7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Well, this has been a week. For those of you just now popping in since last Friday – we spent last weekend in NYC – report here.

Since, we’ve had school, orthodontist, a daughter needing to be taken to the airport at 4:30AM to travel to job interviews, the beginning of basketball practice, which has necessitated some juggling of music lessons, music lessons, and now a day off of school for teacher conferences.

Plus, it actually feels like fall, which means I actually feel like cooking again.

As for me: I didn’t get a ton of reading done this week – only the autobiography of St. Anthony Mary Claret – which I wrote about in several posts on Wednesday (just click backwards for those) and the beginnings of a couple of books – one novel and one historical study. More on those next week, once I finish.

Writing? I finished – I think – the “short” story I’ve been working on for a very long time. It’s over 7K words, which is not unheard of for a so-called “short” story, although the fact that most of my books run around 25k books – just a little more than triple that – does give me pause.

What will become of that story? I have a competition in mind to which I am probably going to submit it, but if I don’t – I will publish it on Amazon Kindle.

— 2 —

I had really not been aware of how much space that story had been taking up in my head until I finally settled on a last sentence and pressed the period key, and then “save.” My brain immediately felt 80% emptier (that might be a bad thing…)

BTW – I’ll be Living Faith on Sunday. Go here for that. 

— 3 —

Halloween’s coming, and wow does it feel great to be past all of that. Sort of like the feeling a post-menopausal woman gets in walking past the feminine hygiene aisle or the parent with no babies in the present or future gets while walking past the diapers.

Been there, done that. 

I mean – one of them will go out trick-or-treating with some friends, I think, but dressed as what? Don’t care, and it’s his job to figure it out. We have had very few trick-or-treaters over the past couple of years, so I’ll just get one bag this year  – and this time, I’ll get a bag of something everyone here actually likes, so the leftovers don’t sit in a bin in the kitchen for…a year.

There will be no lack of commentary on Catholics n’ Halloween – because there never is – but perhaps your most efficient course of action on this score will be to head over to CWR and read Tom McDonald:

— 4 —

Allhallowtide is actually a kind of triduum: three days of commemoration that includes All Hallows Eve (October 31, shortened Hallowe’en), All Saints Day (All Hallows Day, November 1), and All Souls Day (November 2). As with other major feasts, celebration of All Saints Day begins on the vigil, which is why secular culture celebrates Halloween on the night of October 31^st, but then does nothing on the actual feast days that follow.

Halloween is a Christian holiday. Some Celtic neo-pagans and fundamentalist Christians claim the Church simply took over the date for a pagan festival of the dead and all its trappings. False. The current dates fall on a harvest festival called Samhain by the Celts, but there is no indication that Samhain was a festival of the dead. It simply marked the end of the harvest season. Festival days were often regarded as liminal time in which the veil between the material and spiritual worlds are considered thinner, but elaborating this into a festival of the dead on par with those found in other ancient pagan belief systems is more than than the textual evidence can support. Since we have no pre-Christian records of its observation, claims about about its observation are speculative.

Bede calls November Blod-monath (Blood Month), which sounds promising. However, the real meaning is mundane: it was the time surplus livestock were slaughtered to save fodder for the long winter. Otherwise, Bede attaches no significance to the season.

— 5 —

I’ll be posting more on this and All Saints/Souls days next week, of course, but in looking to see if the Clerk of Oxford had posted anything on Halloween, I ran across this interesting post on English churches and saints’ shrines:

This is the season of All Saints, Hallowtide, and it seems a fitting time to post a collection of pictures on a theme I’ve been interested in for a while: how English cathedrals and major churches today choose to represent their pre-Reformation history, and especially the history of the medieval saints whose shrines they once housed. In the Middle Ages, these shrines were integral to the life, history, and physical shape of these cathedrals, a tangible embodiment (in every sense) of their shared spiritual life and their collective identity as a community. As at Winchester, these shrines were usually in a prominent and central position in the church, close to the high altar, and the history of most cathedrals was inextricably bound up with the saints whose relics they preserved, who might be their founders, early leaders, or the nucleus around which the community originally grew. The saint was both literally and metaphorically at the heart of the cathedral, and to remove them created a huge gap. When these shrines were destroyed, it left an absence in more ways than the loss of the saint’s holy ‘rotten bones’.

A number of churches today choose to acknowledge and commemorate that absence, and as a medievalist I’m interested in the different ways they find to do that. This post is a brief journey through the shrines of some of England’s medieval saints – or rather, the empty spaces which those shrines once occupied.

