I've decided to go for a Mediterranean look

One of the television networks that have sprouted so abundantly in recent years, which show reruns of everything that ever was, has been regularly broadcasting To Catch a Thief. Whoever owns the network must have bought the rights to a lot of Cary Grant films, because it seems you can also tune in to Houseboat a lot. Not as good a movie, but noteworthy for the honest scene in which the young boy listens to the bell attached to a rowboat, where his father (Grant) and Sophia Loren are spending some tender moments. The bell doesn't ring quite rhythmically, but almost. And he is in love with Sophia Loren, too.

Anyway To Catch a Thief, having no such remotely dark moments, is all fun, charm, safe suspense, jewelry, sunshine and the French Riviera before anyone heard of Muslim no-go zones -- let's be honest -- and of course it's all the divinely beautiful Grace Kelly. By the way there is only one false note in Edith Head's costuming of her. That is the silly, unimaginative gold ball gown for the costume party near the movie's climax. It diminishes her looks, which would seem impossible to do. The gown is said to be "covered in gold mesh and fabric birds," which I suppose counts as imaginative, but who can see that on the screen? A long time ago I read a slight barb directed at Edith Head, attesting that, as satisfactorily pretty as her clothes were, she was essentially a pedestrian ("conservative" was the word, but that won't do) designer; further that Givenchy showed her how it's done in the black dress Audrey Hepburn wore as Sabrina. Credit for that little frock, either to Head or to Givenchy, has been a matter of controversy ever since Miss Head accepted the Oscar for Best Costume Design for Sabrina in 1955.

But we weren't going to talk about clothes, but rather about patio decor. I have decided to try for a Mediterranean look on my balcony this summer. Being myself not a gardener exactly but a grower of houseplants (hurrah for no weeding chores), I watch To Catch a Thief now to study the vegetation. Looking in on Netflix's Luxury Travel also helps.

The Mediterranean boasts four types of plants that seem unlikely climatic neighbors, but evidently are so, for there they wave and nod  -- or just bask -- in Grace Kelly's Monte Carlo as in today's millionaires' village retreat, Eze. They are palms, cacti, succulents, and conifers. Except for the palms they create an image of hard, random, sunbaked scrubbiness. Add clay pots, stonework, perhaps iron railings, and you have the beginnings of your Mediterranean look. I cannot add an immense blue sky and sea but I do have a plaster bust of the Emperor Augustus, quite large and handsome. Some trailing bright flowers will of course be appropriate. But one can't just fill a window box with fuschias either, and call it "Mediterranean," as I have seen done on some "how to" websites. It might be anybody's front porch in Illinois. On the other hand, more zealous websites offer more interesting suggestions, which are so authentic and full of stone walls, pools, open-air rooms, and views of, um, the Mediterranean, that their "Step 1" might as well be -- 1.) Go live in the Mediterranean.

My determining on palms, cacti, succulents, and conifers for the summer, not forgetting I own a fig tree also, surely right, means I must face a summer decision about the mostly tropical, lush-leaved philodendrons in my living room which have been waiting to go back outside all this long winter -- it snowed as recently as two weeks ago. And have been getting huger and huger. I cannot fit 1) them, 2) my lounge chair, 3) a small bistro table and chairs, 4) the green bench my dad made, which I rescued from being a ragstand in the basement of the house where I used to live, and which will now be a (Mediterranean?) plant stand, 5) Mediterranean plantings, 6), the fig tree, and 7) Augustus, all on one balcony. The whole feel of To Catch a Thief, of views of Eze, is expansive light and space, dotted with rock and dark green. Big flapping jungle houseplants under a lowering Midwestern sky are not that, plus, when the sky is not lowering but blazing hot, they get sunburned. So do orchids. It's true about them, you know -- when they put up a flower spike, be sure not to hit the buds with your fertilizer mist during the weekly watering. The buds, no matter how near to bloom, will turn pink, shrivel, and fall off. 

Dwarf papyrus in a watering can (shades of ancient Egypt!), some succulents (the Mediterranean!), a brown-red brick wall (suburban Midwest condominium construction, circa 1978! -- well at least in those days it was all brick). Can a masked ball with Cary Grant be very unlikely? 

"Sono la Vergine della Rivelazione"

Yesterday I came across the pleasant little story of another apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I say "another," because of course there have been many, and you may know much more about them all than I do. I have only learned about Lourdes by watching the movie The Song of Bernadette (look for Vincent Price's great supporting role as a skeptical small town official battling a constant cold), and about Guadalupe by watching Bishop Barron's Catholicism series.

Now we have the story of the Virgin of Revelation. She is said to have appeared to an angry man in Rome on a sunny spring day in 1947, just when he had been studying his Bible in preparation for a speech he wanted to give debunking her. He was an ex-Catholic who had become a Seventh Day Adventist (I know! In Italy?); his talk to his new co-religionists was planned for that afternoon.

On that sunny spring day the man, who had brought his three children with him to enjoy the park, looked up from his absorptions to notice they had gone. In a few minutes he heard their voices in a nearby grotto (I know! Rome is very old and is built on hills near the sea. Who knows what caves and arches and ruins and stonework must lie everywhere to hand? I guess there are also grottoes). The two boys and girl were all kneeling, gazing at something in the little cave, and repeating happily "Beautiful lady, beautiful lady."

At first the man saw nothing unusual but then came a light and everything seemed to recede. He saw a beautiful woman, black-haired, barefoot, dressed in a white robe with a pink sash and a green mantle, that is a long head-veil reaching to the ground. She clasped a gray Bible to her breast and stood on a black cloth, upon which lay broken fragments of a crucifix.

She said "I am the Virgin of Revelation," which flows more musically in Italian -- Sono la Vergine della Rivelazione is carved in the stone archway at the entrance to the grotto. Or at least it is in the old photo of the man, Bruno Cornacchiola, circa 1947, evidently re-converted and testifying to the small crowd there before him. He had been studying that last book of the Bible, Revelation, in order to debunk her in the park that day.

