The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe

Why is the sky blue? You could say it's because air molecules scatter blue wavelengths while letting reds and yellows through, so that when you look up you see all the blue wavelengths bouncing around. But I've heard it's just as true to say the sky is blue because the air is blue: if you took a big ball of Earth's atmosphere and suspended it in space (near a star), it would shine blue. A leaf is green because it reflects green light while absorbing other wavelengths, but we don't typically give that scientific explanation of it; we say the leaf looks green because it is green. Likewise the sky. So tell that to your kid when he asks. :)

But there's also this: we humans write ideas down in words, but God can write with all Creation.  He can create signs that point to higher truths, like the union between husband and wife that signifies the union between Christ and the Church.  And along those lines, the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins has convinced me that the sky is blue to stand as a sign of the Mother of God.  He wrote her into creation and waited untold years until a Jesuit poet in the 1800's figured it out.

(Oh, and you can get Hopkins' poetry on CD here.  I actually found it easier to follow and appreciate that way.)

The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe
Gerard Manley Hopkins

WILD air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.

If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.

Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.

So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.

Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

"Nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming"

There's a book I really enjoyed called Loss and Gain. John Henry Newman (recently beatified, woohoo!) wrote it in 1848, and it's a short novel set in Oxford in the early 1800's, portraying every religious opinion and character the university had to offer. One character in the book is an emotional and impetuous young man named Willis, who up and converts to Catholicism one fine day. An Anglican named Bateman challenges Willis' new beliefs, finally asking him about the Mass.

"These are such difficult questions," answered Willis; "must I speak? Such difficult questions," he continued, rising into a more animated manner, and kindling as he went on; "I mean, people view them so differently: it is so difficult to convey to one person the idea of another. The idea of worship is different in the Catholic Church from the idea of it in your Church; for, in truth, the religions are different. Don't deceive yourself, my dear Bateman," he said tenderly, "it is not that ours is your religion carried a little farther,—a little too far, as you would say. No, they differ in kind, not in degree; ours is one religion, yours another. [....] I declare, to me," he said, and he clasped his hands on his knees, and looked forward as if soliloquising,—"to me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses for ever and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words, —it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick; for they are all parts of one integral action. Quickly they go; for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon; as when it was said in the beginning: 'What thou doest, do quickly'. Quickly they pass; for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass; because as the lightning which shineth from one part of heaven unto the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass; for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the Name of the Lord as He passed by, 'the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth'. And as Moses on the mountain, so we too 'make haste and bow our heads to the earth, and adore'. So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, 'waiting for the moving of the water'. Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation;—not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him. There are little children there, and old men, and simple labourers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving; there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and scope of it. And oh, my dear Bateman," he added, turning to him, "you ask me whether this is not a formal, unreasonable service—it is wonderful!" he cried, rising up, "quite wonderful. When will these dear good people be enlightened? O Sapientia, fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia, O Adonai, O Clavis David et Exspectatio gentium, veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster."

[The Latin outburst at the end is from the O Antiphons of Advent season and means something like: "O Wisdom, sweetly and mightily ordering all things, O Lord, O Key of David and Desire of Nations, come and save us, O Lord our God."]

It was December 2006 when I first read Newman's book and there was a lot of it I didn't understand-- and not just because his characters spoke in an overwrought Victorian style.  I was in RCIA at the time and set to be received into the Catholic church at Easter, and I'd been going to Mass at least weekly for several months.  But I had never noticed that it was thrilling and overcoming, or that the words passed quickly as the lightning which shineth from one part of heaven unto the other, or that we in the congregation were concurring in a sweet harmony, taking our part with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him.

Really the Mass seemed kinda dead to me. The people barely tried to sing the hymns, there were no Bibles in the pews, and (this was by far the worst thing) the sermons were vague and wishy-washy. I remember thinking that my old Evangelical church would look so warm and loving and zealous and fun to any of those Catholics. Those first few months of trying to become Catholic illustrated for me one reason why so many people move the other way.