Some of these churches are among the oldest surviving institutions in England, with more than a thousand years of tumultuous, yet essentially unbroken continuity, and their saints and their medieval history of pilgrimage are an unavoidable part of their story – unless they are prepared to ignore the first six or seven centuries of their history, and often their own foundation-story, these churches have to find some way of telling that story to visitors. 

Get ready:

— 6 —

This is amazing and beautiful (as seen on Facebook)

Staged paintings / paintings:
1. The burial of Christ / the entombment of Christ
2. O êxtase de María Magdalena / Mary Magdalen in ecstasy
3. the crucifixion of Saint Peter / crucifixion of Saint Peter
4. A decapitação de João Batista / Beheading of John the Baptist
5. Judite decapitando Holofernes / Judith beheading Holofernes
6. The flagellation of Christ / Mikko of Christ
7. the martyrdom of saint Matthew / the martyrdom of saint Matthew
8. The Annunciation
9. Rest on the flight to Egypt / rest on the flight into Egypt
10. Narcissus / Narcissus
11.: the resurrection of Lazarus
Saint Francis of Saint Francis of Assisi in ecstasy
13. Baco / Bacchus

— 7 —

All right, as Queen of the Local Educational Field Trip, I cannot believe that after doing this for years now, researching my eyes out, scouring the southeast for day trips hither and yon – I missed the paper museum!

The museum was founded in 1939 at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology by paper expert and collector Dard Hunter, who came from a family of printers and was a follower of the American Arts and Crafts Movement in the early 20th century. Considered one of the preeminent papermakers and printers of his age, his work has been featured at the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library.

The museum was revived in 1989 and moved to Atlanta, where today it is located at the Renewable Bioproducts Institute at Georgia Institute of Technology. 

(Not kidding – it looks very good – on the Georgia Tech campus, for heaven’s sake.)

Speaking of Atlanta – I am hoping we can see Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibit at the High Museum. It’s going to be there for three months, and all the regular tickets have already sold out. They are going to make a hundred tickets available every day, first come first serve in the mornings. I’ll wait until Christmas break and see if we can do it.

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

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Twenty Years of Harry Potter

 

The first Harry Potter novel was published twenty years ago today in the UK – June 26, 1997.  Some thoughts:

• I’ve read most of them – I don’t think I ever actually read the last one, or if I did, I just skimmed it.
• I read them to keep up with the cultural zeitgeist, because I had a daughter who was mad for them, and for work – I wrote about them here and there, mostly for OSV.
• I always admired Rowling’s imaginative powers, but it became clear, as the series progressed, that the editors stepped away, in deference, I assumed, to her great popularity. The books kept getting longer and longer, with no good reason. As time went on, I found them very skimmable.
• They’re not “great literature” by any means. The writing is flat and declarative, but you know what? She created a world, and that’s admirable and engaging.
• I addressed the religious objections to the series at various times over the years, but never understood them. I am usually able to empathize with other points of view – it’s something that actually functions as an obstacle in my writing life, especially of opinion pieces. But I’ll admit that the religiously-based objectors to Harry Potter who saw it as a harbinger of the occult and Satanic among the young lost me.
• But if someone didn’t want their kids reading them? I’m not going to argue with that and tell other families what to do. This time.
• On the other hand…I was not up for embedding the Harry Potter novels in some sort of alt-canon for purposes of youth ministry and religious education. Yes, lessons can be learned, and there’s clearly an thematic element of self-sacrifice that’s central to the worldview of the novels, but putting the books at the center of religious ed lessons and sermons  is idiotic. It is possible to walk a line, balancing attention to themes that evoke a Christian ethos, without forgetting that …it’s just a kid’s book. Let’s immerse kids in Scripture and the lives of the saints, first of all. That’s priority #1.
• Many years ago, I wrote on the series for OSV. Here’s that article. I think it holds up – it was before the fifth book came out, and I think was published in 2000. I wrote it as a “Should I let my kids read Harry Potter?” kind of piece, answering potential questions. In reading it I can see I was actually more empathetic than I remembered! Good for me!
• (Forgive the boring formatting – it was just at the old site, and I don’t want to bother to do anything new to make it prettier.)
• JK Rowling on Twitter is insufferable. Truly unbearable.
• This is an interesting article on “Harry Potter and the Millenial Mind.”  It addresses, in a much deeper way, albeit a more specifically judgmental way, what I brought up in my recent post on #ReadADifferentBook.
• To me, the Harry Potter novels were about what so much of magic-centered youth literature is about: the magic is a metaphor for the human power and potentiality. As children and young people, we slowly discover that we are not just a mass of feelings and impulses, but that we have power. Not just the proverbial and boring “gifts and talents,” either, but simply, the power to live and breathe in the world in an intentional way that impacts others.

