This is one of my favorite stained glass windows in town.
It was, for a long time, just a blur of colors on my right when I attended Mass at this parish. But over the last couple of years, we had occasion to spend a lot of time in this church building as the parish staff graciously allowed my son to practice piano and organ there, and I finally paid attention to it.
So, let’s take a look.
It’s a Pentecost window, of course. At the center top is the Holy Spirit, showering down those gifts on those gathered in the upper room.
To the left is another figure – St. Francis Xavier, the patron of this very parish. He’s surrounded by symbolic respresentations of the Far East and the people whom he served.
The same Spirit, the same gifts, the same courage given to every link in the chain, from the upper room, through the various branches of the Communion of Saints that leads us to this spot here, in this church building, in this community, on this planet at this moment in time. And this is where you start – right here – and then keep moving, led by that same Spirit to speak – where ever you land.
Here we are – For help in preparing the kids, and perhaps ourselves, let’s go to one of my favorite sources – this wonderful old Catholic religion textbook.
The short chapter on Pentecost is lovely and helpful.
This volume is for 7th graders.
What I’m struck by here is the assumption that the young people being addressed are responsible and capable in their spiritual journey. They are not clients or customers who need to be anxiously served or catered to lest they run away and shop somewhere else.
What is said to these 12 and 13-year olds is not much different from what would have been said to their parents or grandparents. God created you for life with him. During your life on earth there are strong, attractive temptations to shut him out and find lasting joy in temporal things. It’s your responsibility to do your best to stay close to Christ and let that grace live within you, the grace that will strengthen you to love and serve more, the grace that will lead you to rest peacefully and joyfully in Christ.
(The book is structured around the virtues. Each section begins with an event from Scripture that illustrates one of those virtues, followed by stories of people and events from church history that do so as well)
Finally, Veni Creator Spiritus – or Come Holy Ghost, as most of us know it. I have a chapter on it in The Words We Pray.A sample:
Are you getting ready for school? Catechists, homeschoolers and Catholic school teachers are. If you are of a mind to, please take a look at all the resources I have available for catechesis and formation.
If you really want to get strange looks, you could toss this out, something I’d forgotten about – that I have the pdf of De-Coding Da Vinci available for free here. Use as you like. All kidding aside, at the time, I thought that taking apart the hugely popular novel was a useful and engaging way to teach people about the origins of the Scriptural canon and some early Church history. Plus, it took me two weeks to write it, so not a bad use of time. Here you go.
Are you teaching religion to elementary age students? Friendship with Jesus, Be Saints, Bambinelli Sunday, Adventures in Assisi, The Loyola Kids’ Book of Saints, The Loyola Kids’ Book of Heroes.
Can you help catechists, Catholic schools and parish programs? Consider gifting your parish, school or favorite catechist with copies of these books. Click on the covers for more information.
Again – even if catechesis isn’t something you are personally involved in, any catechist, parish school, library or program would welcome a donation as a beginning-of-the-year (no matter when it begins…) gift.
I’m going to be writing a little bit about the Internet and social media every day this week.
“A little bit” and “every day” are nothing more than a probably pointless attempt at self-discipline. This is the kind of knotty issue I do contemplate every day and that might lead me sit for hours in front of the computer hashing out ridiculously long walls of text. So I’m going to limit myself. And sitting here, it’s 9:15 am – I am committing to publish this by 10. AM. Let’s see how I do.
Strange times, what with social media bannings and excommunications and attempts to even deny upstarts and dissidents a framework for their businesses. There’s a lot to unpack here, a challenging task because of the almost frantic narrative shaping that’s happening. We really don’t know – as usual. I have my suspicions. I think the core of what’s happening, both in Congress and in Big Tech, is an effort to strip Trump of his power immediately, before 1/20, not because they seriously think he will have a second term, but because of what he can still do in the next couple of weeks: namely declassify, pardon and issue executive orders (as Pompeo did regarding Taiwan in the last couple of days.)
We’ll see.
That’s not my subject today, anyway.
And yes, what is “actually happening” in the United States government is more important the Internet/social media treatment of it, but they are also intimately connected.
I also want to be very clear on something else: there are serious issues here, related to repression of information and news, and the greater power that has concentrated in a few hands as other news sources have disappeared. That’s not my subject today.
Over the past couple of days, the calls to Follow Me on [Alternative Platform] have heightened. I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook (and hardly any at all commenting or “discussing”), but every other post, it seems, over the past few days has been invitations to migrate, declarations of cancellation and so on.
I won’t be following anyone on to any new platforms. Not a one. In fact, this is a clarifying moment for me. It’s time to take a few more steps away. I’m in the process of stripping down my FB presence – they don’t make it easy, that’s for sure. It might take a few weeks, but in the end, I’ll still have a FB page, but it will only have a week’s worth of posts on it at a time – and none of those personal, just links from here.
(My only concern – and the reason I’m taking time – is to catch personal photos or anecdotes I might have posted there, but not saved elsewhere.)
Before this (yes) wall o’ text, let me just give you an abstract. Maybe save you some time:
If you’re frustrated by the limitations of social media, discern why. Maybe it’s not time to find another, more acceptable form of social media. Maybe it’s time to turn away.
Pay attention, come to me;
listen, and your soul will live.