But slowly I started to appreciate the Catholic ways of expressing piety, and I began to see signs of faith in that parish where I hadn't been looking before.  And then I found a much better parish where the preaching was real, and that was when I really fell in love with the Mass and started going every day.  In April 2007 I was received into the Church and was thrilled about it.

Then in late 2007 my parish started offering the traditional Latin Mass, which is the way Mass was said for centuries (until 1970 when it switched from Latin to the vernacular language, and was simplified and changed in other ways as well.)  That older form of Mass was what Willis was talking about in the novel.  After I became familiar with the old Mass, I re-read Newman's novel and came across that paragraph again.  And I understood.  That's exactly it.

Quotes about the Sign of the Cross

   And lastly, as every one knows, what else is the sign of Christ but the cross of Christ? For unless that sign be applied, whether it be to the foreheads of believers, or to the very water out of which they are regenerated, or to the oil with which they receive the anointing chrism, or to the sacrifice that nourishes them, none of them is properly administered.
     -St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430)

An article from Christianity Today on the subject:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/februaryweb-only/109-22.0.html

   Never leave home without making the sign of the cross.... You should not just trace the cross with your finger, but you should do it in faith.
     -John Chyrsostom (A.D. 347-407)

   This [the letter Tau] bears a resemblance to the figure of the cross; and this prophecy [Ezek. ix. 4] is said to regard the sign made by Christians on the forehead, which all believers make whatsoever work they begin upon, and especially at the beginning of prayers, or of holy readings
   -Origen (A.D. 185- 284)

   In all our travels and movements, in all our coming in and going out, in putting on our shoes, at the bath, at the table, in lighting our candles, in lying down, in sitting down, whatever employment occupies us, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross.
   -Tertullian (A.D. 160- 225)

   Let us not, therefore, be ashamed of the cross of Christ, but even though another hide it do thou openly seal it on thy brow, that the devils beholding that royal sign may flee far away trembling. But make thou this sign when thou eatest and drinkest, sittest or liest down, risest up, speakest, walkest; in a word, on every occasion, for He who was here crucified is above in the heavens.
   -St. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. A.D. 315-86)

   Many have been crucified throughout the world but none of these do the devils dread, but Christ having been crucified for us, when they see but the sign of the cross the devils shudder.
   -St. Cyril of Jerusalem

   After the sign of the cross, grace immediately thus operates, and composes all the members and the heart, so that the soul from its abounding gladness seems as a youth that knows not evil.
   -St. Macarius of Egypt (A.D. 300- 390)

Servant of God, Remember
Will­iam J. Blew (1852)

Servant of God, remember
The stream thy soul bedewing,
The grace that came upon thee
Anointing and renewing.

When kindly slumber calls thee,
Upon thy bed reclining,
Trace thou the cross of Jesus,
Thy heart and forehead signing.

The cross dissolves the darkness,
And drives away temptation;
It calms the wavering spirit
By quiet consecration.

Begone, begone, the terrors
Of vague and formless dreaming;
Begone, thou fell deceiver,
With all thy boasted scheming.

Begone, thou crooked serpent,
Who, twisting and pursuing,
By fraud and lie preparest
The simple soul’s undoing.

Tremble, for Christ is near us,
Depart, for here He dwelleth,
And this, the sign thou knowest,
Thy strong battalions quelleth.

Then while the weary body
Its rest in sleep is nearing,
The heart will muse in silence
On Christ and His appearing.

To God, eternal Father,
To Christ, our King, be glory,
And to the Holy Spirit,
In never ending story.

Amen.

