Are you just visiting or are you a regular adorer?

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.

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 cracker. You're kneeling to a cracker." 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, "It would be more than we could bear, except that our little day finds its permanence in Your eternity," 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.

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 Lord, please do x 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. 

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. Lord, do we have to have so many lay ministers of communion? Must they wear shorts and t-shirts? And please look after ... and so on, x and x and x.

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 swooner over the best leftist violence* but because -- she fretted -- sainthood would distance her too much from the cowardly worshiper? I am not making either up.

"...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."**

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?"

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 sotto of voces. Never speech.

I whispered back, "Oh no, I'm visiting." I had the presence of mind not to say "just" visiting, because that word just, 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.

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?


*"Is Dorothy Day Suitable for Canonization?"Fr. Brandon O'Brien, Crisis Magazine, April 19, 2016.

**"The woman who knew what it took to be a saint," Francis Phillips, Catholic Herald online, July 2, 2018. (The article is about St. Teresa of Avila, not Day.)    

Road trip! Northbound in June, in southeastern Illinois. Don't mind the dirty windshield. 

The geometry of spring, and so on

You can't hear the frogs peeping, but they were. 

The march of the trees? 

"Spring beauty," I think. 

This is what they call a "controlled burn." Look closely. 

As evening falls ... did you know Saturn and Mars were keeping company with the gibbous moon at 3:30 in the morning, all this past week? Also Antares. I think. 

The geometry of spring in the neighborhood

Dwarf papyrus ...

... can you recreate the mud of the Nile in a watering can in the suburbs?

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.