-Today’s first reading. Isaiah 55
Let me offer a little spiritual perspective. Limited, as usual. Perhaps even wrong – not unusual. But perhaps it might help one or two of you.
When we live, shaped by a framework of Catholic spirituality, we live in tension – an acknowledged tension between radical acceptance of God’s will and acceptance of God’s call to courageously plunge into the world and, with his help, affect radical change.
I think following the latter path correctly is totally dependent on embracing the former.
And in traditional Catholic spirituality, acceptance of God’s will in my life means approaching a particular event or circumstance, not with a reflexive reaction of rejection or outrage or determination to do what I did before, but rather of calm watching and listening.
What’s happening here? What is God teaching me through this? How can I grow through this? What does this invite me to embrace that’s good and from God? What elements of my life or the world is it revealing to me I should turn from or change?
So, in the wake of great loss – say, a death – you can rage and grieve – and there is a place for that – but then there is a point at which such emotions become an exhausting treadmill, not to speak of a rejection of God’s will, and it’s time to take a look at life, not as you want it to be, but as it is.
How can I grow closer to God now, not despite this, but through this?
For that – lest we forget – is why we’re here. Not to make our voices heard, not to right earthly injustices, but to grow in holiness. We may do that through those other efforts, but our first reason for existence stems from the fact that God created us, God loves us, and wants us to love him and dwell with him forever.
So when something happens – good, bad, indifferent – our call is to stop, look and listen, set our egos aside, and say….what does this reveal? About my sins? About my temptations? About my love of God and neighbor?
So much for no wall of text.
Anyway. All that is to say – in a moment like this, I find it really ironic that as we have spent years fretting and clucking over the mostly negative impact of particularly social media on our individual and social lives – the minute the true face of these powers is revealed, so many of us respond by….trying to find another way to remain in their caves.
What about this? What about seeing this as a clarifying moment and girding your loins and actually leaving the cave?
Maybe begin with the following. First recognize that this internet/social media loop is not random. It didn’t just happen. Like marketing, it’s designed.
It’s designed to elevate and harness various aspects of human personality and behavior, not for the benefit of society, not for your personal benefit, but for their profit.
There’s no nobility here. There’s no idealism. It’s about money and power, period.
It’s about using particular types of energy that make you tick, like you’re a cog in a machine.
First, and most obviously, you’ve given up your data. All of it. It’s there, from your Social Security number to what you searched for on Ebay just now. It’s all there.
But of more interest to me is how this ecosystem engages and exploits:
Our curiosity
Our nosiness
Our anxiety
Our loneliness
Our aspirations
Our desires
Our tribalism
Our anger
Our ego
Our creativity
Our drive for change
Our desire for freedom
Yes, the Internet can help us direct our good qualities in positive ways. But I think it’s clear, particularly in the context of the authoritarian ecosystem this is turning out to be, it’s mostly a negative and it’s time to leave it behind, as much as we can.
For it is good and natural to:
Want to know and understand
Feel as if I belong
Know that I’m not alone in my views, interests and loyalties
Express myself
Connect
Play
Share what I know
Share my gifts
How does social media exploit these good, even holy aspirations and desires and turn them into destructive, demeaning dross?
So as with anything else – we look to this digital empire and we must discern. It’s true of any moment, of any situation – there is a neutral aspect to it, there is the potential for positive outcomes, and there is always, no matter what, temptation. Temptation to let our qualities, both good and bad, be used for the sake of another’s profit and power.
As you can see, this isn’t so much a comment of the events over the past week, but more a nudge offered about how to approach the moment. To stand apart from the events, whether they be in Washington or on the screen in your hand, and to consider how truth is being served by the events and how they are used, and to consider what how this digital ecosystem is tempting us, what it’s delivering and who is ultimately benefiting.
To consider how they are all exploiting you, your anger, your idealism, your anxiety, and even your desire for change.
And how do we get out? What do we do?
We look at the good aspects of life that we hoped were served by this ecosystem – and perhaps were and are – and we consider two points in relation to that:
What is the cost of finding community, self-expression and so on in the context of this digital/social media world?
What temptations does this digital world touch and exploit in me?
All that – yes – wall of text – is to say – here’s this moment. It’s clarifying even as it’s very confusing. Perhaps it makes sense to respond by finding another outlet that won’t exploit both your worst and best instincts and censor you when you violate the chosen narrative.
In this book, we walk the path of medieval science with a real-life guide, a fourteenth-century monk named John of Westwyk – inventor, astrologer, crusader – who was educated in England’s grandest monastery and exiled to a clifftop priory. Following the traces of his life, we learn to see the natural world through Brother John’s eyes: navigating by the stars, multiplying Roman numerals, curing disease and telling the time with an astrolabe.
We travel the length and breadth of England, from Saint Albans to Tynemouth, and venture far beyond the shores of Britain. On our way, we encounter a remarkable cast of characters: the clock-building English abbot with leprosy, the French craftsman-turned-spy and the Persian polymath who founded the world’s most advanced observatory.
An enthralling story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man and an extraordinary time, The Light Ages conjures up a vivid picture of the medieval world as we have never seen it before
Well, a bit overwrought, but if it enlightens folks, have at it!