C.S. Lewis on reverence and inequality

And here's an excerpt from Lewis' essay "Membership", also available in my enviable 888-page Essay Collection:

Equality is a quantitative term and therefore love often knows nothing of it.  Authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.  Even in the life of the affections, much more in the Body of Christ, we step outside that world which says 'I am as good as you'.  It is like turning from a march to a dance.... We become, as Chesterton said, taller when we bow; we become lowlier when we instruct.  It delights me that there should be moments in the services of my own church when the priest stands and I kneel.  As democracy becomes more complete in the outer world and opportunities for reverence are successively removed, the refreshment, the cleansing, and invigorating returns to inequality, which the Church offers us, become more and more necessary.

   I was thinking the same thing the other day (though not in such clear words) when I asked for a priest's blessing and knelt to receive it.  Opportunities for reverence are increasingly rare.  The American bishops robbed us when they said we should stand to receive Holy Communion instead of kneeling at an altar rail.  Priests shouldn't be absorbed in their own desire to appear humble, but should serve in true humility by filling their proper and very difficult role of authority, no matter how people tear into them for it.  Archbishop Burke, Archbishop Chaput, and Pope Benedict XVI are three examples of that kind of true humility and service.

    Reminds me of another quote, from Fr. Feeney's excellent chapter "The Eucharist in Four Simple Mysteries":

What is Our Lord’s value to us in Real Presence – apart from His other beautiful benefits in graces in the Blessed Eucharist? Well, we now have a place to which we can go, in the presence of which we can say we are, in the direction of which we can bow our heads and fold our hands, to which we can sing our songs, strew our flowers, light our lights, shake our incense; for which we can build our cathedral, top it with a cross, stain-glass it with our windows, give it a center aisle that leads down to the Real Presence, before which we can genuflect. The Real Presence makes our bodies entitled to the prerogatives of adoration.

Some people find no outlet for that inborn desire, and I get cranky if they want to deny its fulfillment to everyone else!

Three Kinds of Men, by C.S. Lewis

I just read this very short essay in my awesome 888-page C.S. Lewis Essay Collection.  Resonates with my own experience for sure.

There are three kinds of people in the world. The first class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding Man and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them. In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them—- the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society—- and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow. They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on. Their life is divided, like a soldier’s or a schoolboy’s life, into time “on parade” and “off parade,” “in school” and “out of school.”  But the third class is of those who can say like St Paul that for them “to live is Christ.” These people have got rid of the tiresome business of adjusting the rival claims of Self and God by the simple expedient of rejecting the claims of Self altogether. The old egoistic will has been turned round, reconditioned, and made into a new thing. The will of Christ no longer limits theirs; it is theirs. All their time, in belonging to Him, belongs also to them, for they are His.

And because there are three classes, any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous. It overlooks the fact that the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy. The tax which moral conscience levies on our desires does not in fact leave us enough to live on. As long as we are in this class we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have. The Christian doctrine that there is no “salvation” by works done to the moral law is a fact of daily experience. Back or on we must go. But there is no going on simply by our own efforts. If the new Self, the new Will, does not come at His own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically.

The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort—- it is to want Him. It is true that the wanting itself would be beyond our power but for one fact. The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars. Even on those terms the Mercy will receive us.

Thomas Merton, 14 years before Vatican II

I'm reading The Sign of Jonas, which is a very personal journal that Thomas Merton kept from 1947 to 1952, about his life in the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani.  He writes something I want to quote or remember on just about every page.  Here's a paragraph from September 1948, ending with a throwaway remark that just nails it.

Evelyn Waugh wanted to edit the English edition of The Seven Storey Mountain and has apparently already done so.  I am glad.  Also it seems he is going to do a feature for Life on the Church in America.  The idea seems to be that there is a great Catholic revival in this country and that the future of the Church depends on us.  That is all news to me.  If we are supposed to be reviving, where are our saints?

I need to read Pascal's Pensées

Here's I quote from it I just saw:
"All our actions and thoughts must take such different courses, according as there are or are not eternal joys to hope for, that it is impossible to take one step with sense and judgment, unless we regulate our course by our view of this point which ought to be our ultimate end."