What do we do with that power?

We can use it for good. We can use if for evil. We have to learn how to use it. We make mistakes. Every interaction we have is a manifestation of this power – of just being a person, in the world.

It’s sort of magical.

• My 25-year old daughter is of the Harry Potter generation – the generation that was the same age as the characters in the books or at least close enough (reading kids always read ahead of their chronological age). I remember one of them came out when we first moved to Fort Wayne. Our furniture was delayed, and she was only seven years old, but I took her to the Little Professor bookstore for the midnight release party. She got the book, and stayed up most of the night reading it on the sleeping bag spread out in her empty room.
• She and her friends loved these books, identified with the characters, and dressed up like them on Halloween and when the movies came out. She’s read all of the books multiple times – it was her habit, than when a new volume in the series or a new movie came out, she would reread them all up to the point of that volume or movie.
• I once asked her why the books appealed to her so strongly, and she said that it was two things.  First, it was the fact that Rowling had created a complete and all-encompassing world, and she found that endlessly fascinating.  Secondly, quite simply: “Friendship.”
• I have never understood how anyone, in their occult-fearing fevers – could miss this. Kids didn’t love the Harry Potter world because they yearned to learn how to cast spells. They loved it – loved it – aside from enjoying and being intrigued by it – because of the friendship between Harry, Ron and Hermione and what it said to them about loyalty, love, community and responsibility.
• When kids could imagine themselves in the Harry Potter universe, it’s not just because of cool, quirky magical elements, but because it would be a world in which there was danger, yes, and mystery, but at the core of that world they could see themselves, not alone anymore, not misunderstood or taken for granted, but with friends, learning important things and being brave, using their powers to do things that really matter.
• For kids trapped in classrooms for twelve years learning mostly tedious things in tedious ways in schools that are hothouses of peer judgment, facing a life in which, they are told in subtle and not-subtle ways – what matters is what you look like and “achieve,” in which authentic community is so hard to find and nurture – that’s a vision that answers a very deep yearning, isn’t it?

My younger two sons, ages 16 and 12 now, have not been on the Harry Potter train to quite the extent as their sister was. For the reader of the two of them, the younger one, Rick Riordan fills that role in life, which is…a bit unfortunate because Rowling is a far better writer than Riordan is, and the Riordan books are actually more problematic to me than Rowling’s – the tone is just obnoxious and superficial. But he thinks they’re entertaining. And he’s also trying to read War and Peace, so I’ll let him have his snarky pagan deities.

I think the movies have played a part in their lesser interest – they saw the movies first, and so the books hold less interest for them. But they are intrigued and interested by the Harry Potter world, so to that end, followers of this blog know that we had two HP encounters over the past year:

First, at Universal Studios Florida last Thanksgiving (no, HP wasn’t the only reason we went – they wanted to go, they were heading to Florida relations for the holiday, and so it seemed like a convenient time to go. I was impressed by the HP stuff – reflected on here – but I will also admit to you that I spent some time thinking, with great satisfaction, I’m pretty sure this is the last time I am ever going to have to go to a theme park. In my whole life. Ever. 

(Meaning….my curiosity about the place was satisfied and they’re old enough now to do these things on their own…and would prefer it that way, of course.)

Then the Harry Potter studios in London, the experience of which really surprised me. I wrote about it here. It’s not just about this world. It’s about creativity in general and the power and goodness of imagination.

 

 

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Thursday scenery

At Wal-Mart, it was the day of Buying A Lot of Stuff. One woman slid a case of red pepper sauce right off the shelf into her cart. As we were driving in, another woman was supervising workers who were stuffing huge plastic bags full of plastic pumpkin-shaped trick-or-treat baskets into the back of her station wagon – I assumed she was picking them up for a school or charity drive or some such.

But the sight of the dozens of pumpkin baskets being claimed by one person clearly bothered Little Michael. He kept mentioning it while we shopped and at one point burst out with, “I think that was a bad woman.” I kept telling him I’m sure there were some left in the store, but the simple task of providing proof was denied us because Michael, torn between his newfound terror of Halloween displays and his concern about the baskets, ultimately let the former win out.

And now, haunted by nightmares of pumpkin-hoarding Alabama women, he naps.

But not before engaging me in some theological conversation on the way to pick up Joseph from school.

“Did God make us?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

(I think how to answer, but before I can…)

“Does he put us on a piece of paper and then make us?”

“Well, no..he spoke…”

“Smoke? He make us from smoke?”

“No – no (let’s try this again) – he makes us through our mommies and daddies.”

“How?”

“Um…he just does.”

Well. He does.

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