Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.
First thought this morning, and spoken aloud, "Well... I guess we should find out what's left of Notre Dame."
And the news was less bad than expected. I've seen a famous and ancient church reduced to rubble, and once was enough.
They have saved the greater part of the structure, including the two great towers. The stone vaults have held though the wooden roof burned and collapsed into the building. The principal movable treasures - first of which was the Blessed Sacrament - were saved as well. And perhaps most surprising is that three of the great rose windows have survived.
These are some screen shots from various Twitter feeds...
Late last night. You can see at the very top that the fire is still not out.
Symbolically, we have to know and accept that the corrupted thing, the
offspring of the Beast, that has occupied and breathed its poisoned lies
into this and all Catholic structures, has to be destroyed utterly and that much damage
to what was good and dedicated to God will be done in the process. But
Faith built this and all of Christendom, and Faith, even reduced, is unkillable.
Out the workroom window. Pouring. And kept on all night. A good solid downpour, soaking deep into the soil. Just what we needed, and started about 1/2 an hour after I prayed the Votive Collect for rain.
Emily Dickinson, #1235
Like Rain it sounded till it curved
And then I new 'twas Wind —
It walked as wet as any Wave
But swept as dry as sand —
When it had pushed itself away
To some remotest Plain
A coming as of Hosts was heard
It filled the Wells, it pleased the Pools
It warbled in the Road —
It pulled the spigot from the Hills
And let the Floods abroad —
It loosened acres, lifted seas
The sites of Centres stirred
Then like Elijah rode away
Upon a Wheel of Cloud.
~
Look for my upcoming 2-part thing for the Remnant on "Praying for things".
Basically, just approaching two questions:
How do we know our prayers are efficacious? If I pray for rain and it rains, doesn't that just mean that rain was coming anyway?
And what are we to think when there is no apparent response to prayer? Or worse, what are we to think when we pray to avoid some bad thing and it happens anyway? How does the problem of evil relate to prayer?
And, bonus round: what's prayer really for, anyway? Why pray at all, since God knows everything and already knows what we need?
Most of the time, in our degenerate times, if people think of prayer at all they either have some vague idea about it, usually derived from nonsense New Age rubbish, that it's "Just talking to God," as though he's just some guy down the pub; or they just think that God is there to be asked for things, like a divine version of Amazon.com.
This rather raises the question of what on earth nuns and monks do all day. When you ask them they say, "We pray." Yeah... but ... all day? Seriously? You don't run out of things to say? Prayer for most people is a matter of listing things to ask for. The Churched will perhaps add lists of things they think God wants to hear about their sins and failings. Most of this, as C.S. Lewis said, is "parrot talk" - reciting things they vaguely remember being told God wants to hear.
So, what DO monks and nuns do all day? What does it mean to spend a lifetime pursuing union with God in prayer? How do you get from the shopping list kind of prayer, or rote recitation of vocal prayers (a good thing, btw, and a necessary start) to the Ecstasy of St. Teresa?
Even a very little acquaintance with the writing of the saints on mysticism will tell you that there's a good deal more going on with them and prayer than most of us are being told. There does seem to be some huge secret or mystery about it that we're no longer being told about.
If mysticism is all based on prayer, then there has to be more to it than the parrot-talk. So, what is prayer, really?
~
Here's a tease:
"In our better moments, we can see by looking back in our own lives how something that might have seemed bad at the time might have worked out to make things better, to make us better. So we extrapolate from that and say that even though we don’t know the logic of the greater good that comes from this evil, God does. Our answer is arithmetical, and God’s knowledge defies all our linear, merely arithmetical logic.
"If we believe in God at all, and if we believe about Him what the Church tells us is true, that He is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, then it can’t be otherwise since there is nothing “random” in His universe. The fact that He hears and answers prayer, all of which He Himself inspires in the first place, follows necessarily from His nature, revealed to us in Christ.
"We are told to be confident in prayer, to come to Him in all necessities. But is this all prayer is? What if prayer for intentions, our own or those of others, were only step one in a much larger and richer divine scheme to bring us to Himself, in fact, to transform us into Himself? A daring thought."
So, I guess it shouldn't be surprising that the icon painters use the standard "canon" of idealised portraiture. I learned this in my study of Renaissance and Gothic Italian painting. The idea that there are mathematically precise measurements of the "ideal" human form is one of the key lessons of the great Renaissance masters. But of course they didn't invent it. Art historians will tell you that the ideals of Italian Renaissance painting didn't come from some lost Greek text rediscovered and sold to a Montefeltro or Medici noble, but developed slowly from Byzantine art, and through the Gothic adaptations. And the math of the human figure was one of those things that were considered great secrets of the trade.
How closely your face coincides with these mathematically ideal proportions is what makes us think it is beautiful or not. Of course, the beauty of a human face or form is about more than proportions (and involves a lot of historical, cultural and environmental factors) but it starts with math.
You don't have to have "perfect" proportions to be beautiful. Here's a photoshopping of Audrey Hepburn that makes her face fit more closely these classical "ideal" proportions, and it completely dulls her brilliance, makes her celebrated face totally uninteresting.
And it kind of depicts what I'm talking about. This idealised beauty, this kind of mathematical proportional perfection, is not intended to depict anything in this world; it's not supposed to look like a particular person. Applying it to a real person just dehumanises. This is why people who undertake plastic surgery either to try to preserve their youth or (even more scary) to remodel themselves after some artificial, cultural standard of beauty, always end up looking bizarre and frightening. Neither Fra Angelico's angels nor Barbie dolls are supposed to look like human beings, and human beings trying to make themselves look like them are really just trying to flee from their own real selves.
But at the same time, this is why it makes perfect sense for the canon of Byzantine and Gothic and early Renaissance sacred art to follow these ideal proportions very closely, since the art form is heavily symbolic. These idealised, mathematical proportions for the human form was a technique developed by the Greeks and Egyptians (and probably Babylonians) to help them depict their gods in painting and sculpture. Math and sacred art have always gone together, and have always been understood to depict some reality that isn't normally visible.
