Light On Dark Water

Seeing for the first time

An anecdote from the Caryll Houselander biography I've been reading. I always wondered if this wouldn't be the case:

...in Lourdes they witnessed the cure of a five-year-old boy who, as a baby, had been kicked in the face by a horse, disfigured and blinded.... Iris remembers the moment when the child received his sight: never having seen--as far as he could remember--he screamed with terror....

And then later he would have had to learn that he was disfigured, and to live with that.

It's only when we try not to experience our special suffering that it can really break us.

—Carryl Houselander, from Maisie Ward's biography of her

Faustina

This Polish movie is a biography of Saint Faustina Kowalska, the recipient of the revelations that became the Divine Mercy devotion. It came recommended by my friend Robert right around Divine Mercy Sunday with the note "Not perfect, but it has a good deal going for it. Likely the best film about a Christian mystic that we'll see in our time."

So I put it on my Netflix queue, and moved it to the top, with the intention of watching it within the period of the Divine Mercy Novena--which I was not praying, but I had some vague idea that watching this would be some sort of observance. And yet I put off watching it, and only did so this past Sunday. And the reason is that I resist watching explicitly religious films, because they're so often dull and subtly disheartening. I think they make me feel a little guilty because I think I should like them, and uneasy because I think there must be something wrong with either me or the faith if it seems like such thin stuff compared to the world.

But I needn't have hesitated in this case. This is an excellent film. As Robert said, not perfect, but well-executed, modest, with little or no forced piety. I found it very moving. 

Looks like a good bit of it, maybe the whole thing, is on YouTube. Here are the first nine minutes:

 

The DVD also contains a nice short documentary called Return about Vilnius, where Sister Faustina met the priest, Fr. Sopocko, who was of great assistance to her, and about the Divine Mercy Sisters there.

Another thought on that last Sunday Night Journal

I couldn't have seen those children as I did, they wouldn't have appeared to me as they did or had the same significance, if I hadn't brought my long life and experiences good and bad to it. And they couldn't have seen each other or themselves as I did. My experience and knowledge were an important part of what made the sight so beautiful and so rich. Life does make us larger, allows us to comprehend more, in both senses of the word. Though it comes at a great cost, we don't generally want to go back to a lesser condition. We are growing toward something. And so I shouldn't wish that the children be frozen in time; they must grow, too, as painful as it may be.

Sunday Night Journal — April 15, 2012

An Unexpected Vision

The past couple of weeks have been difficult at work, due to the departure of someone who not only was responsible for a lot of things that I don’t know much about but who will probably be impossible to replace. I should be working nights and weekends to try to compensate for her absence, but am stubbornly refusing to do so. Long hours are to some extent part of the package when you work in information technology, but I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m not willing to sacrifice for my employer what little time I have for other things.

I was very much looking forward to the weekend, and when I arrived at home I got an entirely unexpected vision of beauty. The picture below is of the street or road that I live on. “Street” for me implies pavement, and the pavement ends a little before my house. The street comes down a short but fairly steep hill, where the pavement ends, and takes a right turn before reaching my house. There are woods all around, and you can’t see beyond the turn. This is the view you get when you come around the turn.

That’s my mailbox, driveway, and red 1992 Volvo (for which I paid $3000 five years ago, a pretty good investment as it has served me reasonably well). The orange traffic cone presumably belongs to the city; I don’t know how it got there. At the end of the road there’s a path through some trees, and then Mobile Bay. Apart from the presence of my car, this is the way things looked when I came around that turn at about 6:30pm on Friday. The picture was taken a few minutes later, and I’m including it so that you can better imagine what I saw: four children running down the road to the bay.

They were, I guess, ten or eleven years old, three girls and one boy. I’ve met the boy, who lives with his apparently single mother in one of the condominiums a couple of blocks away. I don’t recall having seen the girls before. The girls all had long hair and were wearing jeans or shorts and light blouses or t-shirts, the boy has thick curly hair and was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. When I saw them they were about even with where my car is parked. The last of the group, a girl with light brown hair, heard my car and stepped off into the grass, while the others kept going. Then she saw that I was slowing down and ran to catch up with the others. I could hear them calling and laughing to each other. I stopped, more or less where I took this picture a few minutes later, and watched them till they disappeared into the woods.