Speaking of books, as I mentioned before, I’ve been tracking my book sales since the Covid-soused pre-Easter plunge. (Tracking in the only way I can, through the metric Amazon provides authors, which tracks…something. I really have no idea what. I think it’s more than Amazon sales, but I’m not sure).
The cratering reached its worst point the last week of April, when sales this year were about a tenth of what they were last year. Maybe an eighth. No First Communions, no Confirmations, not much Easter visiting and associated gifting from grannies. This year’s sales lagged behind last’s until the second week of May when the tables began to turn.
All summer, slowly but surely, this year’s sales started to surpass last year’s. By mid-summer this year’s cumulative sales of all my titles (as recorded by this metric) were regularly double or triple what they were last year each week.
It’s interesting to me because it’s my way of tracking parish life – obviously what was happening was that parishes were slowly opening back up and beginning to celebrate these sacramental milestones again. And then, as summer waned, folks started looking for religious education materials and supplements. This week’s big sellers wereProve It God, Prove it Prayer(both with sales about ten times the usual – it seems to me that they were required by some classes or schools) and the book of Heroes(sales 7 x what they were the same week last year) and Sign and Symbols (3 x this week last year).
It’s fascinating because at this rate, my sales during this six month royalty period are probably, after a disastrous start, going to even out and end up being commensurate with last year’s.
As I said, it’s mostly interesting to me as a sort-of concrete way to “measure” Catholic parish and catechetical life in these very weird times.
And guess what – you don’t even have to pay a dime for this title!
Speaking of Catholic parishes and the pandemic, if you know of a parish that’s truly worked hard to serve the needs of its people and the community during this time – nominate them to be recognized for this! Here’s an article about the effort, and here’s the site.
As much as I applaud him for bringing our Eucharistic Lord out onto the streets of the city…
As much as I thank him for taking the lead (when so many other prelates remain silent) in insisting that religious worship is “essential activity”…
As fully as I agree with him that the response from city officials—or rather, their failure to make any response—is an insult to Catholics…
Still I wonder: If the archbishop thinks that the city’s restrictions are unreasonable—if he thinks that it would be safe to celebrate Mass for a larger congregation in the city’s cathedral—why doesn’t he take the obvious action? Why doesn’t he go into his own cathedral, invite the public, and celebrate Mass?
Before I go any further let me emphasize that I do not mean to single out Archbishop Cordileone for criticism here. On the contrary, I mean to praise him. The question that I ask of him could apply, far more pointedly, to all the other bishops and priests who have meekly accepted unreasonable restrictions on the administration of the sacraments—to the bishops and priests who have not raised public objections, have not mobilized the faithful, have not organized Eucharistic processions.
But again: Why ask city officials to “free” the Mass? There is only one man who has the rightful authority to restrict and regulate the liturgy of the Catholic Church in San Francisco, and his name is Cordileone. If he wants to celebrate Mass for the public in his cathedral, he can do it.
But wait, you say. He can’t celebrate Mass for the public in his cathedral. It would be against the law.
David Lean was a great filmmaker who grew up in the British studio system preceding the outbreak of World War II and became a director, hitched to Noel Coward, during the conflict. After working directly with Coward for four films, he broke out on his own and became one of the most important British filmmakers. His great epics tend to overshadow his smaller films, some of which are pretty much just as great, and that’s really why I do these exercises of running through entire filmographies.
For about five years now, Karen Langley (Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambles) and Simon Thomas (of Stuck in a Book) have instigated a semi-annual event in which people around the world take a week to read and write about books published during a particular year. The next round, coming up the week of 5-11 October, will look at books from the year 1956.
1956 was a terrific year for what I might call good but not stuffily great books. Perhaps the best example is Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, which won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and which is much loved for the spirit embodied in its opening line: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” This was Macaulay’s last novel; also appearing in 1956 is Anthony Burgess’s first novel Time for a Tiger, the first book in his Malayan Trilogy.
To encourage folks to take advantage of the #1956Club while also discovering something beyond what’s readily available for instant download or overnight delivery, I’ve put together this list of 10 long-forgotten and out of print books from 1956.
Well, here we are. Just a few days until the Return. The Return to College. For a few months, we hope, and not just for a few weeks, as College Guy pessimistically predicts. As I keep saying, I’m optimistic.
We’ll see.
School for the other one is slowly picking up speed – to be interrupted by travel next week, to be sure, but getting a little more organized nonetheless. This week has seen meetings with Algebra 2 and Latin tutors as well as a piano lesson. We talked over plans for literature and history study. Looked at photos posted by the private high school most of his friends attend, saw all the images of people in single file in masks looking at each other from behind plexiglass in the lunchroom, and if there were any lingering questions, they were answered. “We’re good. Thanks.”
All done on a new laptop. I have a desktop, which is my preference for working, but I needed a new laptop – for a couple of years I’d been depending on a Chromebook we’d had to buy for Son #4’s high school career – and I hate Chromebooks. I mean, just hate. I love small laptops – that’s not the issue. The issue is the dependence on the cloud and the Internet and Google and all of that. And the fact that if you forget your passwords, it just might wipe the device of all local data on it – which happened to me last summer in Spain after I’d written a short piece for the Catholic Herald, but before I’d sent it in. Cue new scene with me sitting on the floor in a hotel room in Caceres, Spain at 6 am, fuming (and worse) attempting to reconstruct and rewrite.
