose for her a year ago, when I first (not at all joshingly but somewhat abashedly) returned to church after decades away. And after a full fourteen years -- like Jacob laboring for Rachel -- in the middle of those decades, among lovely people in a Reform Jewish temple. As I sum up to anyone who cares to listen about that spiritual adventure, the Jewish cycle and the sighed gentle hopes came to seem not enough. The sighed, gentle prayers, <i>"It would be more than we could bear, except that our little day finds its permanence in Your eternity,"</i> came to seem not nearly good enough. I want immortality. I want not to ignore the most important person who has ever lived or ever could live. I want moral heft -- life begins at conception -- and I want the intellectual and the artistic treasury of the Middle Ages alone, to say nothing of all the other ages.<br />
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So you see sometimes I feel called to go to Adoration. Having also learned to my puzzlement that "ninety percent of prayer should be listening," not talking, I sometimes try to "listen." To a cracker? No. Heaven knows I talk enough, so I try to at least stop doing that, stop with the <i>Lord, please do x</i> routine. My friend already knew about listening, just on his own. He goes to meet Jesus at a beauty spot, overlooking the ocean in Mexico. He describes what happens. "I got something to say to You, You got something to say to me." I was staggered at his real religious awareness. <br />
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I listen. It is quiet and dim in the chapel, and one woman left while I was there and another woman arrived. I'm looking at the plants and vases of flowers, wondering who takes care of them and who decides when one or two of them get too bedraggled to stay. Then I remind myself that I should be listening, and so I say: the blessed Sacrament is, dear atheist daughter, the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ; it is the same body the Apostles saw on earth two thousand years ago, miraculously really present here thanks to his very words at the Last Supper. Imagine being in the Upper Room. Could there have been a servant who helped lay the table and then went away? Could there have been a minute when a servant, outside the great event about to unfold, put down a bowl and Jesus walked in and they were alone -- and then the men followed in, and it began? But about the plants, does someone take them home and nurse them back to health? I could do that. I tried offering a huge houseplant to someone who seems to be in charge of many things up to and including the Art and Environment Committee, but I got no response. Still I'm "listening," or trying to, deliberately refraining from mentally reminding God what I would like him to do. <i>Lord, do we have to have so many lay ministers of communion? Must they wear shorts and t-shirts? And please look after ...</i> and so on, x and x and x.<br />
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Lord, really. I'm listening. What on earth are you going to say to me, that isn't just going to sound like me talking in my head? "Go work in a soup kitchen"? Go be like Dorothy Day, everybody's favorite safe, flaming liberal Catholic "saint," who pompously (and probably shrewdly) rejected the idea that she might one day be one, not because she was a political self promoter and <a href="https://www.crisismagazine.com/2016/is-dorothy-day-suitable-for-canonization">swooner over the best leftist violence* </a>but because -- she fretted -- sainthood would distance her too much from the cowardly worshiper? I am not making either up.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"...the point of Dorothy Day's repudiation of the label 'saint' when people applied it to her, [was] that she would not be dismissed so lightly. It meant that others, less generous and self-giving, were letting themselves off the hook -- the call to sanctity -- by placing her on a convenient pedestal; by inferring that saints are different in kind from us, rather than simply in degree."**</blockquote>
The next minute, the woman who had come in to Adoration after me leaned over and whispered, "Are you just visiting or are you a regular adorer? -- for noon to one?"<br />
<br />
I was startled because no one has ever breathed a word in here for the year that I have had experience of it. People shuttle in to water the plants, or they snore, or they rattle the ice in their huge plastic cups of water or latte or whatever they bring in, and then they burp, or they recite prayers in the tiniest, the most <i>sotto </i>of <i>voces</i>. Never speech.<br />
<br />
I whispered back, "Oh no, I'm visiting." I had the presence of mind not to say "just" visiting, because that word <i>just</i>, in that usage, so much suggests tentativeness or inferiority or what you might call half-ness. I didn't entirely dismiss myself, even though startled.<br />
<br />
And then I turned back and I thought, well Lord. Really? I'm listening for some understanding that is not me talking to me about what I usually talk about. I'm assuming I will know it because it will likely have to do with a soup kitchen. Or it will be "go promote the cause of my servant, Dorothy Day." And yet I get this plain sensible question. Are you just visiting, or are you a regular adorer?<br />
<br />
<br />
*"Is Dorothy Day Suitable for Canonization?"Fr. Brandon O'Brien, <i>Crisis Magazine</i>, April 19, 2016.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
</blockquote>
**"The woman who knew what it took to be a saint," Francis Phillips, <i>Catholic Herald</i> online, July 2, 2018. (The article is about St. Teresa of Avila, not Day.) </div>
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0