This is why these modern "sacred art" paintings that try to "humanise" sacred persons using modern visual standards fail as sacred art. This is a function of Modernism, both in its artistic and theological expressions; the urge to de-sacralise the subject by naturalising it. But naturalistic visual language has become so ubiquitous - the photograph is now the only visual standard - that modern viewers of sacred art, while they may be aware that these works fail to do what they're advertised to do, fail to do what the art of Fra Angelico did, they often do not understand why.
The point with sacred art is not to depict the subject - the Virgin Mary or an angel, for instance - as looking like a particular person, but to depict a completely different order of reality, one that "eye has not seen..." and which cannot ever be fully grasped by the human mind in this life.
The point of sacred art is to depict the idealised form of the person. Kind of like those videos of Korean girls making themselves look like Asian barbie dolls with face tape and nose putty... only less horrifying. In fact, those weird videos, and this strange thing of completely modifying your face or body to fit some odd cultural ideal of beauty that only exists in photoshopped magazine photos, or more appallingly in Manga cartoons, sort of illustrates what I'm talking about. These culturally-derived, arbitrary "ideals" - cf: foot-binding - have led to some pretty grotesque horrors. This is because there is a failure to understand the distinction between what the sacred artists depict as heavenly perfection - meant to be "unattainable" in this life, as well as eternal - and ordinary, earthly human beauty that is necessarily fleeting.
The ideal perfection of the Sassoferrato Madonna is a good example. Every single thing about this painting is idealised; the face, the colours, the light, the pose the skin tone... everything. No one ever took a copy of this painting to a plastic surgeon and asked to be made to look like this. The purpose of this painting is not to show us what the Virgin "looked like" but what kind of person she is. It is intended to depict her spiritual perfections and glories.
It's understood that this is a heavenly reality, something to venerate, something to inspire to prayer and the pursuit of holiness and Christian perfection. It's intended, as all real sacred art is, to depict an entirely different kind of reality, one that people of Faith used to be able to recognise.
This is from the Ghent Altarpiece. It's a picture not of a mere human person, a pretty but rather overdressed young woman, reading a book in this world. It's a picture of life in heaven, eternal, unchanging, perfect and glorified. It is an attempt to depict a kind of reality that we will never see with our eyes in this life, at least, not until the Changing of the World.
Every single thing about it is symbolic. The flowers, the gold, the pearls, the book, the pose... everything. You don't just look at a painting like this, you read it. And to do that, you have to know the language.
But photography, that now guides all our tastes in pictorial art, has caused us to forget the language of sacred art. Now we take a banal, earthly thing, a photograph of a pretty woman, and hold it up as some kind of ideal, and try to make ourselves look like it. Women who are older or fatter or less "even-featured" than the photograph don't feel uplifted by it; they feel intimidated and oppressed by the demand it makes.
The this-worldlinness of photography is what makes it completely inappropriate as a model for sacred art.
So, now instead of paintings like the ones above, modern "sacred artists" (I exclude here the ones who are merely mocking sacred art with postmodern "irony") are producing works founded on a totally earthly, this-worldly visual language.
And it ends up being trite, uninteresting and ultimately disappointing. You can't help but look at it and think, If this is what heaven is like, how are we supposed to spend our lives - and if necessary our deaths - trying to obtain it? How is it different from what we've got now?
How many jumps is it from this...
These aren't cherubs; they're just a couple of human kids. That's not the Blessed Virgin; it's a studio model, a particular person, playing her.
...
...to this?
The weirdness of the first one as a work of devotional art intended for a church altar, the reason it just sits oddly, is that its visual language is not that of classical sacred, devotional art, but of film. We're used to movies in which sacred persons are being played by actors, so in a sense we're accustomed to being lied to about their identity. It's OK for a movie because that's how that art form works. But these paintings use the same framework, and it fails, because film and sacred painting have completely different purposes. Having models "play" these people for paintings pushes back the depiction of heavenly glory that sacred art is intended for, into the mental framework of a film, in which the viewer is supposed to suspend his disbelief. He's supposed to watch a movie and just put into a mental cupboard the fact that Jesus is being played by Robert Powell or Jim Caveizel.
But that's not what sacred painting is supposed to do. Looking at a work of Fra Angelico depicting a "sacred conversation" is supposed to be like getting a little glimpse of heaven, as though we are peeking through a magical window. It's what Byzantine icons are intended to be; a window through which the sweet and wild winds of heaven blow.
But modern people are more used to watching movies at home about the life of Jesus than they are used to looking at a Fra Angelico or Pinturicchio altarpiece in their local parishes. This is why there has been such a wide acceptance of this kind of modernistic, photographically-informed painting, especially among "conservative" North American church-goers. And I'll admit it's a step up from the horrors of postmodern abstract "sacred art". (I mean horrors, for real.)
But sacred art and photography can really have very little to do with each other; their purposes are completely different. Whereas photography is a merely scientific rendering of physical objects in space, sacred art is intended to depict perfected, heavenly reality, one that we can never fully appropriate in this life, and for which mathematics is the only adequate earthly analogy.
Until modern Catholic painters trying to produce new sacred art understand the difference, and start learning the old, lost language of mathematically idealised forms, they're going to keep producing stuff that just looks ... well... modern, a naturalistic and essentially this-worldly, material reality.
"Despite protestations to the contrary, it is not the icon which is so offensive to Gnostics and iconoclasts, it is the message which the icon represents which cannot be tolerated."
It's not the thing itself that the Soviets were so keen to burn, but the reality it represented. It is why Muslim militants destroy and forbid religious art.
