Marginalized

A strange experience the other day.

Once or twice in the week I attend daily Mass. (Never would have dreamed I would, but there it is.) Once in a great while, but more frequently of late because of the shortage of priests, Mass is said by an elderly and very delightful Father who is too frail to descend the altar steps to receive the offered gifts, and too frail also to distribute Communion himself. He leaves it to the eight or ten lay ministers who "rush the sanctuary -- mostly females," as other and crabbier bloggers snort, while he sits and contemplates either from the chair beside the altar or from his tall hidden stool just behind the altar.

Ah, well. The Church permits communion from "extraordinary" ministers, even though I call them lay because they are laypeople and they are not extraordinary, they are routine. It's the priest who is extraordinary. Was it really our own late Cardinal Bernardin who was responsible for creating Communion in the hand received from lay ministers, and is it owing to him that this one-off "abuse" became the norm around the world?

At any rate my difficulty is that when good Father W. says Mass, it is not possible to "get in the priest's line" as I always prefer to do to receive Communion. We must all get in one of five lay ministers' lines. For a short time I used to receive in the hand from either, not wanting to seem conspicuous or holier than thou upon first returning to Mass a year or so ago. Then I thought better of it -- plus I learned a little about the danger of the Host "fractioning" the more people handle it. I resumed my childhood practice of receiving on the tongue, which, from a lay minister, is rather a ridiculous proposition except that at least one is not contributing to any more fractioning. I have seen ridiculous things all round when it comes to the whole business of mostly badly dressed retirees and communion in the hand. I have seen lay ministers themselves, on the altar, receive communion on the tongue (then why are they distributing it?) and I have seen them cross their arms and bow the head to refuse, say, the Precious Blood, but still distribute that. I have seen Mass-goers kneel to receive the Host on the tongue from a fellow retiree. Basically it's a right old mess, as Basil Fawlty could say.

What I did not know is that it is possible to refuse Communion from a lay minister, and to wait for the priest, no matter how frail he is. (One reads of firmly progressive priests refusing to do anything but distribute in the hand, but this is a "grave offense against canon law," so says the internet source I suddenly can't find even though I just saw it ten minutes ago.) The lesson that the faithful may turn the tables has been shown me, twice now.

We have a Polish lady who attends Mass frequently at the parish. She used to come with two friends, whom I have not seen in a long time. One Palm Sunday they all arrived wearing red cloaks with a painting of Christ the King on the back, and the white eagle of Poland on one side. I looked it up and found out that a few years ago Poland dedicated itself to Jesus Christ King of the Universe, and those are the cloaks you wear to show allegiance. And then, months later when she was alone and frail Father W. was our celebrant, and I had learned his habits and was idly wondering how she must feel at being compelled to take the host from a lay minister, because of him -- she refused to do so, and waited. Boy did she wait.   

She got in line, bowed politely to whoever it was when it came her turn, firmly shouldered past her and went and knelt actually on the altar steps, in front of the Crucifix. I thought she might be going to say a prayer of spiritual communion and then return to her pew. No such thing. She knelt and waited. Everybody finished Communion. She knelt and waited. It began to be very embarrassing. She knelt and waited. The hosts and ciboriums (ciboria?) were returned to the Tabernacle. She waited. Then good Father W., at some point before ending the Mass, exclaimed that he hadn't seen her and toddled back to the Tabernacle, got a golden bowl, got a Host, and gave it to her, on the tongue. She returned to her pew with a small smile of triumph.

More months pass. The second time that life's lottery put this combination together, a few days ago, was more serious. There the Polish lady was in her pew, sans cloak, and I thought, good grief, I hope it isn't Father W. again. What if it is? Perhaps she will rethink her severity.

Eight o'clock. There arrives the frail priest, in white because it is still Christmas. He grips the handrail and climbs the side steps. Oh God. It's Father W.

Mass goes on and on. It's really only a few minutes to the climactic moment, but Father introduces everything with short, folksy, and thoughtful comments, so it seems like forever. She gets in line. Of course he sits again at the altar and contemplates. She bows politely to the lay minister, and kneels at the steps before the Crucifix. I think, Lord have mercy, I don't have her courage. Besides, this is the custom of the community, it seems rather prideful to snub it. I had said as much to a scholarly friend after my first go-round with this experience, and he answered, This lady comes from a very traditional country -- and besides, we are talking about receiving God himself!   

She kneels and kneels and it just goes on and on. The good Father does not look to right or left, from his position behind the altar. No lay minister approaches him and whispers anything in his ear. The Polish lady is stuck behind or to the side of a largeish poinsettia tree. It may be he cannot see her. But it goes on and on. Communion is finished, everyone is back in their pews. All the Hosts and the golden bowls are in the Tabernacle and the rest of the Precious Blood has been "reverently consumed" I suppose in the hallway near the exit. Near the table of hand sanitizer pump bottles. Father W. finishes Mass, blesses everyone and begins the frail singing of "Silent Night."

I am no moral warrior but I do find this outrageous. Not a single person breathes a word of support -- and we yammer, or we're yammered at routinely, about "the marginalized in our society." Bullshit. No gay, immigrant, or trans is as marginalized as this woman, and there she goes on kneeling, like a character in the old The Lottery movie that we were all made to watch in high school to learn about the hypocrisy and jungle cruelty lurking uniquely beneath middle-class American life. She was kneeling in a church, during Mass, at communion, ignored by her fellow suburban well-meaning open-minded Mass-going Catholics.

I'm no moral warrior, in fact I resent this woman making a spectacle of herself and me too, but during "Silent Night" I left my pew, went up with trepidation and knelt beside her. I said to her quietly only that I lacked her courage but respected it, and after a pause I said I hoped God would bless her. She seemed to be almost crying. She seemed to make a slight sibilant sound that might have meant "thank you" or might have expressed annoyance at my interrupting her prayer. Years ago I had a German neighbor lady who used to hiss at the birds and squirrels as she drove them away from her garden with a golf club. I returned to my pew and somehow she got her communion. So the good priest is not that frail. It all took, on my part, hardly more than a minute. I left flustered. The same gaggle of older men chatted in the narthex after, as if nothing had happened.