Plus, we needed a better, more dependable machine for Kid #5’s academics, such as they are. We don’t do a lot of screen stuff, and no remote classes of any sort, but you never know. Might as well have something decent, just in case.
I mentioned before that my book sales, like everyone else’s, have been impacted by this virus and responses to it – namely, no big gift-giving binges around Easter and the Spring Sacramental Season. But, as I noted, since mid-May, sales have been slowly but steadily edging back up. It’s really interesting. I’m still behind last year, but every week since mid-May, sales this year have topped the equivalent week last year, sometimes more than doubling the number of units sold. The Loyola Kids Book of Heroes is now even with total sales from the same period last year (by the measure I have access to through Amazon Author portal – which doesn’t record all sales.). I think parishes that didn’t have big First Communion or Confirmation celebrations when they normally do have been having them in smaller batches through the summer, and people have purchased gifts for that – and then you throw in the increase in people doing homeschooling, and there you go.
One of the most famous works of art rescued from the Nazis by the Monuments Men is, of course, “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb”, more commonly known as “The Ghent Altarpiece”, a 15th-century masterpiece by the Van Eyck brothers that resides in St. Bravo’s Cathedral in the Belgian city of Ghent. Readers will recall that recently, a number of ill-informed commentators and meme-makers criticized the recent cleaning and restoration of the piece, because the face of the Lamb came out looking more humanoid and less lamb-like. After an exhaustive review, experts from the University of Antwerp and the National Gallery of Art have concluded that the Van Eycks did, in fact, intend to have the Lamb – who symbolizes Christ Himself – display the (to modern eyes) slightly disturbing face that we see gazing out at us now. It may be a late Medieval convention with respect to how to portray animals, since similar faces appear among the horses in one of the other panels of the altarpiece, or it may be that one or both of the Van Eycks intentionally wanted to have the viewer thrown a bit off-balance when praying or meditating before the image.
I meant, but forgot to mention last week, that the Cathedral parish held a celebration on August 2, bringing the traditional way of celebrating Our Lady of the Snows from St. Mary Major in Rome down here to Birmingham. That is – letting white rose petals fall from the ceiling.
(And yes, the Cathedral has been having Mass with full ceremony since April/May – no congregational singing, every other pew roped off, etc., but a full music program – you can see the orders of worship here.)
Both accounts undermine the popular image of Poulenc—carefully cultivated by the man himself—as the epitome of Parisian suavity and ebullience. He was, in fact, a turbulent, even tortured character: sometimes arrogant, sometimes self-castigating, sometimes lovable, sometimes impossible. That complexity only adds to the interest of the music. The critic Claude Rostand famously commented that Poulenc was a combination of “moine et voyou”—monk and rogue. Many of the composer’s works fall cleanly into one category or the other, but some of the strongest fuse the two personalities in one. The Organ Concerto (1938) interlaces brimstone dissonances with rollicking fairground strains. The Gloria (1959-60) exudes an almost scandalous joy, as if a crowd of drunken angels were dancing down the boulevards.
Had a very strange, unusual experience yesterday. Encapsulated in this Instagram story:
No, I’m not going anywhere, except to Atlanta to take people to the airport. But it does mean a few days of (I hope) great productivity. What it doesn’t mean is a trip to Ikea on that Atlanta journey, since the hints I’ve read online indicate that there’s a considerable wait just to get into the store, which just reopened about ten days ago. Forget that. Let’s digest:
Writing: I have something due on July 20. Haven’t started writing it yet. Hopefully over the next week I’ll get it about half done as well as get myself in a sort of groove, so that once people return, the hard part of framing and envisioning will be done and I can just write a few hundred words in between music practices and food prep and other shenanigans.
A lot of my book sales are seasonal, specifically– Christmas and then Easter/First Communion/Confirmation related. I don’t have access to book sales from the various publishers that publish my books, but I do have some metric that Amazon provides authors. I don’t think it’s just Amazon sales, but I’m not sure. Anyway, not surprisingly, compared to previous years, this spring’s sales have been laughably miniscule. Totally expected. Shrug. The interesting thing, though, is that over the past two weeks, there’s been a rather dramatic uptick. Not at the typical height of April/May, but about four times as high as a normal June.
First Communions are back, baby!
Listening: As reported, we have moved on from Brahms, Haydn and Prokofiev(you can listen here to the entire playlist – it’s public now – and he got “Excellents” from all three judges in the competition) to Gershwin (the big three Preludes plus Novelette in Fourths and Debussy’s First Arabesque. That’s the summer playlist, with him beginning to tackle the entire Moonlight Sonata as his big project for next year. Plus, I think the teacher is wanting him to do some Chopin Etude.
Watching: A bit of a blip in movie watching, as work schedules, hanging out with friends and a new video game have interfered. After Hobson’s Choice,we stayed in England and took in the Ealing comedyThe Man in the White Suit.
A low-key satire about human beings’ response to innovation and change. Alec Guinness portrays an unassuming yet committed young scientist who is trying to invent an indestructible fabric. He seems to succeed, but the initially-welcomed development is soon understood to have repercussions for almost everyone – from the big business tycoons to labor. It’s a movie about persistence, creativity, resistance to change and yes, my favorite theme, unintended consequences. Not as hilarious as The Lavender Hill Mob or quite as dark as Kind Hearts and Coronets, but a gem of a film.