Have a blessed Triduum, everyone!

(Triduum = Latin for "three days" = the three days before Easter Sunday: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday which ends with the Easter Vigil)

I'm taking off tomorrow morning for St. Stephen's in Sacramento to spend the Triduum in liturgical heaven. It'll be all the old-school traditional Latin Mass, with Tenebrae chanted every morning. :D Four of us are going on this road trip-- now how did I get to know three other people as fanatical as I? We'll pretty much live all weekend at the church and drive back home after the high Mass on Easter Sunday.

I'm going to miss being at St. Peter Chanel though. That's for sure. It's been three years since I was received into the Catholic Church there at the Easter vigil, and I vividly remember that first Triduum when I was an almost-Catholic; it was such a blessed, amazing, otherworldly time. Can't really describe it.

For that matter I certainly still remember Holy Week services at the Protestant churches I grew up in. It was one time of year we Evangelicals would get a bit liturgical, and I always used to feel the significance of it and feel especially close to God. Too bad one can't do everything. I suppose the older you get the more stuff you have to be nostalgic about.

I'm going to quit this post before I start quoting C.S. Lewis' poem about how the past is irretrievably lost to us but not to God-- too late, I'm quoting it:

...Where fled
Dreams at the dawn, or colours when the light is sped?
We are thy colours, fugitive, never restored,
Never repeated again. Thou only art the Lord,
Thou only art holy. In the shadowy vast
Of thine Osirian wings Thou dost enfold the past.
There sit in throne antediluvian, cruel kings,
There the first nightingale that sang to Eve yet sings,
There are the irrecoverable guiltless years,
There, yet unfallen, Lucifer among his peers....

A strict bedtime

I rarely get enough sleep, but on those rare occasions when I am well-rested, I know I work better, pray better, and feel better. So I decided that during Lent it would be a nice idea to make myself get ready for bed at 9 pm every night unless there's some emergency. Theoretically I could implement that policy at any time, not just during Lent. But in practice, I haven't had the discipline to make myself do it any other time. When it's a sacrifice for Lent it's much more serious not to stick to it, and that gives me the extra motivation I need.

One of the prayers at Mass during Lent says, "Every year You give us this joyful season, when we prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery with minds and hearts renewed...." It makes perfect sense. I feel like I have been given the gift of self-control, and I am pretty happy about it. My life became markedly more peaceful as soon as Ash Wednesday arrived.

One nice thing this bedtime does is make me less inclined to waste time through the rest of the day, knowing that I have a definitely limited number of hours to work with. Right now, for example, I'm going to finish this post in a hurry so I can try to decorate cookies and go jogging before 9 pm hits. Before Lent I'd have spent another hour easy, surfing the net and whatnot, and I'd have gone to bed at midnight and then I'd have gotten up late on Sunday, and I wouldn't have had time to pray before Mass-- and when I don't have my hour of prayer in the morning it usually doesn't happen at all, and then I'm out of sorts all day, doing nothing worthwhile because I'm too sleepy.... Going to bed late sets off a nasty little chain reaction. This way my whole day has a different feel to it.

But now that I'm getting a decent amount of sleep, something else has to give, and it's shaping up to be... blogging. Writing posts takes too darn long when I'm watching my hours, so there'll probably be fewer of them till Easter. If I didn't proofread there'd be no problem, but I can't stop myself from correcting and adding and subtracting and re-reading the darn thing for the tenth time.

And Jen does a better job anyway:

Life before modern technology was full of hard stops: the work day ended at sunset -- if you didn't finish laundry during the day there was no going back outside to the washboard at 9:00 at night; the work day began at dawn -- if you got breakfast on the table an hour late that was precious time cut out of you and your family's very finite workday; even finances had hard stops -- when you spent your last dollar there were no tempting "0% interest for six months!" credit card offers waiting in your mailbox. And with a life full of hard stops, even the most disorganized, scattered people must have been forced to have some kind of routine, and to limit their to-do lists. Even people as inept at time management as I am must have been gently reminded to get to a stopping point and wind down their projects each day as the sunlight began its slow retreat from the sky.