Strangely, in the succeeding few days I have had positively zero desire to return to weekday Mass. I am sure I will do so, but meantime I have known that complete, satisfied, not bitter but totally dismissive, suddenly-gelled carapace of confidence that one might feel after a bad first date or a failed first two weeks at a bad job. Wow. Not doing that again. That is not what I go to Mass for.

And yet the carapace must crack, one must go, even if it should be Father W. and the Polish lady at every single one including Sundays for as long as one lives. After all Mass is a thing unto itself, regardless how you feel about it. After all she showed the courage of the Christian martyrs, in a new and awful sort of arena. Witnessing this experience, you must face whether religion is a pleasant little interior hobby, to be caressed and played with like a kitten but put down when it scratches, or whether it is truth to face embarrassment for. I don't know of much that is harder to do than defying your peers. The foreigner, the missionary, kneels alone. 

Having knelt for half a second also beside the poinsettia tree, I can testify that it was not big enough to hide her. She was clearly visible from the altar.     

Four complaints about Christmas Eve Midnight Mass

You cannot call yourself truly crabby unless you complain about Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. So here are some things.

Of course the good people of the choir, who have been practicing since October, would not dream of singing traditional carols for the half hour "choral prelude" before midnight. There were ten songs, many of which began with a few bars of a familiar melody, and then veered off into the narrow shallow well trod ruts of the "contemporary." Not a single one of these little tunes will live beyond the minutes it took to sing them. Because why on earth would it make any sense to sing ancient carols whose whole point is their association with the season, once a year, for the enjoyment and edification of a church packed full of people who only attend once a year? I know right?

Then there was the matter of the chant, that I have only heard twice in my lifetime, once in high school and once last year at this very parish. I used to think of it as a sort of litany of creation, but it has a name: it is the Proclamation of the Nativity, and was regularly chanted before Midnight Mass until Vatican II dispensed with it. Pope St. John Paul II revived it, and because the world saw it on t.v. once a year at his Christmas Eve masses, parishes around the world have sometimes revived it too. In an authentic literal translation of the Latin, it recites the stupendous events of spiritual history preceding the birth of Christ according to Biblical time, that is, yes, as if creation happened six thousand years ago and as if we know the precise date of the Exodus from Egypt, and so forth, thereby. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops provides a kinda-sorta version, with timid and jarringly faux-scientific "untold ages" or "several thousand years" standing in for the robust proud dates of the original. A musing, faculty-lounge worthy "around the thousandth year since David was anointed king" replaces "the one thousand and thirty-second year from David's being anointed king," for instance. The point of this polite avoiding of dates seems to be to not appear fundamentalist, which is quite hilarious when you think about it. The sophisticate whose judgment we fear, on that score, already thinks we're fundamentalist because we're at Midnight Mass worshiping a doll anyway. Why not enjoy the poetry of the robust dates?

Anyway my complaint is that this year my parish didn't provide the proclamation at all. Disappointing. Maybe next year.

Then there was the matter of the Prologue to the Gospel of John. We changed that too, because of course we're more advanced than the saint and Beloved Disciple who also wrote Revelation. Just a tad: where the great line reads, through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race [really originally, men] (John 1:4), the lector -- a woman, a lectress? -- carefully and pointedly intoned, "this life was the light of the human races." Ho ho, I chortled bitterly in my pew, but wasn't the joy of it all, once, that all men are one in Christ Jesus? What races are we talking about? Isn't "what divides us" usually bad? Or, have we circled back in our lofty and open-minded wisdom to 1930, or perhaps 1830? And shall we start measuring skulls again, and deciding who is better?

Then came the great moment. Mind you, all along I am from time to time asking God to forgive me for sneering even in the middle of Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. The good deacon read the Gospel, and he got confused -- I thought -- and read the wrong one. The ruffling of pages from the pews, where people were trying to find his place in the worship booklets, must have alerted him, for after fumbling through something about Joseph deciding to take Mary into his home anyway, the deacon paged through his own lectionary at the pulpit and then finished with Matthew 1:25. He had no relations with her until she bore a son.   

This was something of a minor tragedy. An actual knot of tension seemed to collect and then fray out in the air. The church was full of people who will never come again to Mass until next year if that, and they heard one of the most problematic texts there must be in the Gospels, heard it flatly proclaimed in what, to the English ear, can only be language that said "of course St. Joseph, foster father of the Son of God, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, had sex after, like normal people."

I looked up this line in both my two Bibles, the Douai translation made by Englishmen in France in Tudor times, who knew they faced hanging, drawing and quartering if they snuck back into Good Queen Bess' realm to say a Mass in a private home, in a nation that had been Catholic until the day before yesterday; and I looked it up in the New American Bible, translated by scholars who I think are careful above all of the opinions of sophisticates. The Douai translation for Matthew 1: 25 lays out the line in almost exactly the same English. And he knew her not till she brought forth her first born son. But the fathers of Douai added notes about the truth of faith, which the fathers of the New American Bible do not. There are "divers examples," the former say, that this word until represents a manner of speaking in Scripture, to denote what is done regardless of the future. God says I Am till you grow old (Isaiah 46:4). Does this mean He then ceases to exist? King David's wife Michal had no children till the day of her death (2 Samuel 6). Did she have some after?

The New American Bible fathers simply say "the Greek word for until does not imply normal marital conduct after Jesus' birth -- or exclude it."

