A narrow fellow in the grass…

Vale, Rocky!

This is a bit of a tie-in with the previous post.

One of the many parenting decisions about which I harbor some doubt, once in a while, is the whole matter of pets, most particularly, a dog.

I have a very vivid memory of my late father, while watching my oldest (now 38) play with one of their neighbor’s dogs, meditatively saying, “What that boy needs is a dog.”

Half accusingly, I felt at the time.

But then, what grounds did he have to criticize? We had never owned a pet, except for that one goldfish when I was three that eventually leapt to its death. Yes, we had reason: my mother had severe respiratory issues, including allergies to all animal and bird dander. I’d inherited some of that: fairly severe for cats, not so severe, but still present, for dogs. It still hurt, though, because for some tragic reason, I was enamored of cats, so much so that at one point they got me a subscription to Cat Fancy magazine. Did that make it better or worse? I don’t know. All I know is that I would have given anything to have a cat, including a lung or two.

So, raising my own kids, never did I seriously consider getting a dog or cat for my own. I definitely couldn’t handle a cat, and dogs were iffy. I had survived, my yearning unfulfilled, so could they.

Not that it didn’t come up. Frequently, both directly and indirectly, passive-aggressively, in my mind. As it turned out, conveniently or sadly, Kid #4 (now 20) had the honor of inheriting The Allergies. Oddly enough, the only one of the five. Cats hit him hard, dogs less so, but enough to be a powerful counterargument when it came up.

I had other arguments, of course – and still do, and don’t hesitate to wield them. I’ve never had a dog and don’t know what to do with them. I don’t want to have to take care of one. I don’t want to have to think about what to do with it when I travel. I for sure don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on vet care – which I’ve seen happen to others on more than one occasion.

But, truth be told, I’m also certain that if Mike hadn’t died, well, yeah, we’d have a dog. He really wanted one, and I was fine with it, since it would be his and theirs and not my problem. We’d only lived here a few months when he died and were still in the apartment, starting to look for a house, with the clear understanding – again, no objection from me – that once there was a house and a yard, there’d be a dog, too.

So there’s that. Because he did die, and well, here we have the question of…did I do my best? Everyone came through okay (I think), a dog would probably still have helped. A lot. So maybe I didn’t do my best. Maybe I could have stretched and sacrificed a bit more. And so here we are in that place I was just talking about, aren’t we? I don’t feel guilty – not really – and I don’t regret it, but neither am I going to defend it to the death as the only choice I could have made because I was doing my best. It’s quite possible that the choice to suck it up and get a damn dog might have been the better one for the boys.

Well, what’s done is done, so fast forward to 2014, and there Kid #5 and I are, at a local reptile show. He idly asks me if he could get a snake, and for some bizarre reason, in a fit of insanity, I said sure. I can’t forget the look on his face. And I can’t forget thesubsequent years of half-teasing resentment…He got a snake, but we can’t get a….dog?

Well, all in all, it was fine. We named him Rocky –my idea actually, after a week or so of indecision, I was inspired by the movie we’d recently watched. It seemed to fit. I’ve declared several times since that if you have to have a pet, and you can handle the feeding (frozen or live, Monsieur?), a snake is a decent choice. It can be left for long periods of time, it requires little attention – in fact ball pythons prefer no attention, but is also interesting because it’s, you know, a snake living in your house.

Add it to the list of Things I Only Know Much About Because of My Family: NASCAR, football, film editing, Charleston, South Carolina, public defense practices, Mazda Miatas and Alberto Ginastera, to just skim the surface.

Snakes.

And now, seven years later – and okay this is really weird – exactly seven years to the day after I published the very popular Day I Lost the Snake post – give me a second, because…this is pretty strange…

Ahem….

As I was saying, seven years later, it was time. Rocky’s owner has probably a year or so left at home before he goes off, and was honestly less and less interested in Rocky. Since he started working, he’s also been responsible for Rocky’s expenses – mostly buying rats, and inflation hits everywhere, including the Rat Market – and he’s tired of paying that. Welcome to my world, bud. He also wants a bigger bed in his room, which wouldn’t be possible with the snake habitat in there.

He seems to know something’s up.

Finally, he muses in retrospect that he probably should have thought more about it and gone for another kind of snake. As indicated by their name, ball pythons react to stimulation by…curling up in a ball, and it takes time to get them to feel comfortable enough to engage (as much as they do engage at all). “He’s a coward!” is his owner’s way of putting it. A (small) boa, he says now, would have been more “fun.”

Well, life is a process.

So, the owner didn’t argue when I started gently suggesting that maybe it was time. But I also didn’t want to mess with the “Wait for a Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace buyer to show up and argue with your price” dance. So I resolved Rocky would be given away, and luckily, as I made that decision, I saw a listing on Craigslist from a small-time reptile dealer who advertised that he would take your unwanted reptiles off your hands. I’m sure he would have paid, but considering I only paid $50.00 for Rocky back in the day, at this point, I didn’t care. Just take him.

Ready for departure

Cleaned the habitat and all that was left was the transfer, which happened last Saturday morning, and after a few pleasantries, off he went, sliding around in his nice clean tank in the back seat.

The owner professed not a bit of sadness as the car turned the corner, but of course, since it all involved change and family and growing up, how could I not get a little verklempt, as one does?

People are getting older. They’re moving on, and as they go, they are filling in those gaps, aren’t they. The oldest – whom my father declared to need a dog thirty years ago – still doesn’t have one, but he has a busy life up there in NYC and has had the chance to take care of other people’s dogs, including loading one into an Uber for a trip across the city. My married son has been through a dog, two cats, and is now on another dog, a boon companion for my grandson. My married daughter and her husband painstakingly earned the trust of a neighborhood stray cat, giving great comfort over some very hard Covid-cursed days. The second to youngest? Still in college, about to get an apartment next month, so his mild references to dogs can now be met with a firm, “You have an apartment. You have money. You want a dog? Get one. Be my guest.”

And the youngest? Well, he tried to get me to look at a picture of something the other day.

I think it was a chameleon.

All that remains….

You’re great, I’m great, we’re all great

Nothing in particular inspired this.

In every part of life, there seems to be the need to find the sweet spot – some might call it the happy medium – between scrupulosity and laxity.

We lurch back and forth between them in our lives as individuals and culturally as well. Religiously, too – obviously.

It’s an aspect of the modern parenting narrative, too.

For it’s all over the place isn’t it?

Don’t worry, Mama! You’re doing great! You’re doing your best!

Well, guess what?

You actually might not be doing your best. You might be doing a terrible job, as it happens.

This is where the sweet spot comes in, and I’m on a search for the best way to express what that is and how to settle into it.

For certainly, constant guilt-ridden second-guessing anxiety is a drain on healthy parenting. It hurts the parent, the child – everyone. And can do lifelong damage – to everyone.

But no, the necessary response is not – Everything you’re doing is GREAT!

That’s not healthy, either. And it’s not realistic.

Every time I run across one of those You’re doing your best, Mama! posts on social media, the same string of questions races through my mind, cynically, I admit:

Has she never heard of abusive mothers?

Neglectful?

Manipulative?