I realize as I write this that it’s going to be impossible for me to communicate to you how beautiful they were, and how they moved me: their freshness, their gladness, their seemingly effortless vitality, their grace and freedom. There is a point toward the end of childhood where the body and mind have attained a certain maturity but have not yet fallen into the fears and lusts and longings of adolescence, which seem to stay with us in some degree for the rest of our lives. I found myself wishing they could remain as they were forever. But that’s to wish that they never complete the journey. They made me very happy for a little while, and I said a prayer for them.

1 Samuel by Francesca Aran Murphy

I had planned to write a full review of this book today, but have changed my mind for two reasons. First, the weekend has been busier than I expected. Second, I mentioned to someone in email last week that I was planning to review it, and he asked what publication I was reviewing it for. So I started thinking, well, why not take a bit more time with it, and see if I can place it with Touchstone or some other publication, because I think the book merits the attention. I don’t know how many subscribers Touchstone has, but I’m sure it’s more than the number of people who read this blog. I’m therefore going to make this just a quick first draft of what will be a somewhat longer review.

I don’t know much about biblical scholarship, but this book strikes me as being exactly the way it ought to be done. I should admit that I actually have...let us say low expectations of it, because as a discipline it seems to have played a significant role over the past 150 years or so in undermining Christian faith. It is with a certain weariness and dread that I hear a homilist open his discussion of a scripture reading with “What Matthew (or Mark or Luke or John...) is trying to tell us here is...” What follows is likely to discard the literal meaning of the text in favor of some psycho-literary lesson, possibly of dubious value.

Dr. Murphy does not do this at all. In fact the book seems to engage in a sort of running argument with what I understand to be the conventional literary and historical approaches: the literary one which is all too literary, in that it treats the text as mere literature, the historical one which purports to sit in highly skeptical judgment of its factual truth. This book instead starts with the presumption that scripture means what it says, and that when it clearly treats events as having really happened it is not trafficking in myth and legend (or fiction). Most importantly, it presumes that scripture is intelligible, that the people who put it down were not fools or idiots—nor, on the other end of scholarly mistake, were they novelists, carefully crafting a narrative for literary and theological effect. It takes the biblical author’s historical situation and way of looking at the world as, yes, substantially different from our own, but, no, not so different as to be unintelligible. In short, it sets out to explain, not to explain away.

Broadly speaking, it is an extended and focused effort to bridge the gap between the biblical world and the contemporary believer. In the best tradition of modern theology, it makes ready use of modern discoveries in history and archaeology and languages, but it does not turn these tools against the text. And it doesn’t assume the necessity of what I have always, as a completely unschooled layman, regarded as the suspect practice of resolving disjunctures in the text by assuming them to be the work of multiple hands, in this case with differing agendas. Apparently it is widely held among scholars that the stories of Samuel and Saul, which seem at times to support and at times to condemn the Israelites’ desire for a king, must intermingle the writings of pro and anti-monarchic parties. But Dr. Murphy, in what strikes me as a genuinely literary and yet orthodox approach, tries to show (if I’ve understood her) that this ambivalence expresses something deeper, something about the possibilities inherent in the situation, something about the ultimately incomprehensible but metaphysically real freedom of both God and man.

An assumption of realism must direct our interpretation of the episode, if we want to read it within Christian tradition. The presupposition that the text is describing something that really happened is a tremendous gift to the historical biblical critic. It hinders the formulation of circular hypotheses about source documents and stimulates us to use our historical imagination to try to figure out what is really going on here.

To try to figure out what is really going on here. You would think that would be the primary mission of the scholar but it certainly doesn’t seem to be the case always.

This is not the sort of thing I ordinarily read, and with my chronic difficulty in concentrating I had to work at getting started in it. Once I’d gotten fifty or pages or so in, though, it became fascinating, though never easy; every page is dense with ideas and facts and references to other commentaries, from ancient times until the present. I’m somewhat in awe of the labor involved in the writing of it, not to mention the erudition manifested throughout. I really can’t imagine examining any text at such length and in such detail, and to follow it was a mind-stretching experience.

Challenging it is, but not dry. Those who have met Dr. Murphy online won’t be surprised to learn that flashes of wit appear throughout, sometimes most unexpectedly, as in the description of the Ark of the Covenant as a “bonsai temple.” Or the observation that “In the ancient world, they had to fall back on theater, since they did not have Home Box Office.” Nor will they be surprised by a number of references to The Wire and other contemporary dramas.