Those are my four complaints for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Purblind music, no proclamation, giving St. John what for, and dropping on unsuspecting people what seemed like the bomb of news about Joseph and Mary's postpartum sex life. One more thing I was puzzled to know, and so I looked up this too, is where the good deacon flipped ahead to, to find that Gospel reading from Matthew. I thought he may have found some random Sunday. It turns out he was in the right place all along, he just omitted a lot, or perhaps our Mass booklets were printed wrong. His reading really ended exactly where it should have done.

In my grandmother's old Missal from the early 1960s, the Gospel readings for the three Masses of Christmas Day, midnight, dawn, and daytime, are only from St. Luke or St. John. Could the fathers of the Church have once understood that problematic texts from St. Matthew, while never hidden, are also not to be hurled at once-a-year visitors on Christmas Eve? -- especially in this modern era when the faithful, researching notes in a modern Catholic Bible, will find no help there? Who decided to impose the difficulties of Matthew on Christmas, and why? My first impression of it, bitter and crabby and ho-ho-ing in my pew as I had been and then alone by lamplight, ignorant as I am, -- was, this was malicious. And I should know, right?       

Incredible that I forgot lemon bars

My daughter wants the recipe for lemon bars. There is only one recipe, of course, my own. I thought it would be the work of a moment to rummage among the 600+ posts I had to upload overnight, into Pluot, when poor old At First Glass went kaphut at the loss of the domain name. And yet lo! Search though I might, it seems I forgot to import "At First Glass turns four -- and bakes those classic lemon bars," which first swam into our ken on New Year's Day, 2012.  

Now we might think lemon bars are too ordinary to be worthy of discussion. Who has not learned to make them in a long-ago junior high school home ec. class? Who has not enjoyed them at dozens of Fourth of July picnics and PTA bake sales ever afterward? Here we are, on At First Glass's fourth anniversary, mucking about with (appropriately enough, to be sure) preschool-level treats while grander blogs are fishing ("crabbing") for their own Dungeness crabs, making green lentil soup with curried brown butter, or serving up orange-clove chocolate chip pancakes with coffee-clove syrup.

Yet I submit them, for a variety of reasons. They are simplicity itself. They are a delight to prepare, requiring the use of only one mixing bowl, which can do double duty for the preparation of both crust and filling. There is no need to fuss with softening or creaming butter, nor with greasing a baking pan. Made with fresh squeezed lemon juice, they are the most scrumptious morsels imaginable -- as with so many delicious things, it is their great buttery richness which satisfies you and prevents you from devouring the entire plateful.

And why else? Once upon a time, I made these for some evening PTA function. They lay, all anonymous and humble and ready for any hand to choose among them. People milled about in the blaringly lit, crowded gymnasium, mothers, fathers, grandparents, children. Preschoolers. I happened to be standing chatting with someone, when I saw a woman pick a lemon bar, take a bite of it, pause, and then throw it in the closest garbage can.

Witnessing that, I could only guess that this poor soul had never tasted good, properly made lemon bars before. Are they available in a box mix? Probably. Was that all she knew? Perhaps. It must have been the intense, unaccustomed flavor that put her off -- or perhaps she didn't like lemon and didn't realize until too late what these were. But how could anyone not know? Had she missed that day in Mrs. Pemberton's home ec. class? Is her name legion? All the more reason for me to do my small part today in getting the word out, to dear poor souls everywhere, about this great, commonplace, origins-lost-in-the-mists-of-culinary-prehistory cookie bar.

Lemon bars

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Have ready two 8 x 8 x 2 baking pans, ungreased.

Mix together in a large bowl:
2 and 2/3 cups flour 
1/2 cup sugar

Work in with your fingers until the mixture is moist and crumbly:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter


Divide the dough in half simply by taking it up in fistfuls and putting it alternately in the two pans. Pat the dough down and bake each pan 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from oven.

While the dough is baking, mix in the same mixing bowl
4 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
4 Tablespoons flour
6 Tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice 

Pour the filling over the partially baked crusts. Return to the oven and finish baking for 18 to 20 minutes, until the bars shrink away from the sides of the pan and the edges toast just a little. Let them cool before sprinkling with powdered sugar.



Postscript: do we dare mess with such beauty? Years ago, as Chicago Baking Examiner, I shoehorned this recipe into Examiner.com's random "Vodka month" theme by suggesting a vodka icing to replace the dusting of powdered sugar the bars usually receive. A plain sweet icing starts with 3 Tablespoons of hot water in a bowl, to which about 2 and 1/2 cups powdered sugar is added; you beat the mixture until it reaches a good consistency for spreading or drizzling. Any liquid may be substituted for the hot water, depending on the flavors in the baked treat you plan to glaze. And so, -- vodka with lemon? Or gin .... 

First time at a Latin Mass

I attended a Latin Mass for the first time, at St. Joseph Church in Rockdale, about half an hour east of me, a tiny old village caught up on some very steep hills between the I-80 expressway and the Des Plaines River, south of Joliet. A small, old church, in the old, spangled-ceiling and Corinthian (golden) capital style; about 150 people, of the same wide variety of ages as in any parish, including quite a few obviously growing young families. Many women and girls wore chapel veils, even little toddler girls in pink. Each (somewhat rickety) pew had large missals full of golden-bordered photographs, not only of priests at various parts of the Mass, but also of ancient illuminated manuscripts; at the beginning of this Saint Edward Campion Missal was an exhortation from the publishers hoping that many more houses would take care to reprint these ancient and beautiful testimonies.

We were celebrating today, bizarrely but for a sound procedural or calendrical reason, the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany ... there was an altar rail. Everyone knelt by fives and sixes. No one says "Amen." There is no question of a chalice and communion in both kinds. Ten people indifferently dressed do not pump hand sanitizer beforehand, and do not then drink down the last of the "Precious Blood" in a hallway after. No cell phones rang, although I imagine they must do sometimes.