Has she never heard of mothers who ignore their children’s needs, dominate them, harm them by commission or omission or are generally clueless?

I mean, if Mama is always doing her best, why are so many of us out here still working through our parenting issues well into adulthood?

It brings to mind my experience as a classroom teacher – and as a parent.

You probably know how it goes. From the parent’s perspective, teachers and schools are the problem. They need to get on the stick and do a better job.

From the teacher’s perspective…these parents are INSANE.

If you’re a parent, look back at your parenting fails. Can you honestly say that in those moments you were “doing your best?” Could you really have not made other choices and done something more helpful and loving?

Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it’s no – because that’s life.

It’s not always “yes, I did my best.”

Parenting doesn’t get a pass in this regard. Parenting isn’t not immune from mistakes and missteps, and making “I know you’re doing your best, Mama”  – can work to deepen narcissism, selfishness, and blindness to the needs of other – just as constant anxiety and second-guessing and standard-following can lead to, well, anxiety and, yes, narcissism, selfishness and blindness to the needs of others.

So what is the sweet spot?

That place of healthy, realistic, honest, humble parenting?

I’m not sure, and there’s no Instagram-worthy answer that I can come up with at least.

But it does seem to me to have something to do with humility, objectivity and transcendence. Sort of like everything keeps coming back to for me.

I don’t know where the sweet spot between blinkered guilt and blind arrogance is, but I can say that I think it has something to do with this:

The most important thing you can do as a parent is to give your child the inner resources to overcome your bad parenting.

That means, first of all, reminding them, through word and action, that you’re not God – only God is.

And that we know as parents we’ve made mistakes – some well-intentioned and others, well, no we didn’t do our best all the time – but that God will fill the gaps and heal the wounds, and here son or daughter – is where to find Him, and yes, you must go here because we know there are gaps and you will try to fill them. Here’s the one sure place. Here, in the life Christ leads us to, is the place to fill those gaps.

And you may have to leave us behind, and we all may have to face hard truths in the process. We understand this, for as Jesus says in Monday’s Mass Gospel reading from Matthew:

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

Update: From the comments –

I tell my clients that all of life is spent grieving the fact that their parents were not God. I know that seems so obvious yet I really think that it should posted on every refrigerator. I also tell that to my kids, which is very humbling. You are on point–the goal of parenting is to equip our kids with the tools they need to negotiate their way through the world “successfully”, which includes tools and methods for recovering from me.

Burning Bushes and Bonaventure

This week, the daily Mass first readings began skipping through Exodus. Combine that with today’s feast of St. Bonaventure, and you have a theme: God’s interaction with our lives is ongoing and surprising. As long as there is life on earth, there is no final moment, no perfection, no end to the journey, and it is wrong to attempt to characterize any one moment as the irreformable manifestation of God’s will.

We encounter God, we journey with him, we turn off, we forget, we go our own way, and need to be brought back. Again and again and again.

Yesterday and today have featured Moses and the Burning Bush. Here you go, from the Loyola Kids Book of Catholic Signs and Symbols:

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The Burning Bush is in a section about symbols related to Old Testament narratives. The sample here is the more “basic” entry – on the facing page (not shown) is a full-page treatment at a deeper level for older children.

As schools gear up for starting again (some in just three weeks or so around these parts,) please consider purchasing these for gifts and recommending them to your local public library, Catholic parish program and Catholic school!

Now, St. Bonaventure. This saint was, of course, quite important to Benedict XVI – he wrote his dissertation on him.

As part of his lengthy series of General Audience talks on great figures of Christian history and thought (beginning with the Apostles), he had three sessions on Bonaventure:

Part 1 (3/3/2010) offers an outline of his life

In those years in Paris, Bonaventure’s adopted city, a violent dispute was raging against the Friars Minor of St Francis Assisi and the Friars Preachers of St Dominic de Guzmán. Their right to teach at the university was contested and doubt was even being cast upon the authenticity of their consecrated life. Of course, the changes introduced by the Mendicant Orders in the way of understanding religious life, of which I have spoken in previous Catecheses, were so entirely new that not everyone managed to understand them. Then it should be added, just as sometimes happens even among sincerely religious people, that human weakness, such as envy and jealousy, came into play.

Part 2 focuses on Bonaventure’s theology, and is important to read – it’s still applicable:

In a special way, in St Bonaventure’s day a trend among the Friars Minor known as the “Spirituals” held that St Francis had ushered in a totally new phase in history and that the “eternal Gospel”, of which Revelation speaks, had come to replace the New Testament. This group declared that the Church had now fulfilled her role in history. They said that she had been replaced by a charismatic community of free men guided from within by the Spirit, namely the “Spiritual Franciscans”. This group’s ideas were based on the writings of a Cistercian Abbot, Joachim of Fiore, who died in 1202. In his works he affirmed a Trinitarian rhythm in history. He considered the Old Testament as the age of the Fathers, followed by the time of the Son, the time of the Church. The third age was to be awaited, that of the Holy Spirit. The whole of history was thus interpreted as a history of progress:  from the severity of the Old Testament to the relative freedom of the time of the Son, in the Church, to the full freedom of the Sons of God in the period of the Holy Spirit. This, finally, was also to be the period of peace among mankind, of the reconciliation of peoples and of religions. Joachim of Fiore had awakened the hope that the new age would stem from a new form of monasticism. Thus it is understandable that a group of Franciscans might have thought it recognized St Francis of Assisi as the initiator of the new epoch and his Order as the community of the new period the community of the Age of the Holy Spirit that left behind the hierarchical Church in order to begin the new Church of the Spirit, no longer linked to the old structures.

Hence they ran the risk of very seriously misunderstanding St Francis’ message, of his humble fidelity to the Gospel and to the Church. This error entailed an erroneous vision of Christianity as a whole….

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The Franciscan Order of course as he emphasized belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ, to the apostolic Church, and cannot be built on utopian spiritualism. Yet, at the same time, the newness of this Order in comparison with classical monasticism was valid and St Bonaventure as I said in my previous Catechesis defended this newness against the attacks of the secular clergy of Paris:  the Franciscans have no fixed monastery, they may go everywhere to proclaim the Gospel. It was precisely the break with stability, the characteristic of monasticism, for the sake of a new flexibility that restored to the Church her missionary dynamism.

At this point it might be useful to say that today too there are views that see the entire history of the Church in the second millennium as a gradual decline. Some see this decline as having already begun immediately after the New Testament. In fact,”Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt”:  Christ’s works do not go backwards but forwards. What would the Church be without the new spirituality of the Cistercians, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, the spirituality of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross and so forth? This affirmation applies today too: “Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt”, they move forward. St Bonaventure teaches us the need for overall, even strict discernment, sober realism and openness to the newness, which Christ gives his Church through the Holy Spirit. And while this idea of decline is repeated, another idea, this “spiritualistic utopianism” is also reiterated. Indeed, we know that after the Second Vatican Council some were convinced that everything was new, that there was a different Church, that the pre-Conciliar Church was finished and that we had another, totally “other” Church an anarchic utopianism! And thanks be to God the wise helmsmen of the Barque of St Peter, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, on the one hand defended the newness of the Council, and on the other, defended the oneness and continuity of the Church, which is always a Church of sinners and always a place of grace.