I haven’t said anything about the actual content of the book being studied, 1 Samuel. If you’re as biblically unlearned as I am, you may not immediately recognize that title as designating the story that begins with the birth of Samuel and ends with the death of Saul. I had never read it from start to finish. It is quite a story, and well worth the time spent reading this commentary on it, which naturally you’ll want to begin by reading 1 Samuel itself, unless you already know it well.

Quite a story indeed. My father, who was a churchgoer but ever inclined to questioning, used to say that the terrible behavior of Biblical figures like Saul and David was an argument for the truth of the Bible, or at least for the fact that the Hebrews believed it to be true: no one attempting to hoodwink or proselytize on behalf of a religion would have so openly exhibited the sins of so many of its major figures. 1 Samuel qualifies as a prime argument for that case.

Why Is It Always Me?!

I got a chuckle out of Grumpy Ex-Pat's comment on the preceding thread: "I definitely would have spent Good Friday having a narcissistic self-pity attack." Yes, exactly. And it reminded me of a little-known movie that I saw quite a few years ago and wish I could see again. I couldn't remember the title, but I did remember one of the stars, a very well-known actor, and have just spent fifteen minutes tracking it down by guessing at titles in his filmography. Turns out it was a made-for-TV movie from the early 1990s and is not available on DVD, so the chances are pretty good that I won't see it again. I saw it years ago in a hotel when I was on some work-related trip--I rarely saw TV at home in those years. 

I'm not telling you the name of the movie or the well-known actor, because I'm about to give away the most important parts of the plot, and it's always possible you might run across it somewhere, and I don't want to spoil it. (Email me if you really want to know.) 

 It's a thriller/mystery sort of thing involving a very sleazy blackmailer, not especially notable except for the performance of the above-mentioned star. He plays the blackmailer, and does it so well that you really detest him and long to see him defeated--he's a villain of great craft, but not a sophisticated Mephistophelian one, just a shabby crook who happens to be pretty clever and who stumbles across an opportunity. After many twists and turns in the plot in which he squeezes his victim ever tighter, the tables are finally turned on him. Caught by surprise, and about to be shot, he exclaims, with bitter and whining resignation, "Why is it always me?!"

The idea that he could still, after all his evil deeds, consider himself a put-upon victim gives the scene a definite note of black humor. I think we're all somewhat in that position when we complain about our lot in life. I am, anyway.

Sunday Night Journal — April 8, 2012

Easter Sunday

What were they thinking? In his Good Friday homily at the cathedral in Mobile, Fr. Martin asked this question about the disciples of Jesus as they saw him arrested, tried, and executed. What had they expected of him? Certainly not this. And what did they think when their expectations were utterly crushed? There is no evidence that any of them had any idea that the Resurrection would follow.

I know what I would have been thinking. It would have gone something like this: I should have known it would all come to nothing. This is what always happens; it’s the way life always goes: a beautiful beginning, then disappointment. Nothing ever turns out the way you want it to, or not for long. Dreams always fail. You never get what you longed for, or if you do it isn’t what you thought it would be, or it disappears even as you hold it. And in the end nothing remains but the dream itself, the same old longing.

One of three or four passages in The Lord of the Rings which haunt me, and which pass through my mind almost daily, is this exchange between Gimli and Legolas, upon their parting with a lord of Gondor; specifically, it’s the words of Gimli I recall, and which might be my own:

“That is a fair lord and a great captain of men,” said Legolas. “If Gondor has such men still in these days of its fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.”

“And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,” said Gimli. “It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in the Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”

But Gimli’s is not quite the last word; the exchange continues:

“Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas. “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimil.”

“And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,” said the Dwarf.

“To that the Elves know not the answer,” said Legolas.

Again, my sympathies are with the dwarf. It is not easy or natural for me to resist the feeling that in the end decline and extinction will have the last word. I almost wrote “the idea” in the preceding sentence, and changed it to “feeling,” because that’s what it is; it’s not a conviction, not a conclusion reached by reason, and in fact is contrary to my conscious belief. Yet to some extent it is an idea, though an unwelcome one. After all, is there anything in our direct experience to suggest, much less prove, that it is not true? I say direct experience: we have the testimonies of others, and our own intuitions and hopes. To believe in spirit as the source of material life rather than its product often requires a conscious effort, while the clear indications of the material world itself, and the conclusions of the sciences which investigate it, are that all, literally all, will come in the end to nothing: the heat death of the universe, utter cessation, futility and un-meaning. 