St. Thérèse on falling asleep at prayer

The fact that I often fall asleep during meditation, or while making my thanksgiving, should appall me. Well, I am not appalled; I bear in mind that little children are just as pleasing to their parents asleep as awake; that doctors put patients to sleep while they perform operations, and that after all, "the Lord knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust."

I never argue with a saint. :)

Maxims of St. Philip Neri

One per day! My favorite so far is this one:

He who wishes for anything but Christ, does not know what he wishes; he who asks for anything but Christ, does not know what he is asking; he who works, and not for Christ, does not know what he is doing.

A Case Against Blogging

Well, great. Stefan McDaniel writes in First Things' On the Square:

Someone recently encouraged me to write more, because “words aren’t lifeblood. Words are cheap.” Words are certainly held cheap, and the blogosphere has drastically lowered the going rate....

The blogpost is biased toward speed, brevity, and cleverness. It thus hands the public square over to bullies, sophists, and clowns....

Furthermore, even good blogging threatens to worsen our already bad relation with the written word. Several excellent bloggers have told me that they find it much harder than they once did either to follow sustained written arguments (especially when not tricked out with flashy rhetoric) or to make such arguments themselves; they have grown impatient with writing that does not meet bloggy criteria.

The scary thing is, I think there's something to this. I've noticed that even when I have all sorts of good books I could be reading, and even though on the web there are plenty of thoughtful, informative, interesting articles.... I somehow end up cruising around the same silly sites again and again, hoping they're updated. icanhazcheezburger and Cake Wrecks and Photoshop Disasters and such are pretty entertaining, but I don't want to be spending so much time on them. And at the same time I'm so impatient about following a sustained line of thought, even if it's, say, a trenchant and beautifully written sermon by John Henry Newman.

Eh, I'm bored with this subject. Check out these stormtroopers on the anniversary of the Death Star explosion!

"The sole cause of man's unhappiness..."

I'm reading The Discernment of Spirits by Timothy Gallagher, OMV, for a class we're having at church. So far it's good and we have a good teacher for the class, too. The book is about the first fourteen rules of spiritual discernment that St. Ignatius wrote in the 1500's. (My church is the place to learn Ignatian spirituality. Don't be frightened by our sinister website.)

What caught my eye just now over morning tea and jellybeans was this part in the book, explaining that the first step of spiritual discernment is just to be aware of what's going on inside:

Much is also said of the impact of contemporary culture in diminishing interior awareness.... Electronic means of filling the quiet spaces continue to multiply.... A secularized worldview questions faith and the reality itself of an interior spiritual life.... While these contemporary factors undeniably increase the difficulty of reaching interior awareness, they themselves are nonetheless expressions and consequences of a deeper resistance to living "within," a resistance that lies at the heart of the entire struggle itself. Blaise Pascal [1623-1662] powerfully explores this deepest resistance in his striking description of diversion, wherein we find his classic affirmation: "I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." Diversion, as Pascal explains it, is essentially a flight from our own limitedness.

Boy, do I know what he means. I've wasted years simply being diverted, and I now think that kind of thing-- lots of daydreaming, lots of TV, lack of prayer, lots of useless hobbies, lots of internet (*cough*)-- is much more destructive than suspected because it eats away life. A priest told me, "We want to stay in reality because that's where God is." Pascal didn't mean we need to reject human striving and do nothing. He meant we need to reject useless distractions and fantasies and face ourselves as we are.

You know, just the ads I see over the freeway when I drive to church illustrate that ours is not a society conducive to facing ourselves as we are.