Part 3 on other aspects of Bonaventure’s theology, again, still applicable:

Consequently St Thomas and St Bonaventure define the human being’s final goal, his complete happiness in different ways. For St Thomas the supreme end, to which our desire is directed is: to see God. In this simple act of seeing God all problems are solved: we are happy, nothing else is necessary.

Instead, for St Bonaventure the ultimate destiny of the human being is to love God, to encounter him and to be united in his and our love. For him this is the most satisfactory definition of our happiness.

Along these lines we could also say that the loftiest category for St Thomas is the true, whereas for St Bonaventure it is the good. It would be mistaken to see a contradiction in these two answers. For both of them the true is also the good, and the good is also the true; to see God is to love and to love is to see. Hence it was a question of their different interpretation of a fundamentally shared vision. Both emphases have given shape to different traditions and different spiritualities and have thus shown the fruitfulness of the faith: one, in the diversity of its expressions.

This is what I’m talking about

I’m sorry/not sorry to be banging on this. Someone commented earlier that this isn’t on most people’s radars, is above most people’s heads, well, it needs to get on that radar. Not in an obsessive way, but just…on the radar. So voices can be heard and votes cast when necessary.

This didn’t happen over in Europe. It didn’t happen years ago. This article isn’t from some niche website. This is yesterday, from the website of a major Canadian news source. I’m going to screenshot the webpage for full effect.

So if he’s convicted – if he were in certain states in the United States (not sure what the situation in Canada is) – he’d be incarcerated in a woman’s prison.

So consider the consequences:

The skewing of crime statistics.

The danger to female prisoners.

And most importantly, the danger to other potential victims. Say this guy had been identified but not arrested. Would the warning go out to watch out for a “woman” assaulting children in a Toronto park? Giving then, the real perp excellent cover to keep assaulting?

This matters. It’s not a niche issue. And it starts with gender self-identity, which, as I said before, is now allowed on US passports and of course in many other areas of life – more every day.

Just think of the gaslighting, too, of the victim(s): Is this the woman who attacked you? Can you identify her?

Gender self-identity means that there is going to be no way to put a stop to these people – these men – who will manipulate this endlessly for their own gratification and to the harm of women and children.

Discussion at the radfem site Ovarit.

St. Kateri

May her example help us to live where we are, loving Jesus without denying who we are.

Today is the feast of Kateri Tekakwitha. She’s in The Loyola Kids Book of Saints. Published before her canonization. I’m hoping a new edition can be produced at some point – a new edition of the Book of Heroes was published this summer, so hopefully this will be next.

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There are two major shrines to St. Kateri, one in the United States, the other in Canada. We visited the one in Canada a lifetime ago, and I can’t find photos, so you’ll have to trust me on that one.

In the United States, near Fonda, New York. This is the area where she lived for much of her life after her parents died, and where she met the Jesuit missionaries who facilitated her conversion.

In Kahnawake, Quebec, across the river from Montreal. This is the location of the mission where Kateri moved after life in her previous community became too difficult because of her conversion, where she died, and where she is buried.

Her canonization process was begun in 1884 at the Third Plenary Council in Baltimore. She was declared Venerable in 1943 by Pius XII, beatified in 1980 by John Paul II, and canonized in 2012 by Benedict XVI.

Here’s John Paul’s remarks upon her beatification, and here’s Benedict’s homily at her canonization Mass (along with six others).

Kateri impresses us by the action of grace in her life in spite of the absence of external help and by the courage of her vocation, so unusual in her culture. In her, faith and culture enrich each other! May her example help us to live where we are, loving Jesus without denying who we are. Saint Kateri, Protectress of Canada and the first native American saint, we entrust to you the renewal of the faith in the first nations and in all of North America! May God bless the first nations!

A Wreath for the Enemy (2)

Just a bit more on this novel, about which I wrote yesterday.

As I said there, I was surprised to encounter Catholic themes and characters. They are important, but not exactly at the center at all times. Their perspectives and odd choices are described, commented upon and discussed, but from the outside, as it were – even though Frankau herself was a Catholic convert. These characters’ perspectives and counter-cultural choices impact the course of the story, but we observe them from an outsider’s narrative perspective.

It is almost as if it gives the “insider” – the reader who might be Catholic herself – the perspective of – Oh, this is how it looks to the world. Or, more powerfully – This is how it could look to the world if I actually took all of this seriously and lived it.

It happens here and there, mostly in conversations. I can only say so much about the specifics, because to do more would, indeed, be to spoil the experience, and if you’re interested at all in reading this novel, I certainly don’t want to do that.

I’ll just highlight a couple of conversations and moments that are possible to bring out without spoiling. For example this:

“What subject did you choose?” she asked, looking at me. The turn of her neck made the ‘prim swan’, but there was something pointed and Spanish in the face; a medallion’s look. I explored for a moment the thought of people who looked more interesting than they were.

I said, “It’s on Penitence.”

She was surprised: “Penitence? What made you choose that?”

The memory of the humiliating talk disturbed me still. “Well, Crusoe did, really,” I mumbled. “We were discussing what one was sorry for, and who one was sorry to.” At the grammar he put his hands over his ears.

Mrs. Irvine continued to look puzzled and interested. But I was playing the conversation back. It had happened in the circular panelled room with the books; a bright day and his eyes were hurting him, so the curtains were drawn at the windows. I had just finished eating an enormous tea. I was enlarging upon a row at home.

“And every time I fight, I feel mean to them afterwards. I’m eaten with remorse.”

“You needn’t niggle around with remorse,” said Crusoe.

“Don’t all decent sinners suffer from it?”

“On the contrary. Decent sinners, given time, become penitent. From penitence you can at least learn something. Remorse is sheer indulgence; threshing about in a self-made trap. Going back over it all, trying to pretend that it didn’t happen; or that it happened quite differently; excusing yourself and cursing yourself by turns. All going in, d’you see?—instead of out. Just battering up against the walls of your own ego.”

I like that very much – remorse is pointless and self-indulgent. Penitence is God-centered and oriented towards actual change and growth.

Near the end, one of the characters ends up in the situation of being nearby during the health crisis of a person she doesn’t like very much, and in fact, sees as an enemy of sorts. In the beginning, her assistance in the situation is essential, but as the hours pass, it is less so – but she sticks around anyway. Her only task at that point is to make sure a priest gets to the hospital. That happens, but still – she stays. Something keeps her there.

I said, “Is it all right? I mean . . .” my words trailed.

“She’s still in the operating-theatre,” said Father Briggs. “Awful time you’re having. Shall we go in here?” It was the waiting-room; green leatherette chairs and a green leatherette sofa; white walls; a gas-fire.

Father Briggs shut the door behind him. “Got to wait a little while,” he said and patted the poodles’ heads. “Pretty, aren’t they? How old?”

“I don’t know. They are hers.”

“Your friend’s, you mean?”

He offered me a cigarette. I took it because it was something to do. He said, “We might as well sit down.” He reminded me of the more sober young men at Oxford, solemn and round, with an educated twinkle. It is, I thought, an essentially English pattern.

I was embarrassed, saying, “Look—forgive my asking. You couldn’t do it now, go into the theatre and do it?”