So I would have been thinking, with whatever adjustments in the imagery required for the knowledge and culture of the times, had I been one of the disciples. Just another of life’s inevitable disappointments, a type of the ultimate disappointment.

And what would I have thought at the news of the Resurrection? Undoubtedly I would not readily have believed it; perhaps not until I had seen it for myself. And when finally I was persuaded, I would have made that leap with tears of joy.

But this is, after all, not really speculative. I was not there two thousand years ago, but I have passed through the same doubts and into the same belief, from darkness to light. It was not as compressed in time, not as immediately intense as the experience of the disciples, but it must be a similar transition. And every Triduum I make the journey again, imagining on Good Friday that I do not know that the Resurrection is coming. What I feel and what I say when it does come begins with “Thanks be to God,” but doesn’t end there.

I have had a smaller and more personal taste of resurrection in the past couple of weeks. I came to the Catholic Church after a sojourn of several years as an Episcopalian. Though I couldn’t stomach the doctrinal problems of the Episcopal Church, I became deeply attached to the Anglican liturgy. Moreover, my roots are in the Methodist Church, which is Anglican at one remove. And then there’s my ancestral connection to the British Isles, and my love of English literature. It was painful to leave the Anglican liturgy, even though at the point I encountered it, in the late 1970s, it was being drearily modernized. I needn’t rehash the usual complaints about the banality of the post-Vatican II Catholic liturgy; suffice to say that I shared them, at times almost to the point of despair and temptation to apostasy, and that it was a trial to my faith.

When John Paul II allowed the use of a modified Anglican liturgy under the term “Anglican use,” I had a flicker of hope that I would see such a thing, but there have never been more than a few parishes in the country using it, none of them anywhere near me. And I was pleased when Benedict XVI went further, to the creation of an Anglican ordinariate, but I didn’t expect ever to benefit from it myself. For some time now I’ve been reconciled to the Catholic liturgy as it is, happy enough to receive the graces of the Mass that I could live with the dullness of its treatment.

Then one morning at work couple of weeks ago, there came, entirely unexpected, an email from my wife telling me that she had just had a telephone conversation which brought her news that a seminarian in our diocese has begun the process of establishing regular Anglican Use worship in this area. Until the seminarian, a former Episcopal priest, is ordained, it will not be a Mass; the first event is Evening Prayer, on April 15, and my wife and I will surely be there, God willing.

Thanks be to God. I can’t even say that this is an answer to a prayer; I regarded it as so unlikely that I hadn’t even bothered to pray for it more than a few times, and those long ago. This is God giving more than was asked for or expected, as he did with his followers at the first Easter. However this works out in the longer run, I’ll remember, when I feel doubtful, the happy surprise of hearing the news.

Offline till Easter

I'm going to do my best to stay completely off the net from now (Thursday evening) till Sunday. I wish and pray for a blessed Easter for everyone, especially those who don't believe.

I would like to leave you with some serious message, if only a quotation from someone else, but I'm distracted and hurried halfway to madness these days, and can't muster any substantial thoughts. Instead, I'll suggest that you go over to Janet Cupo's blog and read her series of posts on the Stations of the Cross. Click here and you'll be taken to a page containing all fourteen of them, though in reverse order. See you Sunday.

Sunday Night Journal — April 1, 2012

Fifty Shades of Grey

This is depressing: it seems that there is a pornographic novel called Fifty Shades of Grey which is extremely popular among women, and that its plot involves a young woman who gives herself as a masochistic sex slave to a billionaire. Here is one of several commentaries on it which I’ve run across recently. I wouldn’t be surprised at such a book coming from a man, and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it came from a woman, because I have long since accepted, though very unwillingly, that money and power are extremely attractive to at least some large proportion of the female sex. In my younger and more conventionally liberal days, quick to defend woman as an oppressed minority—and, more fundamentally, naturally chivalrous and a bit idealistic about God’s most beautiful creation—I objected to this. Observation proved me wrong.

It’s not the novel itself but its popularity that depresses. Every man who reads a news story like this must  surely wonder, at least for a moment, if his own wife or girlfriend would drop him in an instant for the first billionaire who expressed an interest in tying her up. And reportedly it is especially popular among married women. 

Also depressing, though simultaneously amusing, is the view of the two women who wrote the commentary linked to above. With that grim and superficial ideological blindness typical of academic feminism, they deplore the novel’s “reactionary gender politics,” though not of course the fact that it’s pornographic. They think its appeal stems from the fact that women have not attained the imagined level of socio-economic power which would make them