Above all else I was impressed, not so much by the Latin, which after all does cloak meaning, and not even by the invisible and modestly talented choir (though that was a relief). I found myself impressed by the altar servers. They were four young men, plus a boy and an even smaller boy, and what I think is a "subdeacon," a man around fifty who stood and simply faced the congregation a lot. So much for the Novus Ordo caterwaul about girls "stepping up to serve" because the boys won't. The boys will serve, I daresay, if the job is serious and they are treated seriously about it. They were dressed in the old style, black cassock and white surplice, not the vague sort of baptismal shift a la Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972, that looks all right for boys and for girls with their hair hanging down their backs, and they had full jobs to do: much kneeling, incensing, bowing, and holding out of thick beribboned book. One young man corrected a boy's mistake with just one flaming eye, it seemed to me. Here is continuity, it seemed to me: at least a chance that these are tomorrow's priests, whereas the altar girls can only be the mothers of tomorrow's altar girls -- which is exactly what they brag about on FaceBook.

And I don't for a moment hold that the Novus Ordo Mass is not the same as the "TLM," the Traditional Latin Mass. Clearly, behind the Latin, they are essentially the same, especially since more traditional translations have been put into use in the last ten years or so. What must be done away with next, I hope, is the excessive lay participation. The six altar servers today were like a liaison between the priest's work at the altar, and us. They left us free to be the faithful. Incessant lay participation is oppressive and the seedbed of irreverence. They gum up the work because where they want to serve, the work must be altered for them. If nothing else, they alter it by their appearance, their attitude, and their numbers.

All that aside, I can begin to appreciate why so much of the Mass used to take place behind a "rood screen" in English churches for example, for it may as well do so. The men at the altar -- climbing the mountain, facing east with us and for us -- need scarcely turn around at all. And I can understand why Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and other woolgathering types would have exchanged love notes scribbled in their very Psalters during, or why young Italian dandies in particolored hose might have wandered in whenever they liked, to see who was there. Yes, the vernacular was a good thing, for it had to have refocused comprehension. 

This experience also makes my grandmother's old Missal all the more useful, for it is the English-language "TLM," for the full year, forever. I wonder if "our Lord" -- as today's Father only ever called him during his homily, and as my own father only ever called him -- he was never the casually familiar "Jesus" -- would permit me to read those Masses whenever I like, and if he would count them as such. 

I think I made someone angry (but first, let's try to rescue an orchid)

I am quite stupid -- you should know this about me right away. In fact I tell the good Lord this all the time, and I am only occasionally guilty of false modesty. For example, regarding the corporal works of mercy -- feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, and so on -- I tell the Lord, "I have not done a single corporal work of mercy in my life, but I am very stupid, so you must now show me exactly how I may do them. One can't simply walk into godforsaken neighborhoods with fruit, or into prisons and say, here I am to help. Although saints do (see Mother Antonia Brenner, here)."

And God has been kind and has shown me, plainly. Recently when I was at the church, on my way out of the narthex, a man who helps run the St. Vincent de Paul society happened to be busy in the St. Vincent de Paul kitchen, arranging foodstuffs. So I knocked on the half-open door and talked to him for a few minutes. It was exactly as if God were saying, This is the St. Vincent de Paul kitchen, d-----t. I learned, "We could use more canned fruit." So I bought some.

It's the same with orchids. A few years ago I bought this Maxillaria sanguinea, above. It flowered precisely once. One time, one flower. When well kept, the plant should display a knot of little green bulbs sprouting fine, lush grassy foliage, with soon an abundance of full-lipped, maroon lady's-slipper-like blooms. After its first and only show, I put mine outside on the porch of my apartment for the summer. Rain, fresh air, and humidity are said to be good for orchids. In the dark wee hours of one summer night, I heard in my sleep a strange, juicy, loud sort of crunch-croil-crunch. The next morning, all but two of M. sanguinea's plump little green bulbs were gone. Eaten.

I thought I might nurse it back to life, and so after some dithering I eventually planted it in a large safe pot with some other specimens, in fact the usual supermarket Phalaenopsis. The poor remnant stayed barely alive, but that was all. I never dreamed that M. sanguinea, trim fine boat, might have different watering needs than three huge Phalaenopsis floating like ocean liners in that sea of processed bark chips (which I might douse at the kitchen sink once in ten days) that inexperienced growers like to use for all orchid re-potting needs.

Today was the day the light broke. Of course. They're different. Pot it in some tiny pot and water it much more often. Who knows what might happen? D-------t?

Who knows what might happen, also, with the angry lady who snapped, via email, "Please take me off your subscription list. Thank you."

This has nothing to do with orchids.

Regarding this I thought, mercy, good woman, I have no control over anyone's mailing list. I got on it myself months ago, I think by saying "Oh! Sure," to some person I actually knew and was speaking to, in another room just off the narthex. It happened that when I had a question for the people on that list this week, about how one does that peculiarly modern corporal work of mercy which may encapsulate and promote all others -- I'm talking about praying to end abortion -- I reasoned, Why not ask them all in general? And I plainly wrote,

Does anyone have any experience just going by yourself to pray outside a PP* site? I went to the Flossmoor location one Saturday recently because the 40 Days for Life site showed someone else had signed on for that hour. When I got there, a man was there praying but he said he had just stopped by to pray because he had the time. Whoever was scheduled didn't show. 

A little later, some parishioners from St. Laurence O Toole arrived and said it was better not to go to PP clinics alone for personal security reasons.  

 The PP clinic on LaGrange is 5 minutes from my house and I could easily spend an hour there on my days off (which are random because of my work schedule). Does anyone do this or is it not safe? I found the experience of praying at the Flossmoor site rewarding and I am just looking for other thoughts.

And I received a few helpful answers and then, today, the cold command. Take me off your mailing list.

