7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

You know, people ask me all the time:

Amy? How do you maintain your sanity in these crazy political and ecclesiastical times? How?

 

Honestly, people. Just get it together.

Okay, there are a few parts to the actual answer to that question, but one of the most important is:

Instead of engaging fevered discussions on social media, I prefer to spend my free time reading about 18^th century Vietnamese priests traveling to Portugal.

You should try it!

More on that at the end. So for now, some super quick takes on watching and reading:

 

 

 — 2 —

 

First, Happy Candlemas:

 Roseanne T. Sullivan in Dappled Things. 

On Candlemas, the prayers said by the priest as he blesses the candles with holy water and incense include the symbols of fire and light as metaphors for our faith and for Christ Himself. The choir sings the Nunc Dimittis or Canticle of Simeon with the antiphon “Lumen ad revelationem gentium et gloriam plebis tuæ Israel” (“Light to the revelation of the gentiles and the glory of your people Israel”) after each verse. A solemn procession may be made into the church building by the clergy and the faithful carrying the newly blessed candles to reenact the entry of Christ, the Light of the World, into the Temple.

From a sermon by Saint Sophronius, bishop in today’s Office of Readings.

In honour of the divine mystery that we celebrate today, let us all hasten to meet Christ. Everyone should be eager to join the procession and to carry a light.

  Our lighted candles are a sign of the divine splendour of the one who comes to expel the dark shadows of evil and to make the whole universe radiant with the brilliance of his eternal light. Our candles also show how bright our souls should be when we go to meet Christ.

— 3 —

From a 1951 book of family faith formation:

Finally on the feast of the presentation of Christ in the Temple, we put the light of Christ into our children’s hands for them to carry still further into the world. The Church has never been reluctant to place her destiny in the hands of the rising generations. It was once the custom at Candlemas for her to give each of her members a blessed candle to hold high and bear forth to his home. It was a beautiful sign of our lay priesthood and its apostolate in action. Now the blessed candles seldom get beyond the altar boys who are wondering whether to turn right or left before they blow them out.

Because the ceremony has died of disuse in many places, because we want our family to appreciate the great gift of light as a sign of God’s presence, because we all must have continual encouragement to carry Christ’s light of revelation to the Gentiles on the feast of Hypapante (Candlemas), we meet God first at Mass and then we meet Him again in our home in the soft glow of candles relighted and carried far.

 

–4–

On a somber note, I recommend this New Yorker article on brain death, centered on the tragic story of Jahi McMath – the whole thing is sad, but the chain of events in the hospital that led to her current condition are horrifying.

The point of the article, though, is not the potential malpractice, but, indeed, the question of brain death – how it came to be widely accepted as a standard, but is now being questioned:

Jahi’s family believes that she is capable of a fuller range of thought than she is able to express, an idea that Shewmon has also considered. “Given the evidence of intermittent responsiveness,” he wrote in a declaration to the court, “we should be all the more willing to remain agnostic regarding her inner state of mind during periods of unresponsivity, rather than automatically equate it with unconsciousness.” Recent advances in neuroimaging have led some clinicians to consider the possibility that a significant portion of patients thought to be in a vegetative state—those who demonstrate no overt awareness of their environment and do not make purposeful movements—have been misdiagnosed; they may be periodically conscious and capable of some degree of communication.

Nailah said that nearly every day she asks Jahi, “Are you O.K. with what I’m doing? Do you want to live? Are you suffering?” She said, “I know that things change—people change. If Jahi has given up and doesn’t want to be here anymore, I’m just going to go with what she wants.” She said that Jahi answers her questions by either squeezing her hand or pressing her own index finger toward her thumb, a signal for “yes” that Nailah taught her. “When I see that,” she said, “I think, Who am I to not want to live? Because many days I do want to die. But then I see her every day, trying her best.”

–5 —

Is your child’s school glued to its seat on the Tech Train full of tablets, apps and Chromebooks?

Try this, from the news release from the College of William and Mary (one of my older kids’ alma mater) about a recipient of one of its teaching awards:

A stickler for his total ban on electronic distractions in his classroom, Glasser almost completely eschews the use of PowerPoint to keep the focus on material to be discussed.

“The biggest thing for me in teaching is that it’s a dialogue, teaching students how to carry on that dialogue with one another and with me,” he said.

Education is fraught and complex – always has been, and is even more so today for thousands of reasons. But guess what? None of those reasons are, “We don’t have enough technology in our classrooms.”  Not one. 