She continued, in what can only seem like a matter-of-fact, Italian mother, eat-your-vegetables tone, "You have been persecuting me. Enough of it now." She instructed him to return to the faith, and to go to the Pope with her own confirmation of the correctness of the dogma of her Assumption, which he, Pius XII, wanted to pronounce, and did pronounce in 1950. "My body could not and did not decay. My Son and the angels took me to heaven." Lastly she requested to have a chapel built at the grotto. 

The tale goes on, to give us the informal papal approval of the apparition, then the building of a chapel and the two "Miracles of the Sun" that occurred there before thousands-strong groups of witnesses, one in 1980(!). We learn of the order of nuns, the Sisters of Divine Revelation, who take their charism from it all and wear green habits in imitation of the Lady's mantle as they pursue their mission of outreach to "this confused generation". The place was named, by St. John Paul II, "St. Mary of the Third Millennium at Tre Fontane [the Three Fountains]." The Tre Fontane refers to a Trappist abbey of that name already present nearby. It is all closeby, in turn, to the site of the beheading of St. Paul two thousand years ago. (Did we mention Rome is old? I know!)

I must admit what first attracted me about this story was the Lady's fashion sense. She is so often shown or imagined in regal lapis blue and blood red. I like the idea of white, green, and pink. It seems so fresh. Do you suppose the day will ever come when the Lady appears to someone in jeans and a top? It seems too irreverent to bear. But on the tilma of Guadalupe does she not wear the garb of a 16th century Aztec woman, complete with the red sash of pregnancy?

As with Guadalupe, and Lourdes, so at Tre Fontane: the Virgin appears in the most desolate places of poverty and even actual filth. The hill of Tepeyac in 1531 -- well, we won't call it essentially the middle of nowhere, but it was a rugged tropical colonial outpost at best, surely. We know from The Song of Bernadette that the grotto of Massabielle was a dump in which to burn hospital waste. Tre Fontane in 1947 served, weirdly, as both a trysting place and a dumping ground for the remains of aborted children. The Lady is no hothouse flower.

It will seem a little twee (wonderful word) but I like to imagine, say if I were writing a story in which the Lady appeared in jeans and a top to a modern person, what that modern person would ask. The only correct question of course is 'what do you wish me to do?' but I think the modern person would think of himself and his dopey private curiosity first. That may be why the Lady confines herself to humble or even distractedly angry people -- unprepared people, who at the crisis at least have the brains to thrust themselves away and ask fearfully about service. The rest of us, the common half-educated types, clean, safe, proud, twee, might ask: what was it like to give birth, really? What did you eat? Did you ever wear jewelry? Did you like the house in Ephesus, -- after? So you were taken up bodily into heaven. Do you miss the dust of Judea on your feet? Are your hands calloused?

Even if you know you are, thankfully, too twee for apparitions, it would be amusing to think you might get a pleasant and undemanding dream on the topic. Last night I dreamed I had to have a tooth pulled, and it required something like a construction crane outside the building, and a suction mechanism. There was no sense of horror, it all simply was. Perhaps the Lady has a tart wit.

Beware translations

Who knew that you have to be aware of what translation of the Bible you use, not only so as to avoid flaccid modern language, but to avoid resurgent paganism in the twisted and disguised text itself? For example --

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void --

is not the same as

When God set about to create heaven and earth, the world being then a formless waste --  .

Why? Not only in lack of majesty and flow in the second translation. Also because the second translation presents the world already there, for God to develop. He is not the Creator: he is part of a pagan dualism, himself plus matter.

Not my idea at all, but so striking. It's amazing what you find drilling down in the internet, even before breakfast. See R.J. Rushdoony's "Translation and Subversion," Chalcedon online, Jan. 1 2005.  

Daily prompt?

I had been working (dear things), on a long turgid piece about "committing the enormity" of reading a papal document, Pope Francis' recent Gaudate et Exsultate; and about having joined the Word on Fire 'Community's' Facebook page, where the Papal Exhortation turned out to be their first topic of discussion. It drew -- the Exhortation on the Community's page, not my unfinished turgid writing -- its first share of trolls.

Then again maybe I was one of them. I didn't like the Papal Exhortation much, either. Francis seems to say that people who like Catholic doctrine are "gnostics," unsympathetic mere scholars of rules, cold and judgmental. Now that can't be. I just met a gnostic, and he fits the real definition: one who mulls and purrs over all knowledge as a sort of private mental toy, amusing in the bits of it which have amused the common herd across all time and civilizations. The gnostic is not a mid-1950s angry fossil Catholic yearning for the Baltimore Catechism. 

But time flew. Word on Fire 'Community' moved on to other matters. And after all one must get out of the rut of thinking one's own marvelous reactions to everything are so important. So someday-collectible, even. I hit delete.

It seemed better to clean house, repot a struggling philodendron, and take a pair of binoculars to the slough, and spot some blue-winged teals. "A mallard," my friend said that night, when I showed him a picture in a bird book. I said it was not, it was really a blue-winged teal. I had gotten a good look. "They're all mallards to me," he snorted.

We watched St. Vincent. He enjoyed it so much that in laughing and commenting on every third scene, he invariably missed the dialogue of the fourth. I've learned to laugh along, and then quickly fill him in on what just happened. We had a good time. 

Go to the cast-off book sales

I'm reading a biography of Jacqueline du Pre (Elizabeth Wilson, Jacqueline du Pre: Her Life, Her Music, Her Legend, Arcade, 1999). It stood out, dark, sleek, serious, from the other castoffs on the library's used book sale shelves. The name stirred a vague memory of something tragic, something a long time ago.