(My main go-to for books like this, the Internet Archive, has been hit with legal action restricting what books it can make available for borrowing – books that you could borrow for a week or more are now only available for an hour. Hopefully they can get that straightened out soon. I discovered that this was available via Hoopla from my local library. It seems to me that Hoopla’s holdings have greatly expanded since the last time I checked, before Covid.)
I enjoyed it very much, although, you know, it wasn’t a laugh riot or anything. Set in Rome during the last stages of the Second World War, it’s about an American soldier who attempts an arrangement with a young Italian woman. A step above prostitution, in his mind, but is it really? Aside from the interesting landscape of wartime Rome, it confronts us with important questions about victory, defeat and occupation – and the impact of these Important Events on ordinary people, who simply want to live their lives.
I’ll be reading more of him.
Now I’m reading The Boarding House by William Trevor, which I also borrowed digitally from Hoopla. It’s quite a strange book. I started it last week and gave up after twenty pages, but then returned to last night. I’ll stick with it this time.
Cooking: Three major recent successes:
Madeleines. They were Son #4’s favorite bakery good from France years ago, and it just occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I should try to make them. Ordered a pan for the purpose, and followed this recipe – success! The recipe is correct though – these are not items that keep. They really are only good the first day.
These ribs. I ended up marinating them for almost three days (kept meaning to cook them, but life interfered). Delicious. Excellent. And yes, the Chinese cooking wine does make a difference. (Obtained, along with the ribs, from our local mega-Asian grocery store. $2.99 a bottle.)
A bone-in ribeye cooked via this method – the reverse sear.This is the second time I’ve done this, and I’m sold. Yes, I splurged on a higher cut of steak (when you’re only buying one, and you do it once a month….go ahead), so that makes a difference, but this method really does produce a wonderfully juicy steak, no resting required.
Not too long ago, our Honduras trip was in the future, and we were ready and excited to go …and then we were in the midst of it….and now…we’ve been back over a week.
Thanksgiving was quiet here. College Kid is back and in and out. Daughter and son-in-law will be dropping by on Friday. College Kid returns for the final sprint on Sunday, then M and I head out to see new Grandson/Nephew for a couple of days (a longer return trip will be happening after Christmas, when College Kid can come, too).
Dinner was fine, but neither it nor the prep were Instagram-worthy. No turkey this year – I wanted to give College Kid food that he’s not getting and that he’s missing at school, so we did flank steak (this recipe – my standby).
The frail argument offered by the usefuls has, for decades, helped to prop up shaky pedagogical and rhetorical methods, only adding fuel to the fire of the uselesses. The structure won’t hold anymore. No, the study of Latin—demanding, challenging, exhausting, and, like a good hike through the mountains, restorative in and of itself—must not be treated like a cognitive boot camp. Next we’ll be going to the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum to sharpen our vision and to La Scala to improve our hearing. Divers and ballerinas have beautiful physiques, no doubt, but they’ve built those muscles so they can dive and dance, not to look at themselves in the mirror. When we study Latin, we must study it for one fundamental reason: because it is the language of a civilization; because the Western world was created on its back. Because inscribed in Latin are the secrets of our deepest cultural memory, secrets that demand to be read.
One other minor contention against the usefuls and the uselesses: Latin is beautiful. This fact undergirds all that I will be saying in these pages. Beauty is the face of freedom. What all totalitarian regimes have most strikingly in common is their ugliness, which spreads to every aspect and form of life, even to nature. And by the adjective “beautiful” I mean to say that Latin is various, malleable, versatile, easy and difficult, simple and complicated, regular and irregular, clear and obscure, with multiple registers and jargons, with thousands of rhetorical styles, with a voluble history. Why give ourselves practical reasons for encountering beauty? Why impede ourselves with false arguments about comprehension? Why submit ourselves to the cult of instant access, of destination over journey, of answers at the click of a button, of the shrinking attention span? Why surrender to the will-less, the superficial, the defeatists, the utilitarians? Why not see that behind the question “What’s the point of Latin?”—perhaps posed unassumingly—rests a violence and an arrogance, an assault on the world’s richness and the greatness of the human intellect?
I would like to put the reader on guard against one more noxious cliché. Even among specialists one hears the term “dead language” thrown around. This characterization arises from a misconception of how languages live and die, and a hazy distinction between the written and the oral. Oral language is linked immediately with the idea of being alive. But this is a bias. Latin, even if it’s no longer spoken, is present in an astounding number of manuscripts—and writing, particularly literary writing, is a far more durable means of communication than any oral practice. If, therefore, Latin lives on in the most complex form of writing we’ve yet imagined, namely literature, is it not absurd to proclaim it dead?
Latin is alive, and it’s more alive than what we tell our friend at the café or our sweetheart on the phone, in exchanges that leave no trace. Think of it on an even larger scale. In this very moment the entire planet is jabbering, amassing an immeasurable heap of words. And yet those words are already gone. Another heap has already formed, also destined to vanish in an instant.