 

–— 6 —

Perhaps you heard this:

A bishop, seven Trappist monks and 11 other religious men and women killed by extremists in Algeria between 1994 and 1996 have been recognized as martyrs by Pope Francis on Saturday.

The decree signed by the pontiff was released on Saturday morning Rome time, confirming that the Servant of God, Pierre Lucien Claverie, bishop of Oran, together with 18 companions have been acknowledged as dying in odium fidei, meaning in “hatred of the faith.”

The monks of Tibhirine knew that they were in danger and would likely be killed if they remained in Algeria, at the time divided by a war between extremist rebels and the Algerian government forces. Their story was depicted in a 2010 French drama “Of Gods and Men,” recipient of the Grand Prix, the second most prestigious award of the Cannes Film Festival.

Here’s what I wrote about the film in 2011. 

— 7 —

Ah, and about the 18th century Vietnamese priest…

Yes, I read history to relax. More importantly, I read history to understand. I am driven to try to understand life and the ways of God and men. My primary lens for doing so is history. I find even the bad news of the past – perhaps especially the bad news – comforting. Surrounded by craziness and worse, we are tempted to despair. Regularly reading some history – really, any history – is an effective antidote. Human beings have always been short-sighted, stupid and cruel – but they’ve also been noble and loved sacrificially. In the present and in the past. Nothing changes except scale and speed.

Some of you, particularly if you are involved in academics, are aware of JSTOR, the online academic journal and book resource. I don’t have easy access to an academic library Super Secret Code, and I don’t want to pay, so I’m limited in what I can read on the JSTOR site – they have a convoluted system in which you can borrow three academic articles at a time for your “shelf” – each article has to remain on the shelf for two weeks before you can trade it out. This generally satisfies my random wanderings, the digital version of long afternoons spent in the stacks.

JSTOR has recently (I think) put a slew of material on “open access,” though, including books. I’ve not looked through the list – it’s here – but one that just popped up on a search for me was a book published last year on one Fr. Philiphe Binh. A summary:

A Vietnamese Moses is the story of Philiphê Binh, a Vietnamese Catholic priest who in 1796 traveled from Tonkin to the Portuguese court in Lisbon to persuade its ruler to appoint a bishop for his community of ex-Jesuits. Based on Binh’s surviving writings from his thirty-seven-year exile in Portugal, this book examines how the intersections of global and local Roman Catholic geographies shaped the lives of Vietnamese Christians in the early modern era. The book also argues that Binh’s mission to Portugal and his intense lobbying on behalf of his community reflected the agency of Vietnamese Catholics, who vigorously engaged with church politics in defense of their distinctive Portuguese-Catholic heritage. George E. Dutton demonstrates the ways in which Catholic beliefs, histories, and genealogies transformed how Vietnamese thought about themselves and their place in the world. This sophisticated exploration of Vietnamese engagement with both the Catholic Church and Napoleonic Europe provides a unique perspective on the complex history of early Vietnamese Christianity.

It’s quite interesting. I’ve learned quite a bit. Before reading the book, when I would think “Vietnam” and “Catholic,” I would next think, “French.” That’s a relatively late association – for, if you think about it, Catholicism came to southeast Asia via the Portuguese and Spanish – and so it came to Vietnam.

So what was the conflict alluded to in the description about? It’s pretty complicated, but it all comes down to disputes about ecclesiastical control of the region, especially after the Jesuits were dissolved. This dispute was played out in ways that seem unfathomably petty today. So, for example, the Jesuits had permitted the Vietnamese Catholics under their care to pronounce the word for grace (transliterated from Portuguese into Vietnamese), not as grasa – which would be transliteration – but as garasa – because they found that the Vietnamese just could not manage that “gr” sound – they needed the vowel in between.

Well, here comes a new bishop who happens to be Spanish. In Spanish, garasa means “grease of a fat pig.” No way!

The bishop announced that failure to pronounce the proper way would prevent Vietnamese Christians from participating in the sacraments of the Church….Binh regarded the bishop’s order as a scheme to depopulate the Padroado community: “The Dominicans wish to take all of the sheep of the Jesuit order, and were preventing the Christians from reading the word garasa, [stating] that anyone who did not give in could not have their confessions heard, nor could they have their children baptized….” (54)

This, and other conflicts led Fr. Binh to decide to travel to Lisbon, and, if needed, to Rome, to request a different administrative arrangement for his people. This effort is going to take years…including years just trying to travel from Vietnam itself, as these unsympathetic bishops keep sabotaging Binh and his companions’ efforts to get on ships, find safe passage and so on. It’s pretty incredible so far.

So do you see? Do you feel the need for a dose of perspective?

Read history. 

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