I like reading about musicians and music even though I can't play or sing. In truth I can't understand whole paragraphs, nay pages, of this biography. The author, a musician herself, delves enthusiastically into artistic and emotional assessments of technical work. She goes on about fingering, slides, portamenti and coda, but also discusses concerts as if they were painting or cooking. We have the "brushstrokes" of "that tragic, noble resignation on the glissando" or the "warm, nutty tone" of a Stradivarius cello made in 1680. "...by placing the thumb on the harmonic D and disguising the shift with a bow change, she could articulate the top note with immense clarity and power." One accepts it all kneeling, mystified.

What intrigues also in a biography of a musician is to meet artists who have an intellectual and a creative vocation, who can't pursue it in solitude like a painter, a writer, or I suppose a scientist doing research. Like an actor or a ballerina, the musician can rehearse alone -- but he cannot begin to bring both intellectual and physical work together without the company of other musicians. And yet unlike the actor or dancer, he doesn't require an audience as such. One fellow will do. Jacqueline du Pre, "Jackie," is described often playing happily late into the night with one friend or teacher, or perhaps in a hostess' home for a beloved audience of two. These intimates went away savoring "a never-to-be-forgotten evening listening to the D major Cello Sonatas by Bach and Beethoven." Perfect art, in perfect privacy, with perfect professionalism and perfect companionship -- it is all beautiful and solid and perfect. I like the photo of New Year's Eve in an apartment in New York, 1970. Itzhak Perlman, Artur Rubinstein, and Jacqueline du Pre play trios. Daniel Barenboim turns over [the pages of music as needed]. Champagne coupes sit on nearby little tables.

Another intriguing, and a related thing, that emerges from the biography of a musician is this: musicians deal with great art, but they re-make it as no other artist does. It's like a priesthood, maintaining a supernatural truth. Actors act lines and dancers dance steps, but no painter is permitted to work on a Raphael, or playwright to change a line of Shakespeare. (If those great men had left "scores"" to be re-painted, or rewritten, again and again for centuries, that might be something like music.) Even you or I could badly declaim or clumsily dance. But when musicians bring alive what was in the mind of Bach or Beethoven, they are themselves the necessary partner, operating from another language. We observe. Like the photographer in the New York apartment, we stand outside the priestly circle.

I like this biography in particular because it is so well written and because Jacqueline du Pre herself seems to have been such a joyous and delightful person. Occasionally the author mentions a bit of depression or frustration in her life, and I have not yet reached the tragedy, which was multiple sclerosis at the age of 28. The joy in the book seems to come from three factors which are a pleasure to immerse in. These are, "Jackie" herself, the artist fully happy in her work; the circumstances of her early success, which allowed her to fly busily about, from London to Paris to Berlin to London to Sermoneta -- where are the famed gardens of Ninfa -- and back to London again, making music, studying with masters, playing in the plazas of little Italian towns during summer teaching festivals; and last there is the early 1960s classical music scene in London. Naturally l know absolutely nothing about this, but it enchants. One has an impression of talented, eager young things rushing to and fro in the great city at all hours carrying their cellos, staying for months with friends who live near recording studios, and going into great concert halls to play and be starchily but sympathetically critiqued by very knowledgeable men and women in great newspapers the next day.

One wonders what comes first, talent, a joyous personality, or music? If I buy an inexpensive electronic keyboard and sheet scores simple enough for children, will I too eventually be able to get inside the mind of Mozart? Will I then know what musicians know? (Because I must say I don't care for the sound of the cello. It seems harsh and ugly.) For Jackie the love and knowledge was immediate. She heard a cello on the radio at the age of four and exclaimed "Mommy I want to make that sound." Luckily her mother was a professional pianist, and in time could even pull strings with a fairy godmother able to afford a Stradivarius. Again the almost supernatural, the priestly, shades to music.

Because I came across the name "Shuttleworth" early in the book -- that is Anna Shuttleworth, another cellist, now in her 90s -- I mistakenly thought here was a name from Jaqueline du Pre's parents' generation, maybe a name from the 1920s which my great favorite E.F. Benson, London gadabout, might have picked up and given to his character Olga Bracely. She is the prima donna of the Mapp and Lucia novels, who marries Mr. Shuttleworth and then sighs that she really should start using his name.

It turned out to be coincidence only. One grasps at straws. But Jacqueline du Pre's life and music- making in the 1960s jibe somewhat with the fictional lives and music-making in Benson's books of the 1930s. In both worlds people still entertain themselves. Everybody owns a piano. He too summons his characters for musical evenings, where the hosts play or, on grand occasions, hire famed string quartets down from London. The running joke of the series is that Lucia can always be persuaded to favor her friends with the Moonlight Sonata. Later, when she inherits a townhouse and becomes avant garde, it's "a morsel of Stravinski." She is at once a great snob and an ignoramus; if Benson had been writing in the '60s he would have had her angling to meet the exciting young cellist, only to cluck kindly at the tiny, tiny flaws in her playing.

Finally we consider the miracle of the internet, even as it touches this discarded biography of a great and lovely artist. Elizabeth Wilson is careful to catalogue where she listened to  recordings of Jacqueline du Pre's music, or watched old films of her happy in London (she was famous enough to have documentaries made about her when she was only twenty-two). In 1999 this research amounted to a pilgrimage route that the average reader would not be able to follow. Already "some of her performances were being re-issued on CDs," yes, but for the bulk of it Wilson went to the sources. She visited studios in London or at Danish Radio, or at the New York Philharmonic. A reader at that time would have had to do what we used to do: carefully jot down which album of which concert he hoped to look for in a local music store, then grab his wallet, walk out of his house, and hope for the best. Today we go to YouTube and type in "Jacqueline du Pre" and see a riot of information. We can watch films of her performing the Elgar concerto, conducted by Barenboim. We can watch bits of the very BBC television program broadcast for the first time in 1967. "We did not know what lay ahead," the narrator now says, "but we knew one thing -- Jacqueline du Pre would never be twenty-two again."