The Sacred Icon - and as a Latin I would expand this to other forms of true sacred art - is an indispensable sign of incarnational religion. In our time, not creating sacred art is a form of idolatry:
"When a religion rejects images of God, it confirms the message that God is only a spirit, and that He has no physical body. Before the Incarnation, that was true. After the Incarnation, it is false, and is therefore, as false worship, idolatry. Idolatry is worshipping false gods, or worshipping the True God while misrepresenting Him."
Before the coming of Christ, the Jewish Temple signified God’s presence, and His people bowed down toward it. Before the Incarnation, it was impossible to make an image of the invisible God, a heavenly reality, without misrepresenting Him. Once, however, God became flesh in the Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, the invisible God became visible, the immaterial God was suddenly approachable.
Traditional iconography has been described to me as a kind of window onto heaven. The figures of Our Lord and Our Lady and the saints are always idealised, and always presented with exactly the same details to symbolise the absolute unchanging perfection of the life of the blessed in heaven. Heaven itself is symbolised by the colours, particularly the use of gold which never perishes or dulls.
The Icon is not a ‘holy picture’ designed to increase piety. Neither is an icon something spiritual in itself, as it does not depict “God” in general. The icon is a dogmatic expression of a theological truth. It is, therefore, not variable as artists would claim by ‘artistic license’ – a term I, as an artist, have always found to be a cop out for lack of talent or lack of vision.
Just as one cannot translate the Bible any old way one wishes to and still remain true to the text, one cannot paint an icon any old way one wishes to and still remain true to the prototype.
~
"Come higher up and further in!"
I've long been fascinated by the concept of a door or other opening between this world and another, better more magical, more significant world. It appears too many times to count in mythology and children's stories. I've described my own spiritual efforts with the metaphor of a lifelong search for the Door to Narnia. Many times Narnia uses this image of a magical door - that opens only at the will of Aslan and not yours - that allows you to leave this ordinary, uninteresting and unimportant world behind and go to spend time in the more real, more beautiful and often more perilous world of Narnia. This is a world where the stakes of life are incalculably higher because the Realness there is incalculably more real.
And if you get to go there, the more-realness of that world changes you to become more real yourself. The very air of Narnia has magical properties, bringing out the best, the bravest, strongest and most noble aspects of our characters, allowing you to achieve great feats of sacrifice and self-conquest. Once this air has worked on you for a while you are altered interiorly, making it possible for you to pursue the adventure that Aslan sends, whatever it may be and however difficult. And once you have been there and returned, you will never see this world the same way again - you will have been changed forever. Even if you fail, even if, as sometimes happens, you betray that change and try to forget it, even if you turn your back on it willingly to embrace the old world and the old you as you were before, it will never leave you. You will never be able to un-know what you know.
Lewis described the difference between that world and ours as being like looking at a beautiful scene though a screen door, and then someone opens the screen and all the details are sharper, the colours more vibrant. It is like the difference you see in a garden on a dull overcast day when the sun breaks through, and for a moment all is gleaming, the colours flash and every drop of rain becomes wonderful. Once you know it's there to be sought, you can't stay still, you can't be satisfied with even the beauties of this life. Like trying to be content to stay forever in the Wood Between the Worlds, a pretty enough place but where nothing ever happens and there's no reason for anything.
I suppose the idea of a magic window is similar, one you could put on your wall and look through and remind yourself what is and isn't real... Imagine what a window to heaven would be like. Or, if this is too difficult, imagine a magic window that would allow you to sometimes see through the barriers between the worlds, to catch a glimpse of the Narnian countryside. Maybe if you left that window open in your home, the Narnian wind could sometimes blow through, bringing its scents and magic with it.
You can't get through that window, not yet anyway, but you can at least look, you can gaze through and remember. And you can yearn. I would soon forget about everything else if I had one. Wouldn't you?
C.S. Lewis described the notion of "Joy" as this yearning, this intense longing that one feels all one's life after the merest glimpse of that other, more real place. Once you had seen it, even only for a moment, you would give up everything, every dull and colourless and pointless thing this world offered, to go and spend the rest of your life seeking it.
You could along the way perhaps sometimes lose the feeling of refreshment it gave you, and you could become distracted. But then you would be granted another glimpse, or even a scent that would bring the memory and the longing back as sharp and painful and sweet as before. Or it would come back to you in a dream and you would wake to find everything shiny and lovely in this world returned to its greyed and faded state and you would resume your search, distractions forgotten.
You would wander your whole life, attached to nothing because nothing in it ever came close to what you were seeking. The grandest waterfall, the sweetest fruit, the most delicate flower, would only serve to increase your longing for the more Real things in the more real place. The ripples of fields of summer wheat would only remind you of the wind in the Lion's mane.
We all know the longing for home, because in a real sense we all leave our home when we are no longer children. That earthly home was the one that we could not have forever. But the yearning to return to it, as impossible as we know it is, is what will compel us forward. There is a home, but it's not here.
I had no idea they were using the Chant. And they seem pretty good at it. (Though I noticed at least one harrrrd American "arrr" in the Kyrie that jarrrrred a little...)
It does seem to be all the rage now to record monks chanting. There has been lots of commentary on the irony that though these chants are often still vigorously banned in churches with the word "Catholic" on the door, the CDs always shoot right to the top of the charts. The Le Barroux sisters have one, the Benedictines of Ephesus in Missouri have several. The Norcia monks did one. Every single one rockets to the top as people are desperately trying to fill the hole in their souls that Modernia inevitably burns, including Ecclesia Modernia.
This isn't a new thing, by any means. (The fad for chant recordings, I mean, not the chant itself, obviously.) When I was a kid my mother had an LP of chant that I used to listen to a lot. And of course Hildegarde of Bingen had a huge following in the 80s (nearly all New Age feminists, but still...) The Monks of Silos made an enormous splash in the pop music world in the early 80s, and it was suddenly all the rage to have "spooky medieval stuff" in your nightclub noise.
I know there are "studies" out there that show the chant has a positive material effect on your brain.