If I were a billionaire, it'd be fun to buy every inch of billboard space and fill it with stuff like Pascal's quote. :)

A Chesterton misquote

More than once on the Internet I've run across this-- tell me if you've seen it too:

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
-- G.K. Chesterton

I smelled a rat the first time I read it. First of all it's contradictory: if you see a possible way you could be wrong, how can you be certain you're right?

Second, it isn't bigotry to be unable to imagine how you might be wrong. It might be thought nasty and unpleasant, but that's not the same thing. Bigotry is utter intolerance of any differing creed, belief, or opinion-- and being sure a belief is wrong doesn't necessarily mean you don't tolerate it. But then, the meaning of "tolerance" also gets confused. People think it means "allowing for the possibility that the other person could be right", when in fact tolerance is putting up with something you believe is wrong, because the evil that would come of trying to stop it is greater than the evil of allowing it. One has to make judgments about right and wrong, and judgments about greater and lesser evils, before it's even possible to be tolerant. A man of no conviction has nothing to tolerate.

But the main reason I suspected the quote was that it smacks of modern sentiment. I don't know if it could have been written by anyone in Chesterton's time (1874-1936), but it certainly couldn't have been written by Chesterton himself. It's too wishy-washy and obviously self-refuting, like, "There is no absolute truth," which is another thing our ancestors were too reasonable to say, at least in so many words.

And now I've unexpectedly found the real quote. I was listening to Alarms and Discursions (downloaded from librivox.org), and in Chapter 19, The Anarchist, I heard this:

No one worth calling a man allows his moods to change his convictions; but it is by moods that we understand other men's convictions. The bigot is not he who knows he is right; every sane man knows he is right. The bigot is he whose emotions and imagination are too cold and weak to feel how it is that other men go wrong.

"Too cold and weak to feel how it is that other men go wrong"-- now that makes sense, and that's Chesterton. To believe anything is to believe that others are wrong, but if you're a big enough person you can understand the lure of the wrong viewpoint and sympathize with those who hold it. Seldom do I meet anyone that sympathetic; I certainly have difficulty with it myself.

Update: The quote is completely correct-- check Oloryn in the comments.  So, okay, I was wrong, but at least I was very passionate about it. :)

2nd Update (May 2012): I've had an epiphany!  Yes, I was wrong about Chesterton being misquoted, but I was completely right about his meaning.  When he says "it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong," he means we need to understand how we might have come to the same incorrect conclusion as the person who disagrees with us (and who, we're certain, is wrong.)

To put it another way, Chesterton wasn't saying we have to be able to imagine that our belief is wrong.  We just have to understand how we could have arrived at a different belief, the belief which we know is wrong, but which nevertheless is held as true by many other (misguided) people.

So we don't have to be in doubt of our own conclusions; we just have to be understanding about others' conclusions.

"We might possibly have gone wrong" doesn't mean our current conclusion is possibly wrong.  It means that in an alternate universe, we could have come to the wrong conclusion.

To put it a fifth way, both those quotes of Chesterton's are saying exactly the same thing.

All is reconciled.  Whew!

Hey, this could be my tagline!

"Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a blog."

With apologies to Edward Gibbon. :)

Septuagesima ending, Lent beginning, a hymn, a C.S. Lewis quote, the last of the sweets, and gearing up to pray more

My schedule yesterday prevented me from going to any of the TLMs within two hours' driving distance. I was compensated by the birthday party of a friend who will be moving out of state soon (sniffle). It featured a cake she decorated herself; go here if you want to see what such a cake looks like with 27 lit candles stuck all over it like sea urchin spines.

I made some more Sprite cupcakes myself, a last hurrah before Lent. I don't propose to fast from sweets but it seems appropriate to at least cut down some on the goodies I've been making. All my dessert posts provoked a friend to email me: "Rachel, you do know that 'Mardi Gras' means 'Fat TUESDAY' not 'Fat MONTH,' don't you?"