“Goodness me, no. Wouldn’t be allowed. I’d have to be disinfected and decontaminated and Lord knows what all—imagine. We never do.” He crossed his short legs and looked at me sympathetically. “It’ll be quite all right; just as soon as she comes out.”

“Can you give her Absolution if she’s unconscious?”

“Oh yes; conditional Absolution, and I’ll anoint her. Don’t worry about that.”

“And if she’s dead?”

“Same thing,” he said. “There’ll be time. . . . It’s all very simple really. It was she who sent for me, wasn’t it? Not you yourself?”

“Oh no. I’m not a Catholic, Father. She thought of it.”

“Well then, her dispositions are good,” said Father Briggs, sounding as though he were talking of her heart, lungs or liver. “So we needn’t worry about anything. Just leave it all to Almighty God. You’re staying near here?”

I explained what had happened. He looked sympathetic again, particularly when I got to the luggage. “Good gracious . . . what can you do about that?”

“Just wait.” I said. “I can get it in the morning.”

“But where’ll you spend the night?”

He seemed cheered by the fact of Aunt Anne. He offered to look after the dogs while I telephoned her, but I said I would rather wait until I knew what was happening. “Awful for you, really,” he said. “Only possible way I can help is with the dog food. I’ve got a Welsh Corgi. So if you’d like to bring them back——” He looked at his watch. “Seven-twenty now. I don’t suppose they’ll be much longer.”

We lapsed into what seemed an endless silence. I knew suddenly that I was tired.

“Wish you’d telephone that aunt of yours,” said Father Briggs.

“I’d rather wait, please. Till I know.”

He smiled at me, “Is she a very old friend, the patient? Forgive my saying so—you look too young to have a very old friend.”

“She isn’t my friend at all.”

“Eh?” said Father Briggs.

I twisted my fingers together. “I know it looks like that, but it isn’t like that. I may shock you,” I said, “but the truth is I want her to die.”

He said mildly, “Oh? Why? Don’t you like her?”

“No. I hate her.”

“Got rather a funny way of showing it, haven’t you?”

If I had to describe the most commonly-shared trait of Priests in Mid-Century Anglosphere Literature – it would probably be matter-of-factness. They all are deeply aware of sin and weakness and of the fallen state of the world, but they don’t stress about it – they simply use the powerful tools at their disposal – their presence, their prayer, their sacramental actions – to bring Christ into the situation. There’s a humility, an acceptance of life as it is and their role in it, combined with an understanding that this role they’ve accepted is essential, but the outcome isn’t dependent on them. There’s just a sense of something bigger, objectively true and good that’s ultimately in control.

This attitude can, of course, slide into indifference and laziness – and I don’t think that’s ignored, either. But this quality – personified best, perhaps, in the old priest who regularly visits the bedridden woman at the end of O’Connor’s The Displaced Person – explaining the dogmas of the Church. There’s only so much he can do, he’s obliged to do it, and so he does – accepting that yes, this is all he can do.

“Well there we are,” said Father Briggs. “She’ll be all right now. What about your aunt? Could I drive you over?” He was leading me down the corridor. I hung back. I had forgotten the number of her room. The corridor was darkened. We came to the lighted window at the end where the night-sister on duty was sitting.

“Father.”

“Yes?” I could see his spectacles glimmering as he turned to me.

“I think I’d rather stay here.”

“No toothbrush,” said Father Briggs constructively.

“Mouthwash. In a hospital. Sure to be.”

“What have you got against your aunt? Hate her too?”

“No, it isn’t that. It just seems so awful to leave redacted here alone all night.”

“She’s got her nurse. And God. Or don’t you count Him?” He patted my shoulder, “Not fair to tease you, is it? I don’t believe they’ll let you stay.”

“If you ask them, they will.”

He didn’t argue. He ducked into the night-sister’s office. “All right,” he said, coming out. “As she’s on the danger-list. They’ll fix you up with some blankets in the waiting-room. But I insist on your coming back to the Presbytery with me and having some supper.”

I hesitated. “It’s kind of you, but——”

“Got to feed those dogs, now, haven’t you?”

“Supposing she dies while we’re having supper?”

“A lot of people,” said Father Briggs, “will die while we’re having supper.”

And now for the author:

Here’s a biography of her – you can find others elsewhere. She came from a family of artists, had a long-term love affair with a man in the 1930’s, was briefly married after the war, had a baby who died, and had a number of intense relationships with women which are ambiguous in nature, ultimately – not ambiguous in their singularity and connection, but in the way they would be defined in 2021. The Wikipedia entry defines them as “lesbian relationships,” and they certainly seem that way to me, but other material is less definitive. It was, in fact, the woman in the first of these relationships who inspired her to become Catholic and indeed acted as her sponsor. And given the seriousness of spiritual themes in Frankau’s works after her conversion – yes, there’s space for ambiguity.

***

To live in this world, believing sometimes beyond all sense, that we come from and our journeying towards the One who is eternal solidity, reality, truth and love, believing that He has entered our world in solid, real, truthful and loving ways – realistic about ourselves, accepting both our limitations and the solidity of that Rock? Accepting what can and must change – and accepting that there is One who doesn’t? Being reassured, frustrated, alienated and comforted by these realities, all at the same time?

That, it seems to me, is the essence of How to Catholic, then and now.

A Wreath for the Enemy

Well. That was something.

There’s something odd about it, too.

Long-time readers know that I am fairly random about my reading selections. Just one more expression of that random, reactive INFP personality, I suppose. Or, if you like, Spirit-led. Yeah, that’s the ticket: Spirit-led.

I browse the “new release” shelves – both fiction and non-fiction – in the library. I do make note of new books I’m interested in and look for them – and even buy them sometimes – like I’ll be buying the new Franzen novel coming this fall – but mostly I browse.

I also browse various websites dedicated to “forgotten” or neglected fiction. Sites like this and this. It was through the latter I took note of a novel called A Wreath for the Enemy by one Pamela Frankau, a British author of whom I’d never heard. Why did I note it? Because this blogger raved about the book and ranked it highly among one year’s reads. I thought – well, huh. I’ll just see if it’s available online anywhere, read a bit, and if I don’t like it, I’ll move on.

Which I did, and not only did I like it very much and keep on reading until the end, I discovered, once again  – that a book I’d randomly pulled off a website had very strong Catholic content – which wasn’t noted in the review.

(You can find the book here – and it’s also at archive.org. It was republished by Virago in 1988, but copies of even that – a not-expensive edition – are available for, oh, around 900 bucks right now. It’s ridiculous that books like this have become so hard to purchase, even used. As the Furrowed Middlebrow blogger says: “Admittedly, I’m surprised that most of the novels on this list aren’t in print, but in this case I’m downright amazed that A Wreath for the Enemy isn’t considered a classic and read in high schools alongside Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a gorgeous novel about a young girl’s life-altering experiences one summer in the bohemian Riviera hotel owned by her parents.”)

Anyway, I’m going to enthuse about this book for a bit here in this post and the next. It’s not perfect, because nothing is, but it’s…fascinating and in some aspects, captivating, with marvelous characters. Made for the movies, really. It’s intriguingly composed, as well, told from various perspectives. I am so glad I read it, and am immediately moving on to another of Frankau’s novels.