~
Dr. Alan Watkins, a senior lecturer in neuroscience at Imperial College London noted that “the musical structure of chant can have a significant and positive physiological impact,” and that chanting has actually been shown to “lower blood pressure, increase levels of DHEA and also reduce anxiety and depression.” Similar studies also suggest that Gregorian chant can aid in communications between the right and left hemispheres of the brain more effectively, therefore creating new neural brain pathways.
Benedictine nun, Ruth Stanley, head of the complementary medicine program at Minnesota’s St. Cloud Hospitals also says she’s had great success in easing the chronic pain of patients by having them listen to chant. “The body can move to a deeper level of its own inherent, innate healing ability when you play chant. It’s quite remarkable.” In a 1978 documentary called “Chant,” French audiologist, Dr. Alfred Tomatis, related how he was called upon to help the monks of a Benedictine monastery who suffered from fatigue, depression, and physical illness. He found that they usually took part in six to eight hours of chanting per day but due to a new edict, their chanting was halted. When Tomatis succeeded in re-establishing their daily chanting, the monks regained their well-being and were again full of life. His conclusion was that Gregorian chant is capable of charging the central nervous system along with the cortex of the brain thus having a direct effect on the monk’s overall happiness and health.
~
That's probably true. Those medievals really knew a thing or two about that integral, holistic human stuff. Other people talk about the relationship between Chant and Math, and this also doesn't surprise me, since the medievals knew some stuff about math too.
I use Chant. I find it's better than Xanax and of course, I think God prefers it. I have a week's worth of the daily psalter; Laudes, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers & Compline, downloaded onto my computer from Le Barroux. I got used to singing very quietly along with the monks in the Basilica and doing that at home is rather a solace in exile. (Even though they're the wrong monks, and the French accents sort of stand out.)
Next step will be buying an Antiphonale. Fr. Basil says that's the one to go with if you want to learn how to read the little squares.
This guy, who I presume is a Chant teacher, has a huge bunch of recordings of the major pieces one uses in the liturgy. There are a lot of Chant recordings out there that are recreational, but this one is the only page I've found set up for serious use to learn the Chant for a liturgical setting.
The problem with these recordings, of course, is that they're set up for male voices. (Buddy above has a few set for female voices, but not many, and nearly all the recordings are of monks and male choirs.) I absolutely can not sing in the tenor range. I can do baritone transposed up an octave perfectly. (Thank you, Stan Rogers.) But when singing along with the men in the highest notes my voice just stops functioning entirely. No sound comes out at all. But bring it down to the monks' lower range and I can't manage it except for the highest bits. (Which is why I say I always sang along with the monks very quietly.)
You have to transpose the whole thing down to the Alto range for me. Which is why I'm going to have to graduate from the recordings to the book eventually. This is a terrible recording but you can certainly hear the difference.
I do rather wish those Benedictine nuns in Missouri would do some serious, less entertainment-oriented, recordings of the Office chants. These nice little songs they do are lovely to listen to but not much use in a practical sense.
A fun Friday rhyme to go with an old fashioned English dish, Stargazy pie, from Cornwall.
Yep, it's a pie with fish heads sticking out, looking straight at you.
The traditional fish is called Pilchards, a kind of sardine that English (protestant) fishermen used to catch and export to Catholic countries, where they were eaten on Fridays.
It goes with the traditional "Toast to Pilchards," which these days I think we can all agree on...
"Here's health to the Pope, may he live to repent
And add just six months to the term of his Lent
And tell all his vassals from Rome to the Poles,
There's nothing like pilchards for saving their souls!"
Here's the BBC's recipe, if you want to give it a try.
For the mustard sauce, bring the stock to the boil in a non-reactive saucepan. Whisk in the crème fraîche, mustard, salt, mustard powder and lemon juice until well combined. Bring back to the simmer.
Pass the sauce through a fine sieve into a jug and set aside.
For the pie, cook the bacon in boiling water for 20 minutes. Drain, then allow to cool slightly before chopping into lardons.
Bring another pan of water to the boil and cook the baby onions for 6-7 minutes, or until tender. Drain and refresh in cold water, then slice each onion in half. Set aside.
Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6.
Roll out the puff pastry until 3-4mm thick, then cut into 4 equal-sized squares. Using a small circular pastry cutter the size of a golf ball, cut out 2 holes in each pastry square.
Place each square on a baking tray and brush with the beaten egg yolk. Chill in the fridge for 15 minutes.
Bake the pastry squares in the oven for 18-20 minutes, or until golden-brown and crisp. Remove from the oven and set aside.
Turn the grill on to high.
Place the sardine fillets, heads and tails on a solid grill tray, brush with the oil and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Grill for 2-3 minutes, or until golden-brown and just cooked through (the fish should be opaque all the way through and flake easily).
Heat a frying pan until medium hot, add the butter and bacon lardons and fry gently for 3-4 minutes, or until golden-brown. Add the onions and stir in enough sauce to coat all the ingredients in the pan. Reserve the remaining sauce and keep warm.
Bring a small pan of water to the boil, add the vinegar and a pinch of salt. Reduce the heat to a simmer.
Crack the quail's eggs into a small bowl of iced water, then pour off any excess (there should only be just enough water to cover the eggs). Swirl the simmering water with a wooden spoon to create a whirlpool effect, then gently pour the quails' eggs into the centre of the whirlpool. Poach for about 1-2 minutes, or until the egg whites have set and the yolk is still runny. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.
To serve, divide the onion and bacon mixture between 4 serving plates. Arrange the sardine fillets on top, then place four poached quails' eggs around the fillet. Using a stick blender, blend the remaining sauce until frothy. Spoon the froth over the top of the sardines and eggs. Top each pile with the puff pastry squares, then place the sardine heads and tails through each hole in the pastry. Serve immediately.
Overnight in Cascia in a freezing cold but otherwise perfectly adequate little pilgrim's hotel (Blankets... lots and lots of blankets...). Took a good long walk around yesterday afternoon and saw nearly all of it in two hours.