So it was a fun day but as I was driving home from the party, I realized it just didn't feel like Sunday. I'd prayed the Office with some others and I'd gone to Mass at my home parish, and that's wonderful, but I do that every day. What sets Sunday apart is the traditional Latin Mass, which is longer and more beautiful and so conducive to worship that even if I'm not very well disposed when I walk into the church, before long my heart just gets seized and carried up to God. I try not to miss my Sunday TLM; if I do it'll be a whole long week before I have another chance to go.

So I'm thinking of driving down to San Diego on Wednesday. I hear traffic's awful at rush hour between LA and SD, but if I leave at 5:30 am I can probably make the 9 am Mass at St. Ann's, and I think that might be the closest place to find the Ash Wednesday Mass in the old rite (anyone know of a closer one???) I'll probably come to my senses before then. :)

Another reason I like the TLM is that it follows the old calendar, which has the season of Septuagesima, the three weeks of preparation for Lent. So Lent doesn't just spring itself on you at Ash Wednesday; you have time to consider your life and what you want to work on and what sort of penance you'll undertake. (Like giving up chocolate?)

And another reason is that the older prayers aren't shy about calling us all a bunch of sinners and begging God for mercy. The same is apparently true of the older breviary. Here's part of a translation of a Latin hymn for Sexagesima Sunday (the second Sunday before Lent):

The days of ease are about to close;
the days of holy observance are returning;
the time of temperance is at hand;
let us seek our Lord in purity of heart.

Our sovereign Judge will be
appeased by our hymns and praise.
He who would have us sue for grace,
will not refuse us pardon.

It's refreshing to read things like that, perhaps because talk of guilt and penance and our need to be forgiven and strive for purity are so very rare. Like I love rain because we hardly get any and we need it so much. We're warned that it's awful to feel guilty or say anything that might make others feel that way. But there never was a culture that needed that warning less than ours does. My thoughts about the old prayers are C.S. Lewis' thoughts about old books:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.

Or, as Pius XII remarked, "The sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin."

A year ago I wrote about visual prayer. Here's a possible subject for that: Christ in the Desert, by Ivan Kramskoy. It shows Jesus just before he began his public ministry, when he went out into the desert alone for forty days to fast and pray (and fight temptation). I love the picture. Compared to most religious art this looks so masculine and intense. Jesus' retired life of working as a carpenter is coming to an end, and he's about to leave his mother's home and call his disciples and set his first foot on a hard road that will lead three years later to the Cross. He looks like he's suffering, and he looks like he's not receiving many consolations in prayer, and he looks deadly determined. Just blogging this is making me realize that I do not meditate nearly enough on Jesus Himself, on his life as portrayed in the Gospels. How amazing is it that we have all those stories in which we see God in human form interacting with people who mostly don't know who He is, and we can actually read what He says and what He does? If that seems boring and you wish you were more interested, I recommend praying, "God, please make me care." I've had that prayer answered pretty spectacularly, though not instantaneously; it took time. Anyway, I definitely plan to meditate on this picture during Lent.

Four little stories told by Fr. Richard Neuhaus

These were rattling around in my brain today and I thought I'd blog them down. They concern three folks who've recently passed away and one who, thank God, is very much alive.

Avery Cardinal Dulles tells of saying Mass in a parish that had a big banner by the altar emblazoned with the message, "God is Other People." He says he very much wished that he had had a magic marker with which to put a big comma after "Other." But that, he notes, was more than twenty years ago.

from Catholic Matters

In 1997, John Paul the Great appointed me a delegate to a synod in Rome. On the concluding day of the synod, I was seated at lunch between John Cardinal O'Connor and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. In the midst of lively conversation about many things, I was suddenly moved to say how grateful I was that I had come into the church at a time when I could have John O'Connor as my bishop and Joseph Ratzinger heading the Church's office of doctrine. They were a bit embarrassed by my outburst, as was I, but it seemed like the thing to say at the moment. Some months later, I related that conversation to John Paul. He smiled in his mischievous way and said, "So, you are not grateful for your pope?"