It’s not enough that the speaker is living to say that the language he or she speaks is alive. A living language is one that endures and produces other languages, which is precisely the case with Latin. I’m not referring to the Romance languages, which were born from spoken Latin, or to the massive contribution of Latin vocabulary to the English lexicon. What I mean to say is that Latin qua literature has inspired the creation of other literature, of other written works, and, as such, distinguishes itself from other ancient languages: those that, even with a written record, are truly dead on the page, since they served in no way as a model for other languages.
This also means, though, that if we are going to become missional parishes, and make forming disciples our main emphasis, the Sunday liturgy cannot be our sole focus. It can’t be our “main event.” It can be the place where disciples come to grow in holiness and be sent on mission, (Ite Missa est), but it can’t be the main way we attempt to accomplish our mission to evangelize. It is a way, in the Church’s theology, that we disciple and catechize those who have already made that intentional decision to follow Jesus, since the sacramental economy is not accidental to the Christian life, and, mainly through the homily, it can be a way that we do missional formation and evangelization, but it isn’t primarily how we as a Church have ever primarily, initially made disciples through the work of pre-evangelization and evangelization.
The Mass isn’t ever going to be very good at pre-evangelization, which is what most people in the earlier discipleship thresholds need. The Sunday service at your local evangelical church is always, always going to be able to put the “cookies on the bottom shelf” more effectively than the Mass is. While we both have Sunday worship experiences, the target audience of ours is very different and, I guess what I am wondering is…maybe that is okay?
To me, this is good news because, frankly, in refining the focus of the Mass, we still do not lose our missionary mandate as parishes, so we have to figure out how to do that elsewhere. Outside of some small tweaks with how we approach hospitality and welcoming, or the homily, etc., nothing about the way the liturgy is crafted is ordered with non-believers in mind. It is inherently for disciples, to move them deeper into the mysterium tremendum. It serves the mission in the sense that it sanctifies disciples to prepare them for mission but it’s purpose is not to speak to non-disciples in a way that impacts them and moves them through the thresholds. Even the best tweaks we can make to the Sunday experience will still not allow for the Mass to actually comprise the sum total of our evangelistic efforts, if we want to be missionally impactful in our communities.
If parishes DO want to be more missionally effective, they then have to get really serious about Thinking Outside of Sunday.
Before we get rolling here with some Thoughts, I’ll just mention, since it is obligatory on Social Media, our Halloween experience.
Yeah, nada this year. I don’t think we had any trick-or-treaters last year (our house is in a neighborhood, yes, but the street is kind off enough to take it away from main Halloween traffic), so this year, I didn’t even purchase any candy – we had a few Gansito on hand, so I decided that if anyone showed up, that’s what they’d get.
Well, it was also in the 30’s here in Alabama, so add that to the situation, and you have, again, no trick-or-treaters, and an almost 15-year old who’s been over the holiday for a couple of years, so it was indeed, a quiet night here.
Which is fine. There might be some aspects of Parenting Young Children in America I miss at this point, but not many. My stance is more of walking past various aisles in the store – baby needs, feminine hygiene products, Halloween gear and (especially) Valentines – and thinking Thank God that part of my life is in the past. What next?
I am convicted of the truth of the Christian – Catholic faith by odd things. Yes, the traditional arguments and proofs have their power and make sense, but in the end, it is manifestations of paradox and a certain kind of skewing that gives me confidence of the truth. I am not as enamored of Chesterton as some are, but where he does appeal to me is his grasp of the paradox at the heart of reality, reflected and clarified in the Incarnation and the faith that flows from it.
The role of the saints in Catholic life makes a similar argument for me, if you will. There are many things to be said about saints, many ways in which they are used to argue for the Faith: they gave up so much for this…it must be true. And so on. But I come at the saints from a slightly different angle.
For when I look at the role of saints within Catholic life and spirituality, I see nothing like it any other institution, culture or subculture in human history. Yes, all cultures honor other human beings, some even have their miracle-workers. They have their wise men and founders, they have their holy fools and mystics.
But in what other human context are rulers and managers and the wealthy told that their life – their real life – depends on honoring, emulating and humbly seeking the prayers of a beggar?
When I consider the Communion of Saints, I see a great deal. I see the Body of Christ, visible and invisible, militant and triumphant. But I also see the breadth and depth of human experience in a way that no other aspect of life affords me and which, in fact, some aspects of life – parochialism, pride, secularism – hide from me. In touch with the saints, I stay in touch with real history in a more complete way, with human experience and with the presence of the Word made Flesh, encountered and embodied in the lives of his saints. Every single day, in the calendar of memorials and feasts, I meet them. I can’t rest easy and pretend that my corner of experience affords me all I need to know.
Here with the saints, we are taught that grace can dwell in every life, from any corner or level that the world erects. We can’t sit easily, proud and blind and dismissive of the other. The peacemaker is invited to beg the soldier’s prayers. The professor turns to the untutored child martyr. The merchant busily engaged with the world encounters the intense bearded figure, alone in the desert.
On today’s Solemnity of All Saints, our hearts are dilated to the dimensions of Heaven, exceeding the limits of time and space.
I attended Vanderbilt for my MA. I was in the graduate school, but my classes were in Vanderbilt Divinity School. (Difference? I was going for an MA in Church History, not an M.Div – a professional degree. So, Graduate School, not Div School). Most of my classmates were being educated for ministry in some Protestant denomination, mostly Methodist (Vanderbilt being an historically Methodist school) or Lutheran.