If it all sounds a bit sad, well yes it can't help being. But memorial funds, music buildings, and  concerts exist in her name. And as the biographer says, none of it can ever replace the voice which lives on in her audio and video recordings.

I met a gnostic

I have met a gnostic, and now at last I understand a little better what gnosticism is. Years ago in one of Paul Johnson's books, perhaps his History of the Jews, he wrote that "gnosticism is like a vine that winds itself around the trunk of a healthy religion" -- in other words it is something that approximates a religion but in fact chokes it. That still didn't tell me much, nor even does the definition of the word, which is simply "knowledge." It means knowledge in the sense of secret, wide-ranging amalgamations and distillations of any knowledge, known only to an elect, and based upon the idea that the world was created by an evil spirit. So as long as you know that and you're not evil, and naturally you are not, you can be bemusedly above it all. Whether there ever was a religion which its own devotees called Gnosticism, and whether or not it had buildings and liturgies, I don't know.

I suspect it did not, because my gnostic friend would not need them and wouldn't attend to them. I suspect his counterparts thousands of years ago would have been the same. What he has, is that special attitude that keeps him above and outside all people's religions, and even above and outside their whole lives, interior or exterior, ordinary or powerful. He's very cheerful about it. To him this perfect private attitude doesn't have a name, it's just the state of being true to himself and (bemusedly), to the human project thus far, across all time and space. In one breath he can mention the Ein Sof, gematria (both aspects of Jewish mysticism), Tao, corrupt government inflation statistics, how "Lucifer" seems like just a whistleblower against a bad boss, in short he can garrulously marvel at anything at all taking place or having taken place, lending mystery or having lent it, anywhere anytime, to today's "dark, interesting world." He is always safe above it.

From meeting him I would judge it's not so much that Gnosticism winds itself around the trunk of a healthy religion. That is academic talk. Rather Gnosticism winds itself around the human personality. It renders it, I suppose, a sort of self-appointed sponge of all wisdom, happy in its cool absorptions but unable to distinguish between bogus inflation numbers and anything at all of real importance. The Four Last Things, let us say. It recognizes the world as founded by evil, so it's exempt from responsibility in it. Nor can it allot to small things like bad inflation numbers their real importance. They do have some.

He is very nice, too. Is this what people mean when they say the opulent West is the Church's prime mission field?

Comfort zones

Go outside your comfort zone, and where does it get you? I went outside mine a few weeks ago, to borrow from the library a novel written in the 21st century. Normally I have a theory and rules about that, i.e., they're not that good so don't bother.

I am sure this particular novelist is a lovely person but her novel confirmed my theory and rules. I abandoned it after thirty pages. It was familiar: written as if by someone who had attended too many writers' workshops, and been mentored and edited by people who had done too much the same. I believe -- another theory -- that they are all taught to fill pages by minutely describing action. She crosses her legs, the slick polyester lining of her knock-off wool pants catching at her unshaved legs. Lord, had it been that long? Since Matt left? That's me, not her. But you see how it goes.

When you borrow a clutch of novels from the library and the rest are Georgette Heyer and Norah Lofts and Barbara Pym, and yes I do read men novelists sometimes and yes I can see why Barbara Pym's seventh was rejected by her publishers since it does very much resemble the previous six, lots of middle aged scholarly women fluttering about the vicar, still, -- when you borrow books at least fifty years old and then this new one, you spot a change. I think you spot a depletion in educational background, in a depth of material to write about. More importantly, you spot a change in what I might call the effort of tone. "Attack" perhaps, as musicians are said to attack their instruments as they begin to play. You miss the sense of a writer merely transparently struggling to describe, in beautiful language, what has never been seen just this way before. What you get instead is the trained, workshop voice: a consensus having assured the novelist "just describe anything, once you get going it's all interesting and true." Meanwhile, because she has not dug into her own ideas, her soul if you like, we meet no people in her first thirty pages whom we can really see, and see no houses we can really enter.

Norah Lofts, to take a random example of fifty years ago, is different. She effaces herself from the story in Which Way to Bethlehem? (1965), sketching natural scenes of generations of people building a road by dropping stones in a muddy path each time they go to the well to fetch water; or of an old slave woman in ancient Korea trying to earn a little money telling fortunes, and unwittingly telling such accurate ones that her angry clients pay her almost nothing but lie awake all night aghast. Georgette Heyer, well, she is just Georgette Heyer. In the past I have abandoned her, when her downmarket characters' dialogue becomes too annoyingly well-researched to be borne. But one forgives her for her titles -- Regency Buck! -- and her ability to have a lofty lady on page one respond to deadly insult by lifting a lorgnette and exclaiming " 'This is indeed the language of the theatre!' " Things like that. I promise I will still try the occasional modern novel, but for a long time they have seemed so predictable. They just don't go well.

Part of the reading for the day happened to be -- the day's reading. Have you ever looked at the "Readings for the Week" in your parish bulletin (of course you have) and wondered, mercy, what holy rollers read the Bible just any old day? The readings are very specific and relate to each other, having been chosen for the purpose by whatever group of scholars assembles the Lectionary. On Monday, March 5, you might have read from the Gospel of Luke about that time the ex-neighbors tried to throw Jesus off a cliff.

No kidding. We pick up the thread at Luke 4:27. He is in Nazareth, talking about no prophet meeting faithfulness in his own country.

"Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed but only Naaman the Syrian [we had just read that story, from the Second Book of the Kings]." When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. But he passed through the midst of them and went away. 