from Catholic Matters

A friend calls it "the magic kingdom." He means Vatican City and, more particularly, the Apostolic Palace within Vatican City. That's where the pope lives, along with some senior members of the Curia and the staff, mainly composed of nuns, that takes care of their domestic needs. Some of the apartments are rather grand, with murals by Raphael and other Renaissance geniuses to be discovered in bathrooms and similarly unexpected places. "It isn't home, but it's much." That's a quip regularly offered by cardinals and archbishops when welcoming a guest to dinner.

First Things, August 2007

When during the O’Connor years I had occasion to meet with the pope, he would always ask, "How is Cardinal O’Connor?" And I would always say that Cardinal O’Connor is flourishing and is an inestimable gift to the Church. One time I went on to say, "You know what Cardinal O'Connor said the other day, Holy Father?" "No," he answered. "What did Cardinal O’Connor say?" "Cardinal O’Connor said that he gets up every morning and prays that he will go to bed that night without having discouraged any impulse of the Holy Spirit. Now isn’t that a beautiful thing for a bishop to say?" A pause of several seconds. "Yes," said the pope, "that is a beautiful thing for a bishop to say. I told him that."

First Things, January 2008

Mother Teresa's got something to say to you :)

"God has plenty of money. It's just in your pockets."

Radical Love photo essay

Time has a really good photo essay here, on a monastery in Summit, New Jersey. It's played as a movie with bits of interviews with two of the sisters. I don't know how long it'll be up. I am surprised and delighted to find a secular news source conveying religious life so well, in the words of the nuns themselves. The last picture's cool-- the photographer found a cross in an unexpected place. :)

As long as I'm being random, here's Archbishop Fulton Sheen: "If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave."

Update: Slightly longer and better version of the photo essay on the photographer's site here.

John Adams on Catholic worship

I really like John Adams, from the little I know of him. One day I should read a biography, or his correspondence with Abigail Adams (she was a smart cookie too). He seems like one of the most admirable of the Founding Fathers. By the way, isn't it quaint and lovely that our country even has "Founding Fathers"? How many countries get to have founding fathers? Don't all you non-Americans feel like orphans now? :) Anyway, on October 9, 1774 when Adams was in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, he and George Washington dropped by the Catholic Church, and he wrote to his wife about it:

This afternoon, led by Curiosity and good Company I strolled away to Mother Church, or rather Grandmother Church, I mean the Romish Chapel. Heard a good, short, moral Essay upon the Duty of Parents to their Children, founded in justice and Charity, to take care of their Interests temporal and spiritual.

This afternoon's entertainment was to me most awful and affecting. The poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood, their Pater Nosters and Ave Marias. Their holy water-- their crossing themselves perpetually-- their bowing to the name of Jesus wherever they hear it-- their bowings, and kneelings, and genuflections before the altar. The dress of the priest was rich with lace-- his pulpit was velvet and gold. The altar piece was very rich-- little images and crucifixes about-- wax candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the picture of our Saviour in a frame of marble over the altar, at full length, upon the cross in the agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds.

The music consisting of an organ, and a Choir of singers, went all the afternoon, excepting sermon Time, and the Assembly chanted-- most sweetly and exquisitely.

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination. Everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and the ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

I think Adams' Puritan prejudice overcomes his reason here, but he's observant and I like how he doesn't just notice the details but analyzes their effect. Catholic ceremony does affect all the senses, I wouldn't say to bewitch the ignorant, but to help everyone to enter in to the spirit of worship. We're physical beings affected by physical reality. Much of what apparently seems suspect to Adams-- ritual and beauty and richness and incense and music-- was commanded by God for temple worship in the Old Testament. Why should anyone think we don't need it anymore? We're still human.

H/T Pertinactious Papist and Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive (follow the link for pictures of the original letter)