One afternoon, I was talking to a friend, a woman who was a Lutheran seminarian. I cannot remember what seminar we were taking together, but the topic of our conversation was the paper for the course. What would we write about? We ran over topics, we mused, we discussed.
And what struck me, and what sticks in my mind almost 30 years (!) later – it’s so weird that I can remember even that we were standing in an office of some sort, talking – was her end of the conversation. As I said, I don’t remember which class this was, but every possible paper topic she considered had, of course, Martin Luther at the center. Luther’s views on……Whatever topic as seen through the prism of Luther’s thoughts…. Understanding X in the context of Luther’s writings on Galatians….
And I thought…
How boring.
How boring to have your Christianity defined by the perspective of one theologian who lived in one tiny corner of Christian history.
(Sorry, Lutherans!)
I’ve thought of that often in the years since, as I’ve been grateful for the dynamic, if sometimes fraught diversity of Catholicism,which simply reflects the reality of what happens when the Word becomes Flesh. In the Catholic context, it’s most clearly seen, of course, in religious orders, all of which have different – sometimes radically different – charisms and spiritual sensibilities, but co-exist in the awareness that the body as many parts: Dominicans, Franciscans, Benedictines, Jesuits, Cistercians, active orders of women and men….etc.
So it has been over the past few years that I have marveled at some people’s insistence that Pope Francis, in his priorities and public expressions, defines – or is in the process of redefining Catholicism. What? Actually, that’s not supposed to be the way it is – Catholicism is supposed to define him, as is the case with all of us. Five tips for happiness from Pope Francis. How can bishops and priests be more like Pope Francis? Following Pope Francis this Lent…..Want to live like Pope Francis?
In addition, as social media takes over the scene and everything, even spirituality, seems to be filtered through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and the like, we see the dominance of I guess what you could call inspirational influencers, people of all denominations and traditions who’ve grabbed these platforms in the name of “faith sharing” and “inspiring” but somehow managed to invariably place themselves – their daily lives, their past and present struggles and victories, their children, their adventures, their advice, their personal care regimes – all at the center of your feed. Constantly.
There’s nothing wrong with being inspired by the particular charism and angle of a particular figure – of course! I certainly am! A particular figure can help us draw closer to Jesus and the Church, certainly – that person can be our grandmother, our friend, a pastor, a friend, a writer or mystic, an activist or the Pope. We can see something in that person that sparks us to take a closer look at Christ.
women, clergy, secular rulers, mystics, martyrs and a fisherman.
These saints would certainly welcome you, advise you to the best of their ability, teach you, listen to you, pray with you and be glad that you were inspired by some element of their life and thinking, but would also be horrified to think that you might be defining your Christian faith by their particular spiritual path rather than that of Christ through His Church. Because, you know, that’s humility. Real humility, which understands when stuff is becoming to much about yourself and your personal vision and in humility – backs off.
In most of these images, the gaze of the saints is certainly fixed, and in their example, they invite us to look, not at them, but with them.
Getting ready here – ready to write the “Pre-trip letter of death,” as we call it – the email I send out to my adult kids before a big trip. You know: location of the estate documents, attorney contact information, detailed (to the extent that it’s been planned) itinerary, insurance information, passport #s.
Fun!
You know why I do this right? There’s some superstition involved, yes: if I overprepare for disaster nothing will happen. But it’s also just, in my mind, an act of love. I’ve dealt with two deaths and estates over the past ten years: my husband’s and my dad’s (my mother died 18 years ago, just a few days after J was born, so I really had no involvement until the final Do you want any of this? stage.) – one unexpected and one, if not entirely predicted, not a total shock, considering he’d been smoking for sixty years and drinking heavily for a lot of that as well.
And you know what? It’s a pain in the neck. I mean – even with a will and other preparations, it’s a hassle, added on top of grief. Who needs that? Life is so complicated now, it’s not as if you can just shut the door and move on. If something happens to me or us, I owe it to the people I’m leaving behind to make the clean-up as smooth as possible. That begins with leaving clear instructions .
Well, it actually starts with having a will and other pertinent documents…you’ve got that, right?
(New readers don’t know this, but my late husband didn’t have a will at the time of his death – and neither did I, of course. It was a huge hassle, and issues still pop up occasionally, mainly related to publishing contracts. Get your wills made and make sure every account you have (529/401K/mutual funds) has designated heirs – a “successor owner.”)
— 2 —
So what else do I do besides write the letter-of-death to prepare for three weeks in Europe? Maybe do a little planning? A little.
(In my own defense, I secured the Seville apartment back in February, when we first settled on the trip. Airfare came much later – in April.)
I finally did start some thinking – mostly about post-Seville – and discovered the delightful note that one of our weirder destinations – the cemetery from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – is just kilometers away from the monastery of the famed Chant monks – S. Domingo de Silos. It will be a spectacular end to the trip, all round, for everyone, with all of our…interests.
I also realized that we’ll be in Seville during Corpus Christi (June 20), with a great-looking procession and hopefully other activities. We’ll be in Spain for St. John’s Day – and Spain, as in many European countries, St. John’s Eve is celebrated with bonfires. The Spain bonfires seem to be mostly centered in beach areas, but I’m still looking….