This is the sort of thing you encounter when you are either a convert or a returned prodigal. You dig, perhaps partly to distract yourself from the awareness of being outside a comfort zone. And this brings me to the topic of the newest Catholic internet sensation, Lizzie. Have you met her? She's a delight really, all of 23 years old, having been on YouTube "since I was sixteen, in 2011," and now having converted to Catholicism and, in tears of happy anguish, told all her hundreds of thousands of subscribers so. She's on the cover of Catholic Herald, which is a bit like being on the cover of Rolling Stone I suppose. She pulls nervously at her long bicolored hair while marveling to the camera how amazing Eusebius is. She is also planning to produce a video all about her upcoming first confession, which I hope someone will dissuade her from doing. Surely that would mean breaking the seal of the confessional. The recompense for this new obedience, however, could be that she may add it to the sparkling list of new sacrifices and obediences which she has shouldered already. I don't smirk, I think truly if the Holy Spirit is working astonishingly in anyone in this internet age, it is working in her.

Now at my end of the Catholic involvement spectrum, life is a bit more humdrum. On a clear late-winter night with the constellation Orion still reigning high overhead, I drive out to a local parish and find my way (with help) through cavernous dark "multipurpose rooms" and big stairwells to an upper conference room, where two women wait to give a talk on the characteristics of a vibrant church. How do we reach the non-churchgoers, the people who are content to be "spiritual but not religious," especially the young who tick the Religious Affiliation box "none"? They are kind and good but they explain the empty churches. And (one lifts one's lorgnette perhaps), can they be really happy?

Three more women enter. And that is all. We congratulate ourselves on the advantages of a small, intimate group, and get underway. As the hour or so moves on, I probably make a bit of a nuisance of myself by remarking the confident, counter-cultural "truth claims" of Islam, and by noting what we all look like to the kind, good "nones." We look sweet and out-of-touch. Why are we attracted to this meeting but no one else is? And never mind reaching the spiritual but not religious, what about the happily non-spiritual? I remember reading very recently that "it is always Satan's desire to persuade us that life with God is half a life." Is that persuasion easier now than ever?

Perhaps not necessarily. One of the women told us how many ex-Catholics are to be found at the rock-and-roll megachurch down the street. How do we get those people? They have found a vital comfort zone. So have our Muslim neighbors who, one of the women testified, begin training their children to memorize the Koran at age four, and whose mosques are filled. A silence. "Serve coffee," the nun joked. For that night, under the cold glittering spread of Orion, that was the best we could do. 

Small experiences, saved

Blonde, yellow and flaxen-streaked blonde, natural I think. Loose ponytail. A tiny bit past first youth, and knows it. All the rest is diamonds -- ears, fingers, throat -- and the polished white, paper-white teeth everyone seems to have now. It even, the polishing I mean, seems to change the way they talk, as if suddenly they have a new and attractive slight underbite; the polished-teeth people slightly thrust out their lower jaws, do you notice? and enunciate better. Once years ago I overheard a dental hygienist advise a young woman not to get them, because they look so odd. Now those of us with natural, dusky teeth look odd.

She wanted advice for wine for her dinner, and the man who normally gives her advice had the day off. "I could try," I offered. (I love the brief line from the fine character actor John Abbott in an old Star Trek episode called "Errand of Mercy." As Ayleborne he says humbly, "I am the head of our Council, perhaps I would do," when Kirk has landed on a planet Much Like Earth and asked who's in charge here. Of course it turns out that Ayleborne will more than "do," he is actually a projection of some sort of pure energy field, deigning to look human to give Kirk a "reference point.") Anyway, I offered to try the food and wine pairing game for La Blonde.

She was planning that night to cook roast pork with bacon gravy, sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, and green beans. And her husband had said, to go along with that, she must "Get a big cab."

No, no, no. Why impose a fudgy, blueberry-spice Napa cabernet on that delicious meal? Instead buy a richly gossamer Chablis, or an Alsatian pinot blanc with that aromatic streak of honey down the middle, or get a fine sparkling wine from anywhere. If you must have red get an old ... no. I was going to say a Gran Reserva Rioja, an elegant brick colored Barolo, but no. No reds. 

I said all this with the utmost in Aylebornian humility. But of course it would not do. "My husband only drinks cabernet. We never drink whites. He said get a big cab."

Okay. I managed to ding the husband by selling the wife a Chateau St. Jean "Cinq Cepages," great, big, suitably expensive, but not -- completely -- a cab. And why has the Man with the Day Off, who always give her such good suggestions, not led her and her husband's shared palate elsewhere by now?

I really must cope with my lack of charity. It's the writer's stock in trade, though. How else can one observe the world from one's own irreplaceable and precious angle?

Spring wildlife has not really returned yet to the sloughs near here that we like so much. The water that will be covered with green lily pads in summer is now open and shining blue, with only the curving shores made of rank upon rank of last year's washed-beige reed stalks showing where land actually is. The woods beyond are an endless tangle of brown and sunlight. A bit of patience and a pair of binoculars were rewarded only with a river otter crashing out of the reeds and swimming through the cold water, then a red tailed hawk overhead, and a lone songbird nearby, like a dull dun sparrow with stripes on his head, that I don't know.

Do you remember the old movie The Greatest Story Ever Told? It's not so great -- see the intelligent review at the charmingly named DecentFilms.com --  but one part struck me as right and as giving information necessary to know. We see scenes of chaos in Jerusalem, as we are to understand it, just before Christ's time: everything and everyone is a whirl and a welter of brown and gray rags, violence, sickness, panic, and at the last, bloodied hands bringing up and steadying a lowing black calf for sacrifice, the huge knife under its neck. The camera swoops up and out to a bird's eye view of the city, with the Temple at its center, and then to white dots of people in a wilderness below and outside the walls, all journeying to the river where John the Baptist stands shouting "Repent!" Now any city anytime may be, in places, a welter of violence, sickness, and panic. But the strength of this visual teaching message, I thought, was good.

You will have to pardon me for "publishing" this, a bit unpolished. But I had an unfortunate event recently, wherein a blog post saved in draft was in fact utterly lost after hours of work. No very great loss, but still.  I learned that if you go ahead and publish, and then hit Ctrl and P, you can at least preserve the wonder of it all the old fashioned way, on paper.  