Met the nice elderly nun at the Agostiniane, who spends her time manning the parlor, chatting with pilgrims and tourists and making everyone feel welcome. Her hands never stopped while she crocheted the hats and scarves and baby-booties and every other thing you can think of to crochet that were piled up all over the nuns' gift shop. The work of many years. (She knew I was a straniera right away, of course, but seemed to think I was secretly Polish and kept trying to give me Polish language holy cards of St. Rita. I think I convinced her in the end, and I got a handful of the cards with the St. Rita intercession prayer in English to hand around to friends when I get home. (That is, "home," to Sta. Marinella.)
I got into a conversation with Giovanni, the nice chap who owns the hotel and who has to live there now since his house was damaged in the October quake. (His alone on his whole street... worse luck!) And he understood completely about looking for a house in Umbria. "The sea is nice for a holiday," he said, "but Umbria's the place you want to live." Without my having asked, when I went for my walk he had been busy talking to his friends in town, asking around if anyone had a flat or a house they wanted to rent out. One of these friends was the guy who owns the pizza shop downstairs from the hotel, and when I went down in the morning for a slice of "rossa," he became animated over how nice Cascia is.
This morning, Giovanni walked me over to the bar - his bar, you understand... the one next door is for other people... bought me a cafe doppio and introduced me to Mario the bar owner...
This is how Italy is. Giovanni assured me that there were no "agenzia immobiliare" in Cascia. "That's not how we do things in Cascia. Norcia, yes, but here no. we have a different mind here." It's just as well, since I do have a very good realtor who came to see me in Norcia and said he'd be working on getting a house "for you and the kitties to be safe..."
But Giovanni dove right in. I'm a straniera, but also a fellow "terremotata."
So, now I'm back at the bar, (the right bar,) having a tea and a packet of crisps, watching the news and waiting for the bus down to Spoleto, so I can get the train to take me out of the Peaceable Kingdom of the Valnerina, and back to that other place, that other Italy. But I know Umbria is waiting for me to come home.
O powerful Santa Rita,
You are called the Saint of the Impossible.
In this time of need
I come to you with confidence.
You know my trials,
for you, yourself were many times burdened in this life.
Come to my help,
pray with me,
intercede on my behalf before the Father.
I know that God has a most generous heart
and that he is a most loving Father.
Join your prayers to mine
and obtain for the the grace I desire *of a home in the Valnerina*
I promise to use this favour, when granted,
to better my life,
to proclaim God's mercy,
and to make you widely known and loved.
I ask this through Christ our Lord.
~
(I've just realized I have not posted the update. The house is not "agibile". My flat is fine, and so is the one downstairs, but the third floor (second in Italy) is badly damaged. I think the chimney needs repair too, since it smoked very badly when I was there in December. This means that it is not possible to live in the house. Further, the commune is not issuing repair permits until the quakes stop, and when this will be is anyone's guess. I was there two nights and felt a total of about ten, mostly small, one big. It means that the house is not going to be repaired in the immediate future. For this reason, my realtor has said he will start to work on finding me another house in the area. Cascia, Roccoporena, Monteleone... quite a few of the little towns of the Valnerina are not so badly hit, so there are possibilities still and there is quite a lively little bus service that trundles all over from town to town - mostly for older people to go to the shops in Cascia and for school children.
All the efforts in Norcia right now are focused on getting the little "case degli legni" built and prepared for all the people whose houses are completely collapsed or so damaged they're not safe to go into. Whole sections of town outside the walls have been bulldozed and flattened to make room, and the little pre-fab houses are going up. All of Norcia looks like a giant construction site. Some of the little houses are completed and are already occupied. I saw housewives hanging laundry outside and signs of kids toys and life generally carrying on, which was very heartening to see.
The little houses are only being made available to people whose houses are permanently damaged or destroyed. In some cases the firemen have been helping people get their things out of their houses, packing boxes of china and carrying out sofas and other things because they can't let people in even to rescue their belongings. I think it is going to be several months before it is possible even to begin repairing houses that can be repaired. Many, many houses are so badly damaged - in some cases with parts of roofs and whole walls collapsed - that the remains will have to be bulldozed.
From a distance, Norcia looks damaged but mostly still there. In reality and for purposes of living daily life, there is very little left. And with 3000 people wanting to come home and 70% of the housing stock damaged renting in Norcia is currently impossible.)
Introducing my little Evil Project for the duration of the Synod.
Later today (I hope) The Remnant will be producing a longish article I wrote explaining in detail (and at length... sorry in advance) why I abruptly gave up news reporting in May this year, literally walking away. In truth, I had gone down to Rome for the March for Life, and the little quiet voice that had been whispering to me for about five years to move on, grew to a roar. I could no longer ignore my misgivings about the value of it. I'm not even really sure what came over me. I had gone to lunch with some friends, and then a couple of us went to the pub for a mojito. Then we went back to my friend's place where I was staying, and watched a movie.
The next morning, when I woke up, feeling surprisingly refreshed, I simply knew that the time was up. I packed my things, took leave of my friends and got on the train and went home.
I spent most of the summer doing not much more than thinking about it and going for walks. I did a few things for the Remnant, and found a new voice started developing, and a new conviction. We all knew full well that the thing that started today, the Synod, would be a watershed moment in the history of the Catholic Church. We all saw it coming, though even now no one really has any idea of exactly what to expect. For me, however, the one thing remained clear: this was too important to treat as "news".
But as we drew closer and closer to the day, I found the old urge to report and reveal coming back furiously.
Yesterday, talking to some blogger friends, it was suggested that we set up a war room, a place where traditionally-minded Catholic bloggers, writers and commentators can write and comment about the Synod as it is happening.
And, as things on the internet are generally about three minutes between conception of the idea and realization of the object,
I have recruited some familiar voices who have agreed to help with their examination and analysis of the situation, with a no-holds-barred rule. Names will be revealed shortly (though in some cases, identities will remain obscured.)