Let’s just begin with the beginning, and perhaps you will see why I got hooked:

I sat still at the table, with the blank paper before me. I went back; I remembered; I thought my way in. It was the sensation of pulling on a diver’s helmet and going down deep.

Presently, on the sea-floor, I began to find lost things; to raise the moods that were mine when I was fourteen years old, sitting in this garden, writing my Anthology of Hates.

I would begin there.

********

There had been two crises already that day before the cook’s husband called to assassinate the cook. The stove caught fire in my presence; the postman had fallen off his bicycle at the gate and been bitten by Charlemagne, our sheep-dog, whose policy it was to attack people only when they were down.

Whenever there were two crises my stepmother Jeanne said, “Jamais deux sans trois.” This morning she and Francis (my father) had debated whether the two things happening to the postman could be counted as two separate crises and might therefore be said to have cleared matters up. I thought that they were wasting their time. In our household things went on and on and on happening. It was an hotel, which made the doom worse: it would have been remarkable to have two days without a crisis and even if we did, I doubted whether the rule would apply in reverse, so that we could augur a third. I was very fond of the word augur.

I was not very fond of the cook. But when I was sitting on the terrace in the shade working on my Anthology of Hates, and a man with a bristled chin told me in patois that he had come to kill her, I thought it just as well for her, though obviously disappointing for her husband, that she was off for the afternoon. He carried a knife that did not look particularly sharp; he smelt of liquorice, which meant that he had been drinking Pernod. He stamped up and down, making speeches about his wife and Laurent the waiter, whom he called a salaud and many other words new to me and quite difficult to understand.

I said at last, “Look, you can’t do it now, because she has gone over to St. Raphael in the bus. But if you wait I will fetch my father.” I took the Anthology with me in case he started cutting it up.

I went down the red rock steps that sloped from the garden to the pool. The garden looked the way it always looked, almost as brightly coloured as the postcards of it that you could buy at the desk. There was purple bougainvillæa splashing down the white walls of the hotel; there were hydrangeas of the exact shade of pink blotting-paper; there were huge silver-grey cacti and green umbrella pines against a sky that was darker blue than the sky in England.

I could not love this garden. Always it seemed to me artificial, spiky with colour, not quite true. My idea of a garden was a green lawn and a little apple orchard behind a grey stone house in the Cotswolds. It was my Aunt Anne’s house in the village of Whiteford. I saw that garden only once a year, in September. I could conjure it by repeating inside my head—

‘And autumn leaves of blood and gold

That strew a Gloucester lane.’

Then the homesickness for the place that was not my home would make a sharp pain under my ribs. I was ashamed to feel so; I could not talk about it; not even to Francis, with whom I could talk about most things.

The plot? The narrator (for this and most of the novel) is Penelope Wells, whose home when she is not in school back in England  is the small Riviera hotel owned by her father and her stepmother. Penelope is a marvelous character, the acerbic girl writer-in-process like Harriet of Harriet the Spy or even the unnamed protagonist of O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” – and a character with whom many of us can probably identify, for even if we didn’t write it down, we were, indeed the type carrying about our own Anthology of Hates. Admit it.

In the villa next door, as it were, during this summer, is an English family who on the one hand is quite ordinary (and scorned by Penelope’s poet father because of it), but an object of fascination for Penelope – and once an acquaintance is made with the twin brother and sister of the family, that fascination becomes mutual. Penelope fixated on the Brody family’s predictable, calm life, and of course the other children enchanted by the exotic life in the hotel. The grass being greener, as it always is.

You will not be surprised to learn that things don’t end well, exactly, but the culminating problematic incident is not only touchingly portrayed but significant in the lives of all the children, especially Penelope and Don, who are thrust through a door and forced to face aspects of life and themselves in a challenging way.

From there we skip a few years, and the narrative centers on Don Bradley, in school in England, feeling somewhat oppressed by the school atmosphere and to some extent by his family. Don finds freedom in a friendship with a local estate owner who gives Don access to his horses – Crusoe Raines, who is wheelchair bound, brilliant and acerbic. More tragedy, more self-knowledge.

Finally, we skip a few more years forward, back to Penelope, now a student at Oxford, but of course back at the hotel on her vacation. More characters appear – lives intertwined with people she knew when she was young as well as those Don knows – and while I could detail the plot, to do so would spoil the book, I think.

If I had to characterize the Big Ideas in this novel – aside from it being simply a decent coming-of-age story – it would be to say that it is more specifically about the necessary movement one makes as one grows older from the stage of life (obvious in the excerpt) in which we think we are in perfect command of life, and see everything and everyon so clearly, and as a consequence are terribly judgmental of them, then move through dashed illusions of all types – to a point at which we understand how little we actually understand, how what we experience is just a small piece of the mystery, and what is required to get through it all is, most of all, mercy.

“You couldn’t,” I said, “tell me how it happened to you? Conversion—in your mind? I need it, very much. Law and order. God’s design. If only I could have them. . . . But chaos always seems to win . . . to be the only visible thing.”

He looked at me thoughtfully, medically. “You’re right there. It is the only visible thing—most of the time. But you can bring yourself to a thundering philosophical halt by asking ‘How do we know that it’s chaos? Why aren’t we all quite happily mistaking it for Law and Order?’ We’re dissatisfied with the incompleteness of everything in sight, we say. Well, all that means is there must be completeness somewhere. Where? Eh? By what light do we recognise chaos?”

Next post: about the author, Pamela Frankau, with her intriguing life – and more of the Catholic-themed content of the novel.

“Born male” to “Female offender.” Huh.

Some transition, indeed!

Reminder why this is important: Because biological reality is important.

Biggest under-the-radar news from last week, that I mentioned here: the US government now requires nothing for you to indicate your sex on your passport, no matter what your birth certificate says. So when I renew my passport next year, even if my birth certificate from 1960 (!) says “F” – I can put “M” on my form, and no one has the right to question it.

So, yes, it matters.

(Incidentally – today, the UK Supreme Court is hearing a case to allow non-binary gender designation on passports.)

We’ve seen this before, over and over again. Use of vague and misleading language, as well as emotional manipulation, is commonly used to promote causes of which most people would be skeptical or even opposed to. It’s happening with this issue, and it’s happening in Catholic circles.

Most of the links below have to do with communication and information: Suppressing conversation, dialogue and information, and demonizing and ostracizing those who question dogma.

Don’t fall for it.

First from Jennifer Bilek on the conflation of paraphilias (perversions/kink/fetishes) with healthy sexuality – and the profit to be made from such

The conflation of paraphilias with healthy sexuality, is a dangerous one and it is a conflation that is happening under the “gender identity” umbrella. It is posing as a human rights movement but, it is dehumanizing. This is not an accident. “Gender identity,” driven by elites invested in normalizing transsexualism and transhumanism are part of a techno-medical complex, using the internet to drive their ideology.