Against poverty

" 'Sell what you have and give to the poor, and come and follow me.' " And the young man went away sad, because he had many possessions.

In a way I am the young man who goes away sad, because I have many possessions. But I quarrel just slightly, if I may, with this idea that poverty in itself is good. Following Christ, yes. But after you  give away your wealth and follow Him, then there must be some other tasks you will do besides aiding the poor, because now you won't have any wealth to give. I suppose you go out and pester other people to give theirs. And then in the course of time everybody is poor and the religion is over.

People in study groups explain away the 'many possessions' line by saying it really means the parts of your life that "own" you. That's nicer to think about because you can just pick something spiritual or non-threatening. We all like our specific possessions don't we -- like Georgie with his bibelots, they are ours -- but this easier interpretation doesn't match the plain sense of the text. And I still quarrel with the exaltation of poverty itself. I have my grandmother's old Sunday missal, full of garish glossy mid-1950s paintings showing the Mysteries of the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, and so on. Below the painting of the Nativity (third Joyful Mystery) is a prayer in which we contemplate the manger and ask God to grant us "the love of poverty."

I don't understand why. I was, for a time, what I consider "poor." Not hell-of-Sudan poor, but drowned in credit card debt and wearing my sister-in-laws' hand-me-downs when I was forty. It was not fun, peaceful, or holy. Yes, I know St. Francis of Assissi gave away everything and kissed lepers, and I know Pope St. John Paul II gave away his teaching salary, had no home and slept on a desk in his university office, but I can't help suspecting these people were free to do so because they didn't have to worry about survival. About gas bills and mortgages. Francis must have attracted followers whose wealthy families sponsored them out of pity, and anyway it was the Middle Ages, who wasn't poor? And by the time John Paul was a bishop and Pope his daily survival problems were over.

Only that's entirely silly and cynical, isn't it? Francis still had to eat even in 1220 (although it's unpleasant reading how much the saints denied themselves in food or sleep or both, and how young and worn out they tended to die -- coincidence, much?), and so did the future Pope in occupied Poland. Anyway that is the whole point of sainthood. It is something beyond the capacity of ordinary people: they were "free" to give everything and follow Me because they had superhuman faith and acted against their own best, worldly interests come what may. And they were rewarded with survival. The path to impoverished sainthood seems awfully circular, or just awful.

Even if we are not saints but ordinary people, I don't understand the hatred of ordinary possessions as such. Of course you can have too much meaningless stuff, and of course buying or collecting can be a bandage on an interior sore that needs more substantial attention. And you can't take it with you so why are you bothering, yes yes. But it also seems to me that God did not make an impoverished world.  If God loves poverty then why aren't all trees black, all flowers brown and all animals gray? It seems to me God takes pleasure in resplendent matter, in peacocks and tigers. And why is there art, and why is art human? It seems to me also that there is a certain grace and honor given to God in living as well as one can while remembering of course there is more to life than this -- and a daily grace and honor given to God includes appreciating and caring for possessions. If not, if poverty is the great ideal, then why not also sickness, dirtiness, or illiteracy? And if concern for possessions robs us of attention needed for grand things, prayer for example, why wouldn't poverty also rob us of that needed attention?

I don't see why one gigantic swathe of human nature which can be for the most part harmless and can lead to all sorts of good things, like oh I don't know the whole of Renaissance art for example, should be wrong. Now lots of "gigantic swathes of human nature can be for the most part harmless and lead to good things," and yet we don't ignore their darker sides do we. Interest in sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll come to mind first I suppose. I get it. But the one carbuncle attaching to this condemnation of possessions, nowadays, is the eternal and triumphant liberal creed beside us and bestride us, which says Yes! Of course too much wealth is bad, and liking stuff is pathetic and unhealthy! We'll tell you how to redistribute it, to whom, and what you don't need, and we'll create the leadership and the laws to make sure this happens. Finally we'll see justice done! You agree, right? ... and that's the carbuncle. I think of it as a foreign growth that slows a ship down and diverts it, or perhaps grows all over it and smothers it. Or let me mix a metaphor: it's not so much a foreign growth but another master, which has a great deal too much power already and which, given the slightest obeisance or cooperation, does not like further dissent.

Anyway if we love poverty do we see the perfect Christian society in Venezuela? In North Korea? Sudan? Poverty is good, right? Don't we even speak of "God's poor," as if they were better people and he loved them more?

"Sell what you have and come and follow me" is one of those commands that no one, no one is going to try except the saints. Far from being like us and ordinary and relatable, they are very unlike us indeed. They will go on seeming so to me unless you can find me a middle class saint who kept all his stuff, enjoyed dusting his bibelots, and also gave something to the poor, and is still considered holy. I almost think it's the Gospel story itself that matters, as a story. It at least puts an ideal into mankind's collective head, or a diagnosis, for saints specially to use.

As far as the non-threatening interpretation of the text, allowing that the "possession" you must relinquish is some interior idol that owns you ("you know what it is," Bishop Barron says confidently in one of his talks, and I'm thinking -- I'm not sure I do ... cocktails?), after all I may know what mine is. Mine has always been the ambition to be a famous and influential writer, even (holy of holies) a full time writer earning my living by it. I don't think a day has gone by since I was twelve that I haven't thought, how can I approach that market or this, how can I get noticed here, there, or anywhere? After all, are we not obliged also to make use of our gifts, even in this huge world full of people trying to do the same? Now to give that possession away, and "follow Me" -- very well, that You can have. But it's paradoxically hard to do. You end up publishing your post about it, secretly thinking, ah, now, at last perhaps.

          

Why The Seven Storey Mountain?