In our district, kids were challenged to read 40 books. They would read 20 books the first semester and another 20 books the second semester. They had to read a very regimented list of books and were required to keep a reading log AND to fulfill a one page question sheet for each completed book to get credit. They were graded and after the first semester, when many of the kids hadn’t read the first 20 books, they had to turn in a sheet each Friday and if they didn’t their punishment was to give up their recess to walk laps. Only two of the options each semester were free choice books, everything else was designed to make them read a variety of genres. Half of the books had to be over 80 pages in length. It was a one size fits all approach that left little wiggle room for the various types and stages of readers. It was limiting, punitive, and left little room for enjoyment or exploration. And it highly regulated our children’s freedom outside of class, which is incredibly difficult because school time is now so very regulated and regimented.
This is how that first semester went in our home. As I attempted to keep my child on task to meet the various requirements and goals, we fought. A lot. My child, already behind and feeling a lot of insecurity and resenment towards reading, responded exactly as you would expect. She cried. She fought. She procrastinated. She told me she hated reading. She told me she hated me. She told me she was stupid and a failure and that she hated herself. It was a very difficult semester in our home, for everyone. But most importantly, I worried that she wasn’t going to make it out of the 4th grade with any positive emotions surrounding herself, me or reading. It felt like everyone was being harmed and damaged.
One hundred and fifty years ago a legal case involving three nuns was front-page news in Britain and Ireland. The plaintiff was Susanna Mary Saurin, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, and she was suing her former superiors, Mary Starr and Mary Kennedy, for false imprisonment, libel, assault and conspiracy to force her out of the order. Or as the barrister representing Saurin put it, “wretched little bits of spite and hatred … heightened by all those small acts of torture with which women are so profoundly and so peculiarly acquainted”.
Saurin, also known as Sister Mary Scholastica, was not an obvious person to embarrass the Church; she was from an Irish Catholic family and two of her sisters were Carmelite nuns. One brother was a Jesuit and her uncle was a parish priest. Nor had Saurin been pressurised to become a nun. Her parents felt that two daughters in the convent was quite sufficient and consented with reluctance.
She was sent to a new convent in Yorkshire where Starr was the superior, with Kennedy as her deputy. Problems began after Starr asked Saurin what conversation she had had with the priest when she was in Confession, Saurin not unnaturally refused to say, and thereafter matters went from bad to worse.
Saurin claimed in the trial to have been subjected to numerous petty but vindictive actions by Starr and Kennedy. She claimed she was accused of disobedience for writing to her uncle, the priest, and she was not provided with letters sent by her family – either that or she was only allowed to have them for a short period before they were torn up.
Maybe most perplexing is the fact that the recordings had come out years earlier, on four separate releases between 1973 and 1982. These were later packaged into a two-disc set, Las Mejores Obras del Canto Gregoriano, which was released in Spain, where it reached Number One in 1993. The Spanish label that put it out marketed it as a stress reliever. This tipped off Angel that it could be a hit, if they could figure out how to sell it.
“We consciously decided to go for the widest possible distribution, the widest possible sales opportunity,” Steven Murphy, Angel’s president, told the Times. “So we took a very classically packaged product, with two CDs and a demure cover and lots of notes about the works, and we programmed a one-CD version of it. We called it Chant, so it would have a name the way a pop album does. And we came up with the cover as a way of appealing to a young audience.”
Improbably, the label’s marketing campaign — coupled with a general zeitgeist that propelled New Agey, Chant-adjacent ensembles like Enigma and Dead Can Dance to stardom — turned it into a hit.
“It’s hip in its own right,” Murphy said of the album to the Chicago Tribune. “It’s not unlike when you had the sound of Jimi Hendrix and the acoustic Grateful Dead. Now, you have Pearl Jam and Chant all in the same space. They are not exclusive.”
It became such a phenomenon, in fact, that the monks’ Spanish monastery, located in Burgos, became a tourist trap in the mid-Nineties. Another Angel rep told Entertainment Weekly in January 1995 that rooms in the abbey were booked through the summer — even if it wasn’t open to all. When the label was running a promotion to win a chance to spend the night there, they had to exclude women because of the monks’ rules. “If a woman wins, she’ll stay in a nearby hotel and be taken on a guided tour,” the rep told the magazine.
A civil war ends, and a knight returns home to a land and wife he no longer knows. A wife mourns over her lost child as her husband returns from years of civil strife. Alone, they have nothing, but together perhaps they could rebuild.
Before they can try on their own, though, they encounter a dragon on their land. Swept up in the flying monster’s beauty and power, they pack up and leave the home that holds nothing for them anymore.
The pair travel through the war torn countryside, seeing the remnants of violence that plague the land while chasing a dragon that flies above it all.
In a land of dying magic and open wounds, follow the knight and his lady as they search for meaning in a new world for both of them.
Speaking of books, again – a few lists if you are poking around for something to read either now or in the future. 
and a new video game have interfered. After 
occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I should try to make them. Ordered a pan for the purpose, and followed this recipe – success! The recipe is correct though – these are not items that keep. They really are only good the first day.
![Crystal Embers by [Vining, David]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/511K-9IauLL.jpg)
Charlotte was Both 