I sent around the following note to some of the louder-mouthed among my colleagues:
We'll run original blog posts as opinion pieces, we'll steal other people's stuff from other sites like the pirates we are, and we'll run original interviews with people on the ground in Rome that no one else will get because we'll have at least a couple of people on board who will be in situ. I will be inviting people to blog against the highjacking of the Synod ... We will give voices to people who would otherwise never be heard.
So, beware, beware, oh those of delicate sensibilities, there will possibly be some salty language as well as some unabashed truth-telling, some openly "divisive" posts, some people (I hope) saying things there that aren't being said anywhere else.
You thought the Mad Rad Trads were the bad kids before? Well the gloves are off today, boys and girls.
I am also opening the commboxes. Get in there, people. Tell us what you really think.
It's funny about the popular obsession with the red shoes, huh? Two years ago there was a kind of weird miniature frenzy over the fact that Bergoglio doesn't wear them (and of course, the implicit sneer at Benedict who did.)
So much noise was made about the shoes in the press that we had Bergoglio himself getting in on the rather nasty joke during the recent triumphal progress. Like every school bully that ever existed, he does seem to make a point of picking on the weaker kids, in this case, the last remnants of believers in the Church. In what is now the normal papal style, he landed a sucker punch and then while the victim was gasping and wondering what was going on, turned around to his gang of followers and snarled out a joke about it.
Mocking and bullying devout little old ladies. What a mensch.
But why did the red shoes even get a mention at all? Why did anyone even notice they were missing in Bergoglio's chosen manner of dress?
Because they are symbolic. Because somewhere deep in the festering swamps of modern man's soul, there is still a tiny glimmer of recognition that symbols are a real thing, there is still communication going on. It's just that now, the New Catholic Man hates and violently rejects what the shoes symbolise. They were one of the last fragments of the deeply symbolic papal grandeur that Benedict XVI was able to revive, and even that so enraged the enemies of Christ that they were the subject of electronic reams of scorn-heaping articles.
But of course, none of the journalists sneering at Benedict or sniggering at Bergoglio's nasty jokes has bothered to stop and look it up, and find out why popes used to wear the things they did. A while ago someone wrote somewhere that this kind of portrait of a pope, where it looks like he's wearing so much stuff that it's holding him up, was like that on purpose. That "holding him up" was precisely the desired effect. This was because the papacy was not supposed to be about the pope. It was supposed to be about Christ and His holy Church.
Remember those photos everyone mocks of President Obama dressed in a polo shirt and cycling shorts and a bike helmet? Those are understood as symbolic garments, and the American political cartoonists have got the message: Obama is a liberal Beta male, not someone to be taken seriously. They are often placed next to pictures of Vladimir Putin bench pressing Russian bears. Political cartoonists are perhaps the last people on earth who still fully grasp the purpose of the physical symbols of politics.
Just try to imagine what the People's Pope would look like dressed up like Pope St. Pius X, Hammer of the Modernists...
...
Yeah. Me too.
Today I came across possibly the best description of the purpose of all that papal pomp and circumstance that New Catholic Man hates so much. Read it, and you will learn why New Catholic Man is no one I want to meet.
One of the things the following clarifies, once again, is that Bergoglio is not anything surprising. We have the pope we've been asking for, for decades. He's a pope in the populist model that John Paul II was so beloved for, only without all those tiresome big words everyone had to look up all the time, and most importantly, without all that tedious religious stuff.
...
[I have retained all the ridiculous American spellings, to prove that it wasn't me...]
It's a very Catholic instinct, a reflex, really, to adore the pope as our sweet Christ on earth, as the sacrosanct keeper of the keys, as the vice regent of the King of the Universe. The problem is this papal affection has been running on the wrong kind of fuel for decades.
When the papacy decided to "loosen up," lower itself, scrape off the barnacles, lose the triple tiara, dye the Church´s proverbial hair and spring for hair implants, the focus, paradoxically, went from the august office to the active, and even hyperactive, man in that office. If you observe the photo of Pope Pius XII in procession, there are multiple layers of order and decorum and rank which act like a kevlar vest for the instinctive popular clamor...
Precisely because Pacelli was ensconced in such an intricate web of sacred semiotics and, shall we say, mystical bureaucracy, the savor and brightness of his unique person was blunted, dimmed, diffused, so that the popular devotion flowed towards what he was animating, rather than towards his charisma, jawline, hand signals, idiosyncratic gestures, etc. A man elected to be pope did not just die to himself by devoting all his labors to the care of the Church, but his personality was radically smothered by the byzantine demands of his clothing, routine, manner of speech, associations, residence, and so on. That was how a sacrosanct office ran on the fuel of sacrosanct populism.
As things stand now, though, the papacy has become so democratized, so "personalized", that the ancient instinct to adore the pope can only find purchase on the unique surface of the particular man with the papal ring. Without the traditional semiotic buffer, the pope-man cannot but become one Great Leader among others (e.g. "the Catholic Reagan," "the Catholic Obama", etc.). This is why Francis's famous "humility" rings so hollow.
Precisely by rejecting the conventional residence, clothing, shoes, forms of expression, associations, liturgical disciplines, etc., he becomes a tractor beam of attention. It may be unwitting but he´s inadvertently become the biggest egotist in the world, sort of like the man who becomes the loudest in the room by repeatedly assuring everyone that he´s not going to say anything else. He is Pope Kanye West and he is here to stay.
As for the selfies, that's just symptomatic of our dumbass age. I suspect Dante would have penciled in a perverse punishment for the vanity that smart phones generally sustain. Perhaps an arm wrapped around one's own throat in an eternal sneering strangulation.
"There is however a new current in the hermit spirituality of single or married lay people, who are deep affinity with hermitism, and feel a great need to be alone with God, and dedicate themselves to this solitude weekly or part of the day. Usually unmarried and widowers [who] work part-time in a secular job, and the next completely withdraw to pray, read, write [and] be alone with God only...