Who knows, it might not be my short letter to forty or so acquaintances and strangers which prompted that command. Perhaps somewhere in the addressee list is someone else whose name my lady suddenly caught sight of, and remembered she loathes. Or maybe my lady is just busy cleaning up her spam folder, and is still polite enough to say "Please" and "Thank you" about it.

Or else she is outraged at the idea of anyone's standing athwart, even in prayer, a woman's "right to choose." For myself, I would not even argue that point anymore, nor any of the usual points regarding abortion really. The legal and political ships have long since sailed. The commercial ship too. You cannot live in the modern world and not support companies who support Planned Parenthood. Not to mention your taxes. It's almost comical. I go to the grocery store after an hour of vigil and find even my eggs have a "Susan G. Komen for the Cure" stamp on them. So I am there outside PP* for me. I'm not completely stupid. All I can do is eventually stand before God and, when he asks me, "What did you do about the worst evil of your time and place?" say, Well Lord, I stood and prayed outdoors.

There were about fifteen of us. Quite a few people driving by on a chilly, blowy Friday honked their horns and flashed a thumbs-up. Later I got an update through my email telling me that this morning was less busy than the usual Fridays, but that Tuesdays seem to be picking up. Perhaps the women are being forewarned.

Shall I cheerfully report all that to the email list, and accidentally forget to expunge my lady's name beforehand? That seems rather mean and self-regarding, perhaps prayer is better for her and me too.


*Planned Parenthood 

Laughing in five hundred years

It's always a good day, don't you think, when you learn one interesting thing and one annoying thing, and both from the same source (Msgr Swetland at Relevant Radio)?

The interesting thing was that "my yoke is easy and my burden light" means that what you are inclined to do or have a vocation for, is the easy yoke and light burden. Now I don't think the church marks out every old predilection we enjoy as a vocation, certainly not, say, bank robbery. Blogging, maybe. I'm pretty sure there are only two major ones, either marriage or the religious life; but still the yoke as the hand-carved harness fitted to the individual oxen, and therefore very right to wear, is an enlightening image. We wear that yoke in order to better follow Christ, yes?

The annoying thing was the claim that one must accept all the gospel, even the aspects one doesn't like. All right, but it seems to me the instant political slant fails here. "The leftist Catholic social justice warrior must accept that abortion is wrong." "The conservative Latin Mass wannabe must accept social justice, a living wage and so on." I notice that our good radio host did not mention leftists also accepting the death penalty, which the Church tries to avoid but admits is sometimes correct. I hope he would not simply say "Pope Francis changed that," because I don't think the dear Holy Father can.

But that is a digression. What annoys me about the argument that You Conservatives Must Accept Social Justice because it's Gospel is that it's not. There is no way the monstrous egg of "social justice" can be disentangled from the modern, deeply anti-religious and yes Marxist nest where it was laid. Sell what thou hast and give to the poor and come and follow me is Gospel and is a command given to the individual. It tends to his conversion. Social justice looks at people as things, and cannot help but say instead "this thing, x, has too much and has no right to it; it must be confiscated for the good of the poor -- more things -- so we get justice." Running through it all is original sin itself. The claiming of the divine prerogative, to judge right from wrong regardless of following Christ ourselves.

Even so holy a person as Mother Teresa includes the great modernist social justice mistake in her Constitution for her Missionaries.* Here is someone who lived a life of total love given out to the poorest of the poor, to the dying and the sick in Calcutta and now, all over the world. But her charter says, "no one has a right to a superfluity of wealth while others are dying of starvation."

And there is the social justice rub. Who ever said anyone had a right to their wealth? In order to make this judgment, and condemn the money, the money had to be earned first, by people whom Mother Teresa did not know and would not have condemned had she merely met them on the street. And the background for her ire has to be the universal human conviction (my economics book bluntly said "peasant," not human,) that the rich man is rich at my expense: he has not created, but has robbed me. If, say, Bill Gates' wealth is therefore a wrong, then there are two options, to confiscate it, or to see that a world is built such that no one else is able to amass wealth. Neither reaction is Gospel or useful for filling the stomachs of the poor. A third option, to preach the Gospel to Bill Gates such that he and his wife convert, and give less of their money to promote abortion, has apparently not been tried with much success. 

No, I don't have to accept that social justice, modernly defined, is in the Gospel. That kind of justice never involves love but always rather committees deciding who is to be hunted and how to divide up their things. If the Lord ever said "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need," I would be glad to know chapter and verse. Far from it, I think he told a story in which the owner of the vineyard asked, "Am I not allowed to do as I wish with my own money?" You see that's the odd truth: the Bible is perhaps "conservative" all the way through, which is why the modern world, having crowned man lord of all, hates it. And yet, as someone once said of the U.S. Constitution, it may be that the principles it conserves are very radical indeed.

I learned one more thing but it's so unsavory that all you can do is shut the laptop and go to bed, saying to yourself "it's too much information and I'm sure randy stuff went on during the Renaissance too." Some aged and horridly elfin-looking cardinal was presiding over a (homosexual) sex and drugs party in the Vatican when a guest overdosed and the cops were called. They saw to it that the cardinal 'skedaddled' before arrests were made. If only these men also patronized great art, people could laugh in five hundred years.     

*See Something Beautiful For God, Malcolm Muggeridge, 1971 (1986).   

Still sitting at the counter at Schwab's

Oh God. I have this thing where I just balk at shelling out $27 a month to "join" wonderful Bishop Barron's Word on Fire Institute. Granted, that's a cheap fee for all the scholarship and the on-line video wizardry he and his team do, but still. I think at bottom we nobodies are just waiting for our blogs to be discovered, so we can become "Fellows," never mind forming real communities and actually meeting each other, like, in our houses and stuff. (What a bore. "No American feels really free unless he is alone." I read that somewhere recently.) And all the Fellow positions have been filled, by Ph.Ds who are already famous anyway.