The main engines normalizing paraphilias are the internet, bio phobia and by extension, woman hatred. The internet, the beating heart of the techno dystopia we are entering is changing our cultures, our thoughts, our world and what it means to be human, faster than we could have imagined. This apparatus is wedded to the industries that have formed around the sexual objectification of women for profit: Porn, prostitution, surrogacy, and now “gender identity.” They are driving these industries faster than we can resist them.

I’m going to come back to this in a post either later today or tomorrow, but please don’t forget the profit to be made from this moment. You convince someone that they can change their sex via medical intervention, whether that be blockers, hormones or surgery, you set them on a lifetime of having to spend money on keeping that up. A lifetime.

The 11th Hour Blog is worth bookmarking if you are interested in these matters.

Secondly, from Jesse Singal, a long Substack post on some inside baseball – but important to understand. On a prominent website’s decision to pull a positive review of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage.

This sort of politicization of a very important scientific debate is pernicious for obvious reasons, and at first glance, a site like Science-Based Medicine would appear to be well-situated to serve as a useful balm to cool things down: Novella and Gorski enjoy leadership roles in a community of skeptics who aren’t afraid to step up and respond forcefully to confident overclaiming, whatever the politics of the overclaimer, on some of the most controversial subjects imaginable. And on this issue, confident overclaiming is rampant, so it’s a target-rich environment.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Instead, Science-Based Medicine has fallen into the exact same trap as numerous mainstream news outlets, violating some of its founding principles in the process. If you read the site’s recent coverage of this issue, you will come away thinking there is a big, broad, impressive body of evidence for youth gender medicine, that there isn’t any actual controversy here at all. Rather than evaluate the available evidence carefully, SBM defaults to just about every activist trope that has come to dictate the terms of this debate in progressive spaces. This is a disturbing example of what complete ideological capture of an otherwise credible information source looks like. Science-Based Medicine has “bought into the hype and failed to ask the hard questions.”

Then, Shrier herself lets loose on ineffectual “conservative” opposition to the Trans Train:

Here, then, is a solution for conservatives: Stop playing the Left’s game of victimhood, stop straining to adopt its lingo. I’m not suggesting that you speak disrespectfully. I’m suggesting that you’ll never win a victimhood contest, in part because you don’t believe in victimhood contests (to your credit) and it shows. The point of the Left’s quick-changing lingo is to confuse, to make it impossible to form an argument or respond to one. The lingo is very much a trap, and if you’re straining to master it, you’re already caught.

Speak as plainly as you can. When discussing issues of biological males competing in women’s sports, don’t say “transwomen in women’s sports”—because the entire question at issue is whether these biological men who identify as transgender are a kind of woman; they aren’t, and pretending they are forfeits the argument. In such context, talk about “biological males in women’s sports” because that is both accurate, clear and essential to making the argument our daughters need you to win.

Nor should you accept that the point of public dialogue is to avoid offense. That has never been the point of language, though it is often the point of its opposite (silence). The goal of language in the public sphere must always be to speak truthfully and as clearly as possible. If you can avoid offense, so much the better. If you cannot, then at least you’ll have been understood.

When a member of the Administration replaces the word “mother” with “birthing people,” you don’t Aw, Shucks, as if you’ve encountered the last native speaker of Etruscan. You’re faced with a direct assault on women and the family. And you respond in kind.

A personal account of abuse, from a positive birth advocate who publicly dared to equate the people who give birth with, you know….women.

Again, it’s a little inside baseball-y, but that’s how all of these matters are played out, isn’t it? In subcultures and groups and smaller movements that police their own, which then moves out into the broader culture.

In short: Milli Hill is a long-time birth advocate, with a particular perspective, familiar to those of us who were discussing these issues back in the 70’s and 80’s: the commodification of the birth process and, in her view, the role of patriarchy in shaping the corporate medicalization of birth, which she characterizes as “obstetric violence.” She’s obviously coming from a progressive perspective. She started an organization to raise awareness, she’s written books. She’s all about empowering women.

And she has expressed the radical view that women give birth, and to change that language is not only unrealistic, but dangerous. As a consequence of posting this view on a couple of social media sites in rather mild fashion, the Cult has come down hard on her. Here’s her piece explaining what happened.

By sharing this story, I am aware I am laying it in front of you for your judgement. You may decide that my views about obstetric violence or the distinction between sex and gender are wrong. And that’s OK. It should be ok for us to hold different views and to respectfully discuss them. When we do so, it’s sometimes even possible to change people’s minds. Alternatively, we don’t change their minds, but our own clarity of thought benefits from the dialogue, and we develop and grow from the experience of sharing our views and disagreeing. We discover branches of thought we have not yet explored, we enter into grey areas, we see new perspectives. This is the kind of nuanced discussion that elevates humanity and promotes ideals such as peace, progress, growth and tolerance.

The opposite happens when we decide it is acceptable to mistreat, silence or bully people with whom we do not agree. It should never be acceptable to threaten individual’s livelihoods in the way that is currently happening to so many women. I can see that the tide is currently beginning to turn on this, as more women speak out – and this is my main motivation for speaking out. But I also hope that at some point there is a period of reflection on just how far the policing of women’s thoughts and opinions was allowed to go before anybody really noticed. To those of us in the eye of the storm, it felt completely dystopian, and this was exacerbated by the fact that the majority of people seemed to have no idea that a modern day ‘witch hunt’ was happening – or perhaps they did know, but looked the other way.

I also hope that people take time to consider why those who are being dragged to the pyre are not just women, but in most cases, lifelong left-leaning, open minded, educated and tolerant women, often with a history of supporting minority groups or working in areas concerned with justice and fairness. Either there is something in the water that has caused these usually rational and inclusive women to turn into hateful bigots overnight, or they have a point that’s worth listening to.

Finally (and these are only a few of the many I could have chosen from last week), on the implications of self-id in crime and crime reporting, from a UK perspective.

So, it’s the Daily Mail – and you have to scroll past a bunch of nonsense to actually take in the whole article, but the gist is centered on one particular arrest last week:

Violent offences committed by men who self-identify as female are being recorded as having been perpetrated by women – leading to claims that the practice is distorting official crime figures.

It was highlighted by the case of former police support officer Zoe Watts, who was jailed last week for a string of offences including building an improvised bomb and having a cache of illegal weapons including knives and a stun gun.

The 35-year-old worked for Lincolnshire Police for eight years. 

The court was shown YouTube videos in which Watts used a baseball bat to smash watermelons bearing pictures of prominent public figures including Boris Johnson and the feminist author Germaine Greer.

Watts was born male and was called Kyle. But the force has confirmed it will record the crimes as being committed by a female offender because that is Watts’s self-declared gender identity. 

Its record of the offences will be shared with the Home Office and become part of official crime figures.

The article quotes a Welsh MP who’s gone on record opposing this. I’ll just link directly to her remarks:

To find effective solutions we must fully understand the problem, and accurate data is key in tackling the causes of crime, protecting the public, providing justice to victims, and rehabilitating offenders. Data must be accurately sex-disaggregated in order to fully understand the impact of all crimes on women and girls. In order to combat sexism, we need to count sex, and in order to combat discrimination against other groups, there is a need to record separate and additional data. The offending patterns of men and of women show the highest differential of all, so we need to monitor the sex of victims and of perpetrators of all crimes. For example, the proportion of women among those prosecuted in 2019 was 2% for sexual offences, 8% for robbery, and 7% for possession of a weapon.