Nine hours of sleep is enough. Get to bed at a decent hour, set your alarm, get your ass out of bed, bundle up, scrape the ice off your car, and go to Mass on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul -- that was January 25th. Pray for whoever it was under the blue tarp, on the driver's side of the smashed car, along the icy road yesterday morning. A dozen police cars, lights flashing, the empty closed road, the quiet and patience of all the other drivers obediently crowding into one lane; then a jack-knifed semi and two or three flattened small trees in the median strip, all witnessed that here eternity and the world just met.

I had been reading and since have finished Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. It was one of four spiritual classics offered for sale at Bishop Barron's site Word on Fire. I thought well yes, I'll get it, but I can just as well buy it and the other three from Amazon.Smile cheaper, and make the half-percent donation to my local parish. This wasn't mean of me, I hope.

Thomas Merton's prose is beautiful, better than his poetry, but something about him annoys me. Why is his story considered so remarkable? Because he had been known in the publishing world since childhood -- his grandfather worked for Grosset and Dunlap, he met "Bob" Giroux and Mark van Doren at Columbia -- and so when he became a Catholic and a monk, the word spread? ("A Trappist, no kidding! Well well ... say, tell him if he can give me eighty thousand words, I'll take a look at it. He had a way with words as I recall." Pause. "Are monks allowed to write memoirs - at thirty?" Professional chuckle....) Then there is the whole business of his own hermitage on the grounds of Our Lady of Gesthemani in Kentucky. I've seen photos, it's a lovely little house. What did the other monks think of his being allowed this treat? Did he need such quiet and privacy, or was it a reward for being a rainmaker for the firm?

The Seven Storey Mountain doesn't even seem very spiritual. Three or four times in the book, he suddenly outflows with a short paragraph that seems to come from outside himself, and to be wise. You'll know because you'll be startled, and underline it. Otherwise he seems to be always looking at himself, admiring himself and marveling at his journey.

Often it's a literal one. From the interesting childhood and adolescence in Bermuda, France, and England to the specific geography of Manhattan streets, churches, and college campus sports fields, one gets the impression of someone privately telling a circle of friends, not so much anything spiritual that they can use, but rather: Ah yes, remember? I left all that. I left it. In fact I would even say (it's me talking again, not him), that in the chapter on his trip to pre-Castro, lushly Catholic Cuba, he writes the only psychological explanation I have ever read and begun to understand, on why some people enjoy really eat-everything, ride-the-local-buses travel. Admitting that he survived "the perilous streets and dives of Havana" with probably angelic protection, he says,

... this absence of trouble, this apparent immunity from passion or from accident, was something that I calmly took for granted. God was giving me a taste of that sense of proprietorship to which grace gives a sort of a right in the hearts of all His children. For all things are theirs, and they are Christ's, and Christ is God's. They own the world, because they have renounced proprietorship of anything in the world .... 

Maybe not too many travelers think in those words, -- and again, if this is a spiritual classic for everyone, what does all that mean? -- but the attitude of own-the-world confidence might be common. Merton here sounds as if made in the very mold of his own grandfather, "Pop" of the childhood chapters, whose loud, American (of course) tourist enthusiasm embarrassed the boy living, for the moment, authentically with his artist father in a hamlet in the Auvergne.

He may own the world but he perhaps should have explored his own backyard more, or read more comic novels. As we read on we meet his "little man" for example, the mysterious Indian "poor little monk" Bramachari, whom he met among his young Columbia friends and who seems to have introduced Merton to the idea of "spirituality" being the possession of all religions. This man sounds just like the Guru of E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels. He too wafted about, penniless and peaceful, boarding with and teaching meditation to wealthy middle aged ladies (and running up liquor bills) until their husbands had had enough. When "Daisy's Guru" was found out as a London curry cook he decamped in the night with the silver .... The decade is right, too: the spiritualism-mad, table-turning 1930s. Did Merton never crack a smile at himself?

For that matter, did he ever have a backyard to explore? Not really. For all I know Thomas Merton may be among the greatest saints in heaven, and it may be most uncharitable to pick out the annoyances in his most famed book. But the curmudgeons who give it bad reviews on Amazon notice what I do. They notice the endless word painting about landscapes, and the tales of a sad little orphaned family -- he had one brother -- brought up helter skelter and pulled in and out of schools in Europe and America without much rhyme or reason, none of this background striking him as perhaps explaining some emptiness and anger. About three fourths of the way along in his story, he does, as one curmudgeonly reviewer says, go into sheer raving. He discovers Harlem, and the plight of the Negro. It's all the "furtive sensualities and lusts of the rich whose sins have bred this abominable slum," and so on, pages' worth, only by the time the crusading Russian baroness who raised his consciousness about it asks him "Well Tom are you coming out to Harlem for good?" to help, he had made up his mind about his vocation and had been accepted into the monastery in fresh, rural Kentucky.

He seems to show a pattern of discovering and condemning evil, and then of turning on his heel and walking prayerfully away, full of "peace." So do we all, we sinners, but can he never crack that smile at himself? As a very young man he bowed his head before his generation's wholesale, amorphous guilt at the coming of World War II. It was the inevitable wages of their evil. He was in his early twenties. But then he had to think very hard about whether or not he was willing to be drafted and serve. Odd logic, no? And why do anguished pacifists always want to be stretcher bearers? There is the Quartermaster's Department. Ask around. My father did.

And what of the great sin in his life? -- the one that got him rejected from the Franciscans and that you cannot find in the pages of The Seven Storey Mountain? The one you have to go to Wikipedia, for example, to sniff out? Apparently he had an affair and got a girl pregnant in England when hardly out of his teens. He was swiftly bundled up and shot off to America, to live with, or at least near, Pop. Of mother and child nothing was ever known. They "may have died in the London Blitz." "The child has never been identified." It was as if Merton was a wayward prince and heir, desperately requiring all this protection.

