7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

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.

(There’s a good, if overlong documentary on the effort to find and restore the cemetery – it’s called Sad Hill Unearthed and you can watch it here.)

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….

— 3 —

Pentecost is coming! Is your parish dropping rose petals from the ceiling?

 

-4–

I don’t know anything about the “40 Book Challenge” – but here’s a parent/librarian who pushed back against what she describes as its misuse:

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.

–5 —

“‘The Great Convent Scandal'” That Transfixed Victorian England.” Somewhat interesting, but I’m left confused by exactly why the bullies fixated on this particular nun:

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.

— 6 —

More on the Chant  recording, 25 years old this year. I didn’t know that it was a compilation of older recordings:

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.

 

— 7 —

Writing notes:

Pentecost is coming:

 

From The Loyola Kids Book of Heroes which, annoyingly enough, has been unavailable since late April (high season). I assume they are trying to get another printing done, but why it’s taking so long I have no idea. 

I was in Living Faith earlier this week. 

My 2020 daily devotional won’t, of course, start until Advent 2019, but it will be published in about a month. So if you’d like to take a look at it and consider it, for example, as a gift for your school’s teachers or parish/diocesan staff – you’ll have plenty of time!

And…one of my older sons is prepping another novel for publication – Crystal Embers. 

You can read an excerpt here – along with his almost daily thoughts on film.

 

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.

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Bishop David Foley, RIP

Earlier this evening, Bishop David Foley, Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Birmingham (Third bishop of the diocese, as well as former auxiliary of Richmond), passed away after final bout of cancer. He was 88, tiny (under five feet tall) but astonishingly energetic up until the end. Last weekend, parishes in the diocese published this handwritten letter from him in their bulletins.

Bishop Foley remained very active in the diocese after his retirement. He said Mass everywhere, whenever needed, including in the Extraordinary Form. I last heard him preach perhaps a year ago or so, and his preaching was focused, on point and deeply well-prepared. One of the most striking elements of the way he celebrated Mass was perhaps related to his celebration of the Extraordinary Form – he prayed the Consecration almost sotto voce.  This might surprise some of you whose knowledge of Bishop Foley derives primarily from his interactions with EWTN leadership – including Mother Angelica – back in the day. But there it was.

One more note: My 17-year old works at a local grocery store, and just last fall, Bishop Foley came in. He recognized my son – we are assuming because my son has served at Casa Maria Convent and Retreat Center, where the Bishop would sometimes celebrate Mass – but their paths did not cross that often – perhaps two or three times over the course of three years – but Bishop Foley recognized him – if not by name, but definitely by sight – and chatted with him.

Requiescat in Pace. 

Bishop Foley’s obituary.

 

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Not the Enemy

Many, many years ago, I found this image on the webpage of a small pro-life group that no longer exists, I guess. It’s still one of my favorites. It says it all, and 44 years after Roe is still pertinent.

Pertinent not just for our thinking and behavior toward the defenseless unborn, but also for our stance toward anyone who is dependent on us,  anyone whom we are called to love, for whom we are challenged to sacrifice.

Not the enemy. 

 

(Feel free to use the image.)

 

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Guardians of the Galaxy

We’ve arrived at the point in our household at which if no older siblings are available, I let the boys (who are ages almost 10 and 13) go to the movies by themselves.   It will not surprise you to know that I obsessively research a movie before they’re allowed to see it, so I feel very comfortable about it.  I’m around during the showing, just down the mall row at Barnes and Noble, and I get back to the theater well before the movie ends. This doesn’t happen very often since most movies are awful, but rarely, it does.

That’s a preamble to telling you about last night.  They’ve been wanting to see Guardians of the Galaxy, and considering the raves I’ve been reading, I wasn’t against it.  It was quite rainy here last night, so it seemed like a good time to take in a flick.  I was going to let them go by themselves, but do you know what?  Something nagged inside, telling me…not this time.   It’s not that I wanted to go.   I have no truck with comic book/superhero movies – they bore the heck out of me, no matter how psychologically deep they attempt to be.  In fact, the more attempted psychological depth, the duller it is.   But, you know, popcorn.  And that nagging sense.

And boy am I glad I did.  First of all, I’m glad I can, you know, enter knowledgeably into this cultural conversation.  Secondly, I would hate to have had my boys sit through the opening scene of this movie without me.

Because do you know how the adventurous hijinks begin?  Cold open – no credits, just a date (1988):  With a kid watching his mother die.

Okay, so it’s essential to the arc.  No problem.  That’s real.  But I was just…surprised.  And glad I listened to the voice that gently insisted I be there with the boys. And if you are taking younger children, you might what to know that.  The movie starts with a young boy watching his mother die and shrinking back from her outreached hand.

But. There are other problems with this movie that hardly anyone is mentioning.  There’s a surprising amount of vulgarity.  Several “sh**” – includiIng one at a climactic – what I would call “quotable” moment.  I don’t mind it so much, in small doses, in offhand ways, but at moments like this, when a character is making a big speech and the vulgarity is part of what might be a catch phrase..not so much.

There’s an extended riff on to what extent someone is a “dick.”  Really.  At one point, a character goes, “What the …” and you know the rest – how his teeth reach out to the lower lip for the beginning of the “f” sound.  I really have to wonder…what kind of idiots who are also adults sit around and think, “HARDY HAR HAR…LET’S HAVE THE GUY ALMOST  SAY F***!”  HILARIOUS!”

Wut?

I’m no prude.  I say all those words in real life (not in front of the kids, though).  Well, maybe not “dick” because why?  But I’m not keen on them being used in movies marketed to kids.

Nor am I keen on the exhausting violence.  Yes, it’s cartoonish, in a way.  But it really is deadening, exhausting and stupid in the end – this constant assault of CGI creatures screaming, rolling, blasting and slicing each other, mostly for the sake of the 3D version.  (Felt the same way about Hobbit 2 – it was an assault.  Not just of the two parties on screen on each other, but on me. An assault, I tell you!  Relentless and deadening.)

And, yes, oh, it had a point.  There was a bit of self-sacrifice at two junctures, which was good and even a bit moving to behold, but other than that?

Really?  You got into the late 70’s and 80’s soundtrack?  As if you didn’t grasp the direct appeal to the demographic that is in its late 30’s and might have early tween kids?

Sorry for the dissent, bu  once again, I’m left marveling at the resources – millions of dollars and human creative energies – spent on something that was really not great, was obviously exploitative in the way most contemporary entertainment is  and that a day later, my kids aren’t quoting or referencing at all….it came, it brawled, it cussed, it moved on….

 

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Buried

I have no patience with being coy about spoilers, so, you know, if you haven’t seen it and you’re going to, don’t read this post.

 

(I, myself, will be in that boat next week, as I will be traveling Sunday night and might not be able to watch the next episode until Tuesday…..)

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