Gobs of you here today. Welcome! Come back! Again and again!
I blog every day about something – usually something about a saint o’the day, the Scriptures, something I read or watched or am raging about.
These days, it’s mostly gender issues, since very few in the Catholic world are addressing it directly and those who are doing so are missing the point, massively.
It’s been a busy day, so I didn’t have time to follow up on this morning’s post. We were building a new bed and rearranging my son’s room now that Rocky is no longer with us.
I will probably post some more thoughts a little later, as more reactions come in.
I will say – contrary to what some are assuming, guess what, I’ve been to maybe four TLM celebrations in my life. So it’s not personal with me, in that sense. I’m interested in history, in the coherence of Catholicism and the Gospel across time, I’m very interested in the practice of religion and the uses and misuses of power and language within religious systems.
Anyway, a couple of unrelated links I was going to post earlier, so might as well toss them up here.
Staying in England, from the 5/12 issue of the New Yorker: “The Mysterious Origins of the Cerne Abbas Giant.”
I’ll highlight the thoughts of the local RC priest, which strike me as wise and expressive of the usual Catholic balanced, reality based view on things:
While I was in Cerne Abbas, I met up with Jonathan Still, the personable vicar of St. Mary’s Church. The Reverend Still took over the parish a decade ago and has successfully reinforced connections between the church and the village, including the possibly unholy figure on the hill. Questions about the giant’s origins were beside the point, Still proposed, in a phone call before my visit. “The giant is absolutely essential to what this place is, and who these people are,” he told me. “He is an active personality in this community, and that is far, far, far more important than when anyone constructed him.” As with any work of art, Still went on, the giant’s significance lay not in what his makers intended but in his reception through the ages, and in the emotional response that he stirred in all who encountered him. “He is an artifact, and he is undeniable,” he said. “He just is.”
The vicar had experienced the giant’s strange potency one night, he said, when he and a house guest—a naval-chaplain friend—climbed up the hill in the company of Vic Irvine and Jodie Moore, the brewers, in whose business Still holds the role of spiritual director. Irvine and Moore had brought plastic jugs filled with their latest brews—an offering for the giant. “It was a clear night, about half past twelve, and we could see the whole valley in the blue moonlight,” Still recalled. “It was freezing cold, with the smoke curling up from the chimneys below. We sat up around the giant’s head—which is totally illegal—and we tasted this one, and that one, and we poured some into the giant’s mouth.” After about an hour of sitting and drinking, Still said, an extraordinary thing happened: “We poured this beer into the giant’s mouth, and we saw his Adam’s apple go up and down as he swallowed it.”
When Still and I spoke, the scientists had not yet presented their surprising revelations about the giant. But the vicar told me that any suggestion that the monks of Cerne Abbey would have been horrified by the presence of a naked figure on the hillside failed to comprehend the aspirations of the cloistered life. “The most difficult part of being a monk is coming to terms with yourself and your own existence,” he said. “Benedict said, ‘Remain in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.’ You have to stay in your place, in your spot, and come to terms with who you are. So the link with the giant would be about being frank and honest about what we are. That is exactly what the giant is, and that is what the monks would have been trying to do.” Outside Still’s church, of which he is the forty-sixth vicar in a lineage stretching back seven centuries, he urged me to look up at the building’s façade. Carved into the stone of the tower, which dates from the early sixteenth century, were several grotesque images of oversized figures eating smaller figures. “I had grotesques on my previous churches, but I’m not aware of images of giants eating people,” he said. He’d never noticed them before that afternoon, while waiting outside the church for our appointment, he told me. “You just walk past things, and you don’t see them,” he said.
Charlotte was Both 