We all want to live in a society that is respectful and tolerant and strives for equality. Gender reassignment is rightly a protected characteristic and we must respect the privacy of transgender people, but in order to protect everyone when it comes to official records of offences, particularly against women and girls, we need accurate records of the biological sex of the victims and the perpetrators of crime, in addition to data on the gender identity of victims and perpetrators. Why then are police forces recording the self-identified gender of victims of suspected offenders and not their biological sex? I understand that at least 16 regional police forces now record suspects’ sex on the basis of gender identity, following the advice of the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Data based only on self-identified gender does not give accurate data on which to build a violence against women and girls strategy, nor to effectively plan services that support all victims and target all perpetrators whatever their sex or however they identify.

If police records are not robust and correctly disaggregated by sex, we end up with unreliable and potentially misleading data in reporting. For example, the BBC asked 45 regional police forces in the UK for Toggle showing location ofColumn 507data on reported cases of female perpetrators’ child sex abuse from 2015 to 2019. The data received indicated that there was an increase of 84%. Data corruption means that we cannot tell whether this large increase is due to an increase in female offenders or those identifying as women, and that detail matters.

Women make up 3% of the arrests for all sexual offences. The number of women convicted for these crimes is so low that the misrecording of the sex of the perpetrator skews the data very quickly. Where offence categories are very rarely committed by women, the addition of just one or two people can have a significant impact on data. For example, a biological man convicted of attempted murder and other offences at Birmingham Crown court in 2017 was recorded as female, thus falsely elevating the number of females convicted of attempted murder that year in England and Wales by around 20%. We need to know what action the Government will take to ensure correct police record keeping and prevent the potential corruption of data on crimes and their impact on women and girls.

St. Benedict – July 11

Yes, it’s Sunday. But it’s still his day.  First, what I’ve written about him for children.

He’s in The Loyola Kids Book of Saints under “Saints are people who teach us new ways to pray.” Here are some excerpts – click on images to get a fuller view.

Over the past few years, there is much talk about St. Benedict and monasticism, as people wrestle with the question of  how to live in a culture increasingly hostile to the Gospel. You might come away from these conversations thinking that Benedict and is way is essentially about “withdrawal.”  I don’t think that is correct.  Looking at the origins of Benedictine monasticism might help understand why. Again – history is going to help. I keep telling you!

Christian monasticism did, indeed, begin with withdrawal from the world. In the 3rd century men and, to a lesser extent, women, began heading to the desert to live in solitude. But even these anchorites did not shut themselves off from interaction with others, as they accepted visitors seeking to benefit from their wisdom and assist them.

Benedictine monasticism was different, of course. Cenobitic, as opposed to anchorite, monasticism, it was a call to live in community, together, with brothers.

But is this “withdrawal?”

In fifth century Europe, most people lived their lives in small communities of extended family and small settlements. Most people did not travel far from where they had been born, unless driven to do so by war or natural catastrophe. As towns developed, they built walls, and in general, one could not just pop into any walled settlement you happened to be passing by. The walls were there for a reason, and access to all communities  was guarded and controlled.  These kinds of restrictions on travel and entrance into unfamiliar towns is not just a feature of medieval life, either. I recently read a history of hotels and tourism in the United States, and was quite interested to see how serious travel restrictions were even in the US, up to the mid-19th century and the development of the railroad. The traveler, in short, was usually viewed with suspicion before welcome.

My point is this, moving back to 4th and 5th century Europe: Benedictine monasticism developed on a  continent in serious, violent transition, parts under constant siege, and it was radical and transforming, but the basic instinct – to form a community with a strong sense of self-identification vis-a-vis the outside world was a fundamental paradigm of social organization of the period. 

One could even say that during this period, all communities that valued their survival and identity were, in a sense, semi-cloistered, guarded against the influence of the outside world. 

The difference is that Benedictine monastic communities were intentional, with ties rooted, not in family or geography, but in brotherhood in Christ. A new family, a new community in a continent of other communities formed out of different paradigms.

I also think the argument could be made that Benedictine communities, while they were certainly withdrawing from worldly influence in terms of turning from marriage, familial ties and the political arrangements of the world, they were probably more open to the world than your average family-based walled settlement down the valley from the monastery. They were more open to learning, more open to visitors from other areas, more cosmopolitan and just as economically engaged – at least before the growth of commerce.  

So to position Benedictine monasticism as an option that, at heart, is a means of protection from the world, period, is a simplistic misunderstanding of the origins of this movement that misses the opportunity to explore what St. Benedict and his monks really have to say to us today.

It is about community, yes. It is about cutting ties with some aspects of the world and intentionality, yes. It is about expressing the instinct that human beings are made, fundamentally, for communion with God and that aspects of the world actively work against spiritual growth and fully human life as God desires. That is fundamental to Christian spirituality, as we can see from St. Paul on.

But withdrawal from everything, pushing away and closing-off? No. 

From Pope Benedict XVI, in 2008:

Throughout the second book of his Dialogues, Gregory shows us how St Benedict’s life was steeped in an atmosphere of prayer, the foundation of his existence. Without prayer there is no experience of God. Yet Benedict’s spirituality was not an interiority removed from reality. In the anxiety and confusion of his day, he lived under God’s gaze and in this very way never lost sight of the duties of daily life and of man with his practical needs. Seeing God, he understood the reality of man and his mission. In hisRule he describes monastic life as “a school for the service of the Lord” (Prol. 45) and advises his monks, “let nothing be preferred to the Work of God” [that is, the Divine Office or the Liturgy of the Hours] (43, 3). However, Benedict states that in the first place prayer is an act of listening (Prol. 9-11), which must then be expressed in action. “The Lord is waiting every day for us to respond to his holy admonitions by our deeds” (Prol. 35). Thus, the monk’s life becomes a fruitful symbiosis between action and contemplation, “so that God may be glorified in all things” (57, 9). In contrast with a facile and egocentric self-fulfilment, today often exalted, the first and indispensable commitment of a disciple of St Benedict is the sincere search for God (58, 7) on the path mapped out by the humble and obedient Christ (5, 13), whose love he must put before all else (4, 21; 72, 11), and in this way, in the service of the other, he becomes a man of service and peace. In the exercise of obedience practised by faith inspired by love (5, 2), the monk achieves humility (5, 1), to which the Rule dedicates an entire chapter (7). In this way, man conforms ever more to Christ and attains true self-fulfilment as a creature in the image and likeness of God.

The obedience of the disciple must correspond with the wisdom of the Abbot who, in the monastery, “is believed to hold the place of Christ” (2, 2; 63, 13). The figure of the Abbot, which is described above all in Chapter II of the Rule with a profile of spiritual beauty and demanding commitment, can be considered a self-portrait of Benedict, since, as St Gregory the Great wrote, “the holy man could not teach otherwise than as he himself lived” (cf. Dialogues II, 36). The Abbot must be at the same time a tender father and a strict teacher (cf. 2, 24), a true educator. Inflexible against vices, he is nevertheless called above all to imitate the tenderness of the Good Shepherd (27, 8), to “serve rather than to rule” (64, 8) in order “to show them all what is good and holy by his deeds more than by his words” and “illustrate the divine precepts by his example” (2, 12). To be able to decide responsibly, the Abbot must also be a person who listens to “the brethren’s views” (3, 2), because “the Lord often reveals to the youngest what is best” (3, 3). This provision makes a Rule written almost 15 centuries ago surprisingly modern! A man with public responsibility even in small circles must always be a man who can listen and learn from what he hears.