What bothers me (about this episode) is the way Merton harps (throughout) on the theme of the evil and filth of his early life. Because he cloaks the actual event, but we know from other sources that this is the big one, we are left to presume (unless we hear of something worse) that by filth he is talking about a girl he once loved and about a son or daughter who is his. As the abbess interviewing a postulant remarks in the novel In This House of Brede, " 'A cold heart is no good for a religious.' " And what also bothers me is that all the fine people Merton went on to meet and, some of them, to draw into the Church after his example, "Lax" and "Rice" and Mark Van Doren and Bob Giroux and the Baroness and all the rest, never not a one of them said you know Tom, the better part of faith might be to go back to England and find that girl and at least be a father to your child. The only one who comes close, and it is to Merton's credit that he chronicles this, is the priest in the confessional in New York who lambastes the weeping man after the Franciscans reject him. "He gave me to understand I was wasting his time and insulting the Sacrament of Penance by indulging my self pity in his confessional." You cheer for that priest.

Now, who knows? The woman herself or her family may have had so much of the future Father Louis' annoyances that they were glad to hand him his walking papers and shrink into anonymity from him. But by now my impression of the writer is of a rudderless, unhealthy personality, and I am only halfway through. And the book is said to be a spiritual classic.

While finishing it I cheated and looked ahead, as you see, at Wikipedia's article on the whole life of Thomas Merton. I learned he "battled" with his abbotts at the monastery he had been so happy to enter, about being allowed to leave, rather frequently it seems, to travel and live out the famous writer's life of scholarly correspondence and conferences that his books had earned him. Just turned fifty in 1966, he also undertook a serious love affair with a young woman who was his nurse when he was hospitalized for back surgery. Forays into Zen and American Indian mysticism -- in general the hunt for mystic experiences and the freedom they give the community of mystics above religion, since who is to say what God may not vouchsafe to his best creatures? -- that is my judgment of what he  was looking for -- these explorations continued apace. He foreshadowed them when he described his first few nights in Our Lady of Gesthemani at the age of 25. (His life is so full of genuine adventure we forget how young he is throughout.) Disappointed at the "icy" reading material he is given, which prudently discourages the newcomer's hope of any "summits" or otherworldly contemplative joys, he writes,

...I was left with the impression that contemplation in a Trappist monastery was liable to be pretty much secundum quid [i..e., true or fruitful sometimes, as far as it went], and that if I had a secret desire for what the lingo of the pious manuals would call 'the summits' I had better be cautious about the way I manifested it."   

Here the former lycee schoolboy also objected to bad transliterated French, particularly the word "vouchsafe." On top of everything else Merton knew full well, and he was told by people who knew, that his vocation was writing first. The writer wants quiet and solitude -- a little hermitage -- the writer wants to have or invent experience -- travel, mysticism, love affairs -- the writer has almost an extra organ where is housed lack of charity, which he needs to look askance at the world and chronicle it with his precious comments added on, unlike any other writer's: so Merton sneered at ordinary people's "unsophisticated" taste in movies, or at his grandmother's wasting her life putting on cold cream, because she hadn't got grace, or at his fellow postulant "Fat Boy," who couldn't hack the Trappists and returned to the world. True, Merton is young all during a lot of this. Some writer once said the young are righteous.

I would not for a moment want to give the impression that I dislike The Seven Storey Mountain because it shows the author was imperfect, or chose the wrong path in life. He may stand among the greatest saints of heaven. And I must disclose some small prejudice against him, as he disclosed the angry priest in the confessional. Years ago I wrote an article lamenting my spotty Catholic education, and I mentioned that I knew nothing of one "Thomas Merton." An old lady wrote me in the days of letter writing still. She exclaimed with underlining, "Thomas Merton was a devil! He turned Buddhist ...." I never forgot her vehemence.

I dislike it because the author seems to me such an unlikable man. Here is someone who, for all the beautiful prose, knows in his bones that he is on his own and so is everyone else. Well, alone except for God, who, on the last pages, offers to Thomas Merton a sort of grand doxology, in italics. You have to read it to believe it. " 'You will be praised, and it will be like burning at the stake ....' "

The Seven Storey Mountain was offered for sale on Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire website. But in one of his many excellent YouTube videos, the Bishop once said that religious journey memoirs are not very interesting in general because they are all the same. The convert, the returning soul, whoever, are all "influenced by" this book or that, this teacher, that friend, this mysterious "pull," this set of coincidences (frankly) or some other. The theme of all of them must be, here I am, a brand plucked from the burning; aren't I marvelous, and aren't you glad? Though the writers of religious journey memoirs will not like to hear it, it's Christ who is interesting, not us.

In a way it's easy to write a brand-plucked-from-the-burning memoir. Merton shows how: word-painting about landscapes and some blushing acknowledgement of past foolishness. But that leaves another category of book, the true spiritual classic, which I submit The Seven Storey Mountain, religious journey memoir and a cagey one at that, is not. So then what really is? 

Paradiso

My dear things! Fatheads!

Just random notes, you know.

In the middle ages -- remember not long ago we were reading that biography of Caterina Sforza? --  aristocratic ladies (and don't we sometimes wish we had been one of them, instead of the farm wife all our ancestresses likely were) aristocratic ladies were happy if they could have among the rooms of their palaces, or their husband's hunting boxes, a "paradise" of their own: a cozy set of rooms, more like an entire floor at a fine hotel today probably, but still a relatively small, private, warm-in-winter, cool-in-summer interior, decorated as they liked, and meant to be a feminine refuge from whatever loud public life their husband's or father's career required of them. One imagines stucco walls hung with Renaissance Madonnas and tapestries from Ovid, and young girls playing lutes amid plashing fountains and parrots. Only no tropical monkeys please, even if they were a gift from some duke's possessions in New Spain. Anne Boleyn, sensible, cold weather Renaissance Englishwoman, disliked them and so do we.   

Clearly the weather is cold outside the windows of my paradiso. Still it is a great joy to get home from work at an unreasonably early hour, having gone in to work at an unreasonably early hour, and to be able to light the little lights and mix a cocktail, and just safely watch the snow.