I'm becoming fascinated by the potential of the lay eremitical lifestyle, and given the situation in the Church, I'm finding that there are a lot of people who are attracted to this as well. We live in such times that it simply seems unwise to become involved in any formally, canonically recognised religious community. We have all taken well in the horrifying lesson of the Franciscans of the Immaculate. Stick your head up above the parapet and the current regime will make sure you lose it.
But one does not need canonical recognition to live an ordered regular life of prayer and contemplation, pursuing union with God. It certainly helps if there are other people around to help though, and I know there are groups forming to offer mutual support, mostly informally, and dependent upon the internet. I'm in touch with a few of them myself.
I read an interesting article about research done by an Italian writer, Isacco Turina, a sociologist at the University of Bologna, who found out that there are actually hundreds of these unofficial, lay hermits and semi-hermits in Italy, nearly all of whom came to the life on their own, most of whom are women and in their late 40s and early 50s. In fact, this is not remotely surprising to me, and I expect that an examination of these women's backgrounds would find that most of them arrived at the lay eremitical life, voluntary solitude and a focus on prayer and sacramental life, after being disappointed in their vocational aspirations. The Asteroid did nearly wipe out the kind of religious life that many people had sought. I can't imagine I was the only one to look around in the 80s and be put off by the empty, arid wasteland that the Church and the religious life had become.
Thank you for posting the link to my begging page. I'm a regular reader of yours, and was just tickled to death to see it up there. It's doubly helpful in that it gives me an excuse to tell you how much I enjoy your writing, in terms of both style and content. I doubt you've read anything of mine, but I've had a few pieces on OnePeterFive, and I must give you credit for helping me continue to develop my style. And on top of all that, your insights into Benedictine spirituality have been such a help to me in my discernment. Words can hardly repay my debt of gratitude, but thank you, thank you!
Truly,
J. Kidwell
... sigh...
Well now I have to do something for her... dammit! And while I'm all jealous and envious and stuff about her being young enough to apply to this place that didn't even freaking exist when I was the right age. How come she gets good nuns and all I could find was poxy old lesbian peace activists in polyester mumus?!
I'll help, but danged if I'm gonna be gracious about it! I suppose I could take it as a kind of penance for having frittered away my stupid youth going to punker gigs and watching John Hughes movies.
Ugh. I hate being good.
We're going to re-post every few days about Jessica's campaign. I notice that though it's been going for three months, nearly all of the $3000 worth of donations have been in the last five days. So, if you can, do help a girl out. I've replied to her email above and said that if we manage to make this work and she gets in under the deadline, she can be my nunny proxy.
~
My name is Jessica Kidwell. I’m 22 years old, a recent graduate of the College of William & Mary and hail from Fairfax, Virginia. I have heard God’s call, and I would like to serve Him by joining the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles in Gower, Missouri. I have been admitted to enter there this fall, but that offer is contingent upon me paying all my educational debt first. All told, my debt totaled about $60,000 when I left school. I’m writing you to ask for your prayers and your financial assistance. Even though I have a full time job, a part time job, and take on odd jobs whenever I can get them, it could be years before I have paid off these loans by myself. My goal with this campaign is to raise $30,000.
~
Hey, did I ever tell y'all the story about the time I met the prioress, Mother Cecilia?
I and some friends were going to the evening Mass at our parish in Rome, Santissima Trinita, and when we got there, the doors were locked (they're terrible slackers at that parish and often just don't care at all about opening up on time.) There were these two Benedictine nuns, both Americans, standing on the steps waiting to get in. They had come a little early so they could sing vespers in the Church before the 6:30 Mass. It turned out it was Mother Cecilia and her subprioress (whose name I forget.)
I introduced myself and my friends and we tried to raise Fr. Kramer (parocco) on the phone to get someone to come down and open the doors, but as usual no one was answering either the cell or the parish landline. So, we gave up and chatted instead. I mentioned that I had wanted desperately to be a Benedictine nun when I was younger, but that there simply were none left in the 80s that weren't completely ruined. She was very sympathetic, and seemed quite sorry that now that I was 48 it was far too late. But as a consolation prize, she pulled out her Antiphonale and I got out my Monastic Diurnal, and we sang the Office hymn for Vespers for the day on the church steps in the little piazza with the people in the coffee bar across watching rather bemused. It was great.
After Mass, my friends and I took them out to the local Chinese place to get some dinner. We had a great time, and I learned that they're totally and completely onside.
I must say, this is about the only time I've ever wished to be 25 again (a thought that normally fills me with horror).
One of the biggest problems in the Church right now is not lack of vocations, it's lack of support for them. And student loan debt is near the top of that list. Add to that the time pressure; nearly all religious orders for women of any reputation at all have an upper age limit. If you don't pay off your student loans before you hit the ceiling, you can forget it.
The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles is perhaps one of the most painful examples; they're possibly the only viable Benedictine monastery for women in the English speaking world that has retained the traditional Divine Office in Latin and the traditional Mass, but their age limit is one of the lowest: 28. If you have loans in the tens or hundreds of thousands for your (unemployable) arts degree in academic navel-gazing, you're pretty much out of luck.
A very large number of people are not in orders right now because of this.
Go help this lady, if you can find a few extra bucks. But do remember, if you can't pay your kids' way through university, send them to a community college to learn an employable trade. Teach them to love learning, get them addicted to books by all means, turn them into civilized and educated people, but for heaven sake, unless they're natural engineering or math prodigies, help them find a way through life that doesn't start with a crippling lifelong insoluble debt.