Isn't that a terrible attitude? What about the joy of hidden-ness and humility, a la the Virgin Mary and all the saints? Then again, what about other paths and streams of scholarship, besides those laid out by the Word on Fire team? Not that the team aren't very, very good and noble.

But one has to weigh it all. Thirty bucks a month, for there must be taxes, is thirty bucks a month.  What do you really want, and how can you really serve? Is your "community" not exactly where you are now? -- and not trapped in the dream of influencing and catching the eye of someone else, who cannot say to you, he that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life for me will find it?

"... the sheep moreover are insolent"

"So you wish to stray and be lost? How much better that I do not also wish this. Certainly, I dare say, I am unwelcome. But I listen to the Apostle who says: Preach the word; insist upon it, welcome and unwelcome. ... However unwelcome, I dare to say: 'You wish to stray, you wish to be lost; but I do not want this.' For the one whom I fear does not wish this. And should I wish it, consider his words of reproach: The straying sheep you have not recalled; the lost sheep you have not sought. Shall I fear you rather than him? Remember, we must all present ourselves before the judgment seat of Christ."

From the Second Reading for Sept. 24, Office of readings of the Liturgy of the Hours (Monday of the 25th week in ordinary time) -- St. Augustine's Sermon on Pastors: "Insist upon the Message, whether it be welcome or not"

Driving home from work to see the full moon reflected in a glimmering slash of silver-gray in the dark gray waters of the local slough, itself a shadowy depthless presence in the surrounding forest night; you know how the mood of a lake changes, especially if you have vacation memories of marveling at water that was a sunny sparkling blue playground in the daytime, become a strange flat dark disc ringed with mysterious impenetrable vegetation, and possessed by sounding crickets at night; with the nice medieval music playing in the car (the library was literally giving unwanted CDs away, so I got a trove of Gregorian chant, some medieval Christmas, the odd Schubert and Debussy), -- doing this, I felt the Jeep was a more sacred space even than the church had been the Sunday morning before. Very wrong of course, but music will have effects, and the music for Mass had been more jamboree-like than usual. A small crowd of sympathizers, I won't say Commie-pinko plants, turned and clapped and whooped appreciation at the end, as usual.

The nice young seminarian, thank God there are still some, gave a talk. He said he would be with us on weekends for the next five years of his discernment. He welcomed calls and emails from any of us, looked forward to getting to know us, and said his email address would be in the bulletin. I won't be crabby and uncharitable, and say how tempting it is to take him up on his offer and write, Dear good young man, I do hope when you get your own parish you can make some sort of inroads into the ghastly music we all must hear and have heard for fifty years. Why does Marty Haugen, Protestant wunderkind, still govern the liturgy? (I have an ancient, slightly saccharine book called St. Michael and the Angels, Compiled From Approved Sources, which tells me for example, "St. Michael offers to God the prayers of the faithful symbolized by incense whose smoke rises towards heaven ... his name is mentioned in the confession of faults made by the priest at the foot of the altar, and by the faithful in turn ... St. John Chrysostom, among others, states that 'When Mass is being celebrated, the Sanctuary is filled with countless angels who adore the Divine Victim immolated on the altar.' " Who knew? What incense? What Divine Victim? To think that this was the sort of thing got rid of for the sake of contemporary relevancy, and bongo drums.) ...The whoopers at the end are not the majority. I judge this by the grim, clamped-mouth silence of most of the congregation. Most of them are, at best, offering up their suffering to God. They don't want to clap in unison with the happy blonde at the podium, either.

But I won't be crabby and uncharitable, for what do I know? Can't sing, can't read music, can't play an instrument. It's very wrong to suspect that musical people are oddly authoritarian. "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness," and so on. Why not ask to join the choir and make changes from within? Can you imagine the new person, unable to carry a tune in a bucket, suggesting to the seasoned performers and the professional choir director fresh from his role in the off-Broadway show in the next suburb over, that we start singing Hildegard of Bingen? Perhaps I should write a novel in which a crabby -- but musically able -- old woman does this, or at any rate writes that letter to the visiting seminarian. She could be formidable but elegant, and perhaps solve parish mysteries (who killed the blonde?), and have two cats named Sassicaia and Egypt.

The CD in the Jeep, which made the moonlight on the water seem like something eternal and sacred that God himself and all the communion of saints were looking at right that moment, also has the word ancient in it. It was Ancient Music for a Modern Age, by an ensemble called Sequentia. They have been doing God's work for forty years. They have even recorded everything by Hildegard of Bingen, nine discs. Who knew?

We began with St. Augustine telling his parishioners in Hippo around the year 400, that -- yes -- he and they were obliged to bring in straying sheep, even if the sheep were insolent and did not want to be retrieved. What an amazing thing. I'm just adding, at the risk of beating my own bongo drum that I may go on beating for a good long time, good music would help.


   

Prayer before rapier wit

I have an uncharitable habit of imagining how I may reach people through lofty and rapier-like intellectual scolding. The young things at work were outraged, yesterday, by whatever videos they had seen on some correct and outraged political site. "She interviewed this Trump supporter, and the guy didn't even know what a refugee was! He just kept saying, 'I don't believe that.' "

"Oh my God," the other young person said. She may have said oh my Jesus fucking God. "Oh my God. Kids are dying because of this asshole." And she stormed off, speaking in the asshole's voice. "Yeah, just fuck the kids, who cares."

These (mostly polite and good) young people have a raging passion for justice but would of course not dream of marrying their significant others, settling down, and having any children of their own, for a start. Never mind the college 101 indoctrinations, defining justice in very narrow terms, and still as fresh as yesterday. Naked but sterile evangelical outrage simmers beneath every dewy-complexioned surface.