Benedict describes the Rule he wrote as “minimal, just an initial outline” (cf. 73, 8); in fact, however, he offers useful guidelines not only for monks but for all who seek guidance on their journey toward God. For its moderation, humanity and sober discernment between the essential and the secondary in spiritual life, his Rule has retained its illuminating power even to today. By proclaiming St Benedict Patron of Europe on 24 October 1964, Paul VI intended to recognize the marvellous work the Saint achieved with hisRule for the formation of the civilization and culture of Europe. Having recently emerged from a century that was deeply wounded by two World Wars and the collapse of the great ideologies, now revealed as tragic utopias, Europe today is in search of its own identity. Of course, in order to create new and lasting unity, political, economic and juridical instruments are important, but it is also necessary to awaken an ethical and spiritual renewal which draws on the Christian roots of the Continent, otherwise a new Europe cannot be built. Without this vital sap, man is exposed to the danger of succumbing to the ancient temptation of seeking to redeem himself by himself – a utopia which in different ways, in 20th-century Europe, as Pope John Paul II pointed out, has caused “a regression without precedent in the tormented history of humanity” (Address to the Pontifical Council for Culture, 12 January 1990). Today, in seeking true progress, let us also listen to the Rule of St Benedict as a guiding light on our journey. The great monk is still a true master at whose school we can learn to become proficient in true humanism.

By, of course, Ade Bethune. 

One of my favorite things to post when thinking about St. Benedict and monasticism – the wonderful video from our Benedictine monastery up the road here in Alabama, St. Bernard’s.

7 Quick Takes

—1 —

Update: Just because. Mainstream news services aren’t mentioning it, but new spelling bee champ Zaila Avant-garde is…homeschooled. First homeschooler to win the Bee since 2000. But, as I said, you won’t read it in the NYTimes….

All right, for this set of quick takes, I’m going to do a run through of some recent movie viewings with some random links for whatever is left. (Update: nothing. Oh well.) Not in order of watching, just in order of when they come into my brain. For far more intelligent takes on film, go to my Film Guy Son’s page here.

— 2 —

The Graduate watched with 20-year old. Which is the age Dustin Hoffman is supposed to be in the movie, but of course, in real life wasn’t – he was almost ten years older. But no matter. I’ve seen the movie a couple of times before, and have always enjoyed it. It’s so much of its time (1967) and really could be of no other: nihilistic, everyone drifting, the Greatest Generation robustly assuring the Boomer of the way to inner and outer peace…plastics.

It’s a landscape in which everyone is terrible, everyone uses each other, no one’s really settled or truly at home in the world. Very much of its time – and of ours, for we, their children and grandchildren, are still suffering from and working our way through all of these people’s issues and the ways they chose to cope.  

A world of accomplishment but no purpose.

A world of relaxation but no rest.

A world of need but no love.

Depressing? Maybe.

Realistic? Absolutely.

— 3 —

The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann/DiCaprio/Maguire version. I’ve never seen the Robert Redford version. It came out when I was in high school, and back then, I had a deep aversion to Redford, a man for whom many of my female friends swooned, but whose face always struck me as a weird combination of too pretty but also malformed.

All three of us watched this, and I’m going to admit to you – I liked it. A lot. There are a few problems with it including the casting of the actor who plays Tom Buchanan and awkward exposition of Gatsby’s past. I mean – it’s in the novel, but the way it’s handled in the film seems inserted and not smoothly done. I liked the framing of the film – Nick writing the book in a sanitorium, which is entirely fitting since so much of the power of the book comes from the narrative perspective  – but I also felt there was too much of this. It should have been at the beginning, and at the end, with no scenes of him typing and furrowing his brow in between.

But other than that, I thought it was good. You might sniff at the use of contemporary music in the party scenes, but, as we discussed in our living room afterwards, it works. Perfectly, almost. It serves to bring the modern viewer more intimately into the moment of the film, successfully, at least for us, avoiding the temptation to see the thing as a museum piece. Guys, this is us – striving, faking it, chasing after illusions, reaching for the light on the other side of the bay hopefully, yet hopelessly.

— 4 —

Alien  – seen it several times, but one of us had never seen it. Highly enjoyable, although not, of course, as groundbreaking in impact as it was over forty (WHAT) years ago.

— 5 –

Rear Window – again, I’d seen it, one of us had not. The film is masterful in creating such suspense in such a confined space, but I think what elevates the film and makes it truly affecting are the side plots emanating from the other windows – from the honeymoon couple whose shade is never raised to the ballerina who entertains multitudes, but in the end welcomes back her little shrimp of a serviceman love, of course Miss Lonelyhearts who is saved by music – so lovely, and so true – the couple who sleeps outside and lowers their poor doomed dog in the basket and finally, the sculptress on the bottom floor – my alter ego, really. Living contentedly by herself in the city, making her art, sitting outside in the sun with her reading material. Geez, Hitch, get OUT of my dreams already.

“It’s called ‘Hunger.'”

— 6 —

Jackie Brown – we actually watched this a couple of weeks ago, the twenty-year old and I. Again, a great film. Tarantino fanatics probably don’t like it as much as they enjoy the rest of his blood-soaked oeuvre, but as a woman of a certain age, I’m here for it. I saw it in the theatres back in the day, way before I was a certain age, but didn’t remember much about it. What I for sure didn’t remember about it was that aside from Pam Grier, the other real star was Robert Forster, the late lamented featured player of Breaking Bad – Vacuum Cleaner Man. I had no idea he played such an important role in this film.

And again, as in Rear Window – it’s the human factor that he provides that raises this film to another level. Jackie Brown is certainly a film best understood by those in the middle of the journey of our life. Like Jackie Brown, we’ve scrambled our entire lives, taken steps forward, but perhaps more steps back, and just really want to get off. Like Max (Forster’s character), we’re maybe ready to take a chance.

But the end? Perfect. It ends in absolute respect of both characters. It could force a “happy” ending of the two of them riding off to Spain together, but it doesn’t. It could have – but it doesn’t. And that makes all the difference.

Oh, and this with The Graduate – we have two films that begin with long shots of characters riding smoothly on automated sidewalks through airports. Add it to the the equivalent scene in Mad Men, and I guess you have a trend.

— 7 —

What’s next? Well, people want to go see the Black Widow, so I guess they’ll do that. I checked out The Big Sleep from the library, so I guess we’ll do that, too. One of the guys is going to be busy this weekend, and the other is out of town with friends, so I guess all of these will wait until next week.

Which just means Mom will have the television so hello Criterion Channel.

Oh, and Loki was watched. I watched it too even though I don’t understand a bit of it and don’t want or need it explained to me. I’m just here for the obvious jokes and for Owen Wilson, thnx.

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