My name is Jessica Kidwell. I’m 22 years old, a recent graduate of the College of William & Mary and hail from Fairfax, Virginia. I have heard God’s call, and I would like to serve Him by joining the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles in Gower, Missouri. I have been admitted to enter there this fall, but that offer is contingent upon me paying all my educational debt first. All told, my debt totaled about $60,000 when I left school. I’m writing you to ask for your prayers and your financial assistance. Even though I have a full time job, a part time job, and take on odd jobs whenever I can get them, it could be years before I have paid off these loans by myself. My goal with this campaign is to raise $30,000.
I’m asking for your assistance to pay off my student loan debt. Please consider my situation, and decide if this something you feel you can support. It’s difficult for me to ask others for help, but I realize that I have gotten to this point in my life with the love, support, and kindness of many people.
I’ve wanted to be a nun since I was in the second grade. In school, we were assigned a book report on Saints, and were then to dress up as the Saint and give a presentation about their life. My Saint was St. Clare of Assisi. The more I learned about this holy woman and religious foundress, the more I grew to admire not only her as a person and great Saint, but the concept of contemplative religious life itself. This wasn’t a detached admiration, either; I was utterly taken with the idea and wanted to live it myself. Throughout the rest of my childhood, this desire grew, taking something of a dip in high school, with the realization that not many people become religious nowadays. I earned my bachelor’s degree from the College of William & Mary, a state school, and was on track to graduate with a minimal debt load, but for various reasons, I had to cover a far higher percentage of tuition in loans my last two years. I took a semester of graduate classes, with God pulling at my heart with greater and greater intensity as time went on, before I finally surrendered. I left my Master’s program, threw myself into work, and I am dead set on entering the monastery this fall.
What I like about Norcia is not only the food, the people, the weather, the monks, but the culture. This is a place that loves its traditions, and keeps them very consciously as a shield against the outer world that is becoming denuded of unique traditional life.
This is is a little video I took last winter on the Festa di Sant'Antonio when the townspeople bring their animals up to the monastery of St. Anthony and the priest blesses them all, and they have a little festa.
~
Friday, July 24, 2015
A long, long time ago, the first time I ever visited a cloistered monastery of nuns, the abbess who was leading our retreat told us to let our minds sit gently on the words of the psalms as they were being chanted in the Office. Don't try to grip it too tightly, that is force yourself to concentrate too hard, but let our minds take it in easily, like a cool breeze. She said that at some point during the retreat a phrase or verse might start to occupy our thoughts, and this was what was usually meant by allowing God to "speak to your heart".
Naturally, being young keeners, we three girls enthusiastically set about concentrating very hard on energetically allowing our minds to "float gently," which makes me smile now.
But Dom Calvet, (who once wrote an encouraging note to me) says here that this good abbess was quite right, and it has come about at last, now that I am no longer a young keener, that I also have a single line of the psalms rolling slowly back and forth in my mind, again and again.
Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at thy altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my God.
~
ONE DAY, as we were asking a Carmelite sister to tell us how she made her prayer, her heart to heart with the Lord, she responded that, for thirty-five years, one phrase of the Gospel was enough for her, and she returned to it without ceasing. It seemed to her that drawing on another source would be to be unfaithful to her particular vocation, or at least to the attraction which the Lord had given to her for her time of mental prayer. It is very true that the interior life, more than a response to passing impulses, is chiefly an effort to persevere in the direction of a continuous line flowing from the first grace.
The phrase that our Carmelite was taking in this way was drawn from the Gospel of John: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that whoever believes in Him, should not perish, but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). The whole doctrine of salvation is contained in these few words: the divine paternity, the redemptive Incarnation, the role of faith, the drama of reprobation and the perspective of eternal happiness. The ancients gave a name to this verse of the Gospel of Saint John: they called it Evangelium in nuce, the Gospel in a nutshell.
So, this week, following my trip to Rome, I deactivated my work-related Facebook account. A while ago I separated my working contacts and groups - people and organisations that send me information that I pour into my work - from my contacts with personal friends, people I actually know and want to keep in touch with. I have been collecting stuff on the personal FB account that have nothing whatever to do with The News. Mostly stuff about gardening, science, botany, herbalism, archaeology and monasticism.
One day Facebook sent me some kind of weird thing where it showed you what you posted exactly seven years ago. It was a photo album of my first visit to Rome. For some reason, it made me kind of freak out. My reaction was not, perhaps, what FB intended. I put up the briefest possible note saying I was retiring the account, and I clicked it. It's off. The other one, the personal one that's full of stuff about herbal remedies and gardening tips, is still going.
I'm not entirely sure what is happening in my brain at the moment, but I just can't look at the other stuff. Day after day of scrolling up and down that newsfeed and I felt myself diminishing, eroding, almost fizzling away. Finally, I realised that I have to make a choice between activism and a new thing. I was at Mass on Wednesday morning in Norcia after my long weekend in Rome, and it came home to me with great clarity: choose.
As my buddy Steve says below, we certainly seem to be entering a time of persecution and diminishment. It's going to be a testing time, particularly, I think, in the next six to eight months. I'm not saying anything "prophetic," I'm just reading the signs of the times. Suddenly, the reason I came to Norcia is becoming more important than anything else.
Listen to this podcast from my old friend Steve Skojec. It more or less says what I think:
"I can’t do my job — trying to get the truth, which is often unpopular, in the hands of as many people as possible — without living in a constant state of promotion. But this works against the very virtues I believe we must extol."
~
O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed,
Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved...
From the desire of being extolled ...
From the desire of being honored ...
From the desire of being praised ...
From the desire of being preferred to others...
From the desire of being consulted ...
From the desire of being approved ...
From the fear of being humiliated ...
From the fear of being despised...
From the fear of suffering rebukes ...
From the fear of being calumniated ...
From the fear of being forgotten ...
From the fear of being ridiculed ...
From the fear of being wronged ...
From the fear of being suspected ...
That others may be loved more than I,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I ...
That, in the opinion of the world,
others may increase and I may decrease ...
That others may be chosen and I set aside ...
That others may be praised and I unnoticed ...
That others may be preferred to me in everything...
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should…