And I fancy pondering how to correct them through gently startling rhetoric. Then I heard a caller on Relevant Radio, a lady marking the feast of the Korean martyrs, say that she brings a prayer journal to work and writes down in it the names of people whom her co-workers have asked prayers for. And I realized, that is the much better way. As with the Gospel reading of that very day, in which the Pharisee Simon loftily notes within himself that Christ cannot be a prophet, or he would know the truth about the sinner touching him, in other words he would see interior lack, and Christ responds to his thoughts -- she loves much because she is forgiven much -- so it would be more to the point for the outraged young people to know the offer of prayer rather than an offer of what I consider probing intellectual correction. Love first, in short.

The downside is that one must consent to be the sweet (I suppose) religious middle-aged lady at work, who says she will pray for you. Then again, if it's totally crazy but you do kind of start noticing good things happening to you, it's so weird -- maybe they would also think a thought, and crack open a book.         

Serving

For those of us who care, events are falling thick and fast. I wondered if perhaps we who care are living in a tiny self-referencing bubble. It seems to me all the people around me would simply blink at this, looking on the Church herself and Christianity in general as irrelevant, and so finding scandal within her, especially about homosexuals, a smirkingly comical irrelevancy within an irrelevancy.

But I may be wrong. There the headlines are, not shrieking but present, out in the world at Drudge and Yahoo. "Pope refuses comment." "Cardinals named deny," etc.

The events as they came to my attention, in order over the weekend (and now we are approaching another weekend), were:

Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan will investigate Chicago diocese: Cardinal Blase Cupich welcomes. The hen investigating the henhouse, I thought; these two liberals will come to a very satisfactory understanding.

Then that story vanished. Vigano says Benedict tried to discipline McCarrick, Francis rehabilitated him, and then for whatever reasons, McCarrick essentially appointed Cupich and Tobin (of Newark). Ho ho, Cupich in the hot seat. Maybe. Tobin, who in some pictures looks unfortunately a bit like Wolsey brought straight back and infuriated from Tudor England, now off to a synod on young people, the faith, and vocational discernment. I hope that will be the last tone-deaf thing the American Catholic church does for a while. 

Then Father Robert Altier's magnificent homily at St. Raphael's in Minnesota from a few days ago, run twice in two days on Relevant Radio. I listened spellbound in the car before going grocery shopping and then listened again the next day (today). "Do you understand why all you hear is fluff 'n' stuff instead of good homilies?" he asked. Men who don't live Catholic morality will not teach Catholic morality.

But "the Virgin Mary's work has begun," he thinks. "Jesus is sending his Mom to clean the room."

And we must join her army, Bishop Barron agreed. He must be thanking God, if Cupich shooed him, conservative Thomist evangelizer, out to wacky California to make the best of it, that the best of it has been good. His Word on Fire ministry grows from strength to strength as far as I can see, and he in obedience has Chicago in his rear-view mirror.

And what do we do? "Join her army," "become the greatest of saints, to tower, because of these times, over the greatest saints of the past"? That was Father Altier's message. How to become so? By staying put, of course, or joining, by prayer and fasting and raising voices. But always be measured and charitable, as Bishop Barron's example shows. The Lady cannot make use, I don't think so anyway, of meanness and griping and interior wrath that does nothing. Like mine.

Amid all the stew of news and reports and ideas about launching committees and streams of comments on the Catholic websites' comment boards, I had a thought which is probably sterile and wrathful so I didn't put it out there. I'll put it here, where no one will see. I thought, a purge of the Church could start, and could make extraordinary progress in two weeks, in one: only let the Holy Father order that all priests in all parishes all over the world preach a homily, next Sunday, averring that homosexual activity is sinful. Not the people, not the inclination, the activity. We live in a secular culture for which homosexuality is the helmet of faith and the breastplate of salvation. Let the Holy Father command such preaching, and in two weeks you would see weeded out the men who can't choke out the words, and the faithful, soldiers (maybe unknowingly) in a different army, who can't choke down the message.

But here I'm being wrathful and proud. How do I know? Maybe lay-led committees investigating McCarrick -- even though he has already been truly found out and set aside -- are better. Maybe Cardinal Tobin is a very fine man whose prayers I am not worthy of. 

And I was thinking at Mass this morning (the feast of St. Augustine -- our good Father skipped any homily at all, maybe he is planning a bombshell of some sort of his own for Sunday and desired to save his energy) -- I was thinking, you really cannot decide how you will act to become a greater saint, to "tower like a cedar of Lebanon over a shrub," as Father Altier quoted Louis de Montfort. That alone is ego. You must still yourself, somehow, to a core of obedience to a Master, and to right action and right words. The Divine Office, for the hour of None, has this Psalm,

My soul is weary with longing, day and night, for your decrees (Ps. 118 (119): 17-24

Another thought. Years ago I remember hearing of veterans of World War II, that they tended to look back and say, of course in those days everyone either joined or knew they would be drafted. But whatever your anxiety, you didn't want to sit out this fight. "Everybody was going -- you didn't want to be the one who missed out." I think this may be like that.    

The majesty of the package

Don't be put off by the way this starts. It has its origin, you will see, in the comments board below somebody else's writing; so I had in my mind the same material everyone else was addressing, and I could plunge right in, having come to some of the same conclusions and naturally taking up the same aggravated tone they did. This is what we moderns call an "online community." I began to type ...

I notice the drumbeat of prayers for migrants at Mass has stopped, at least in my parish for the last few weeks. Coincidence? The effect of a new pastor? The hierarchy somewhere in a Chicago high-rise, deciding for a while not to rub the wounds of a conquered people, just while the newest homosexual abuse scandal now reaching up to the cardinals' level unfolds? But if migrants needed prayers last month, don't they still? Do you turn off God's attention and power based on a sort of Lenin-style assessment of who is more useful when?

"Conquered people" is a strong term, perhaps unfair. It occurred to me because of an unrelated issue, namely music. Once again on Sunday we were permitted only the "traditional Caribbean folk melody" for the Alleluia, which is all we ever get, and which sounds just like the preschooler's foot-stompin' beach dance tune you would expect. Holl-lay, holl-lay, holl-lay, Looo-oooo-yah! The recessional was a "traditional South African" song which no one knew, neither the good (Ugandan) priest nor the deacon nor the people nor, I think, even the man playing the piano in the choir loft. Interestingly, he had played Panis Angelicus during communion, when it could be safely hidden as background noise. The recessional therefore proved a mostly silent fumble. This is what conquered people are made to do: sing songs not their own. It's a natural and an age-old political move. Whereas at the close of a blessedly silent weekday Mass the celebrating priest, or even a member of the congregation, has only to begin the Lourdes hymn ("Immaculate Mary") and everyone joins, with no guidance from the piano at all. We react naturally to our own music. I might almost dare say ... we are ready to be led home, by and with our own music.




I chronicle and I express crabbiness about all this because [here we go] I am still thinking about Elizabeth Scalia's article a few days ago at the Word on Fire blog. I don't think it's worthwhile my being the fortieth commenter on a piece that is, very naturally, already being bumped down the roster of the blog's main page as new things are published there. But it got me to thinking in terms of natural and unnatural.

It was natural for almost all the thirty-odd commenters there to come up with simple, strong responses to it. The man in the street tends to do that. Never mind, they scoffed, Ms. Scalia's advice to the laity to form "investigatory panels" and "become the Church you want to be by being a conduit of love." Being a conduit of love (I scoff) won't stop the propagation of cheap music for example, which affects us in our official, public worship life, as whatever went on at a cardinal's beach house decades ago does not. Not that it does not, however: we do feel this week's dark news personally. Is there a Latin way to say "hard to be a Catholic," and capture the rueful endurance of schwer zu sein ein yid?

But to stop that, I mean bad music, takes power, and after fifty years of other people's folk tunes, it looks like no one has that much power. "I'm not giving the Church any more of my money" was a natural response too. So was the great call, the frightening call, the repeated call throughout the comments board, which perhaps cannot be answered in the man in the street's lifetime, or yours or mine -- because it means really facing Satan, all tolerant, loving, funny, and with great taste in the finer things -- "The bishops need to say homosexuality is sin." For it is not natural that a man should lie with a man as with a woman.

It's not very natural that Catholics, buffeted now by witnessing a resurgence of '90s style immorality among their priests and bishops plus the Pope choosing this moment to change the catechism, -- it's not natural that they should be comforted or strengthened when they walk into a Mass of bad off-Broadway music, of a dozen "extraordinary ministers of communion" including young girls in miniskirts and hairy-legged middle aged men in shorts and t-shirts, and of the whole congregation reflexively adopting the hands-upheld "orans position" when the priest does, because no one has ever told them not to. That was new to me when I walked into my parish church last summer for the first time in thirty years. I thought it made everyone look like ecstatic, village idiot snake-handlers. Then I did some of my usual crabby research and found out you're not supposed to do this "orans posture" wheeze at all. All I can figure is that our good bishops, who don't dare call out a fellow who preys on boys, are certainly not going to speak out on something so minor in the face of people and offertory-makers far too culturally Protestantized to accept rebuke. And who can always now rejoin, "Really? You're upset about this?"

Ah, to rejoin. The rejoinder -- the come-back. The coming back. The answer to all this mess is not investigatory panels, or being a conduit of churchly love, or even fasting as such. The answer is to make the Church and its Mass seem like something that is above and outside and truer than time or the world or men or sex or anything. We cannot do that, our leadership must. They do that by returning somehow to the majesty of what it was, to the package it used to show to anyone who walked in the door; the package unchanging no matter where it was found or no matter what poor sinner or downright creep briefly kept the door. The package used to say: "we have to do this, and say this, because it is true and our 'colossal Master' (G.K. Chesterton's phrase, about Whom Joan of Arc obeyed) -- because He commanded it. Yes even of us sinners." Returning somehow to the majesty of the package ... what, shall the College of Cardinals (minus McCarrick) admit it is all really dreadfully traceable to Vatican II? Shall they say, sorry, we lowered some bars there and it was a mistake? That really cannot be. If the Holy Spirit presides over other Councils it  He must have presided over that one.

Perhaps what will prove to save everything will be that great Council's rumored exaltation of the laity and our responsibilities and rights. I don't know, I'm the man in the street, I never read the documents. Anyhow what previous Council ever insisted that the faithful, busy at loom and plow, should bestir themselves to "read the documents"? But suppose the laity now do take that responsibility, given from the Holy Spirit, seriously, and do read and do find their power, and start asking for old things? Unless of course they just demand validation for the new things they have been doing anyway, like getting divorced and taking the Pill. A hierarchy which can't condemn homosexuality may have a hard time pressing "Church teaching" on any other matter.

It may be that with my thirty years' absence I am insufferably behind the times. It may be that in fact the new and the young, starved of Catholic meat, have been asking for old true things and getting them, long since. It may be they are now middle-aged and making waves themselves. There are jokes on crabby online forums about Ugandan and Nigerian priests, doing missionary work among the suburban soccer moms of the U.S.A., pronouncing words like magisterium. Our own dear Father G. makes the sign of the cross after his homily, which is just what you can hear being done at traditional Masses on YouTube, Masses celebrated even sometimes by priests of those mysterious stern "Societies of St. Peter" (or Pius). They sign themselves before and after. Perhaps it had a meaning once. Wonderful Bishop Robert Barron comes to mind of course, talking of younger clerics feeding the starved.

But he's got these bloggers working for him who still seem to bar the gates, even emotionally, against the fuming man in the street, and the man knows it and that's why he responds with comments not remotely assessing her ideas, but simply brushing them aside. As if he is a force of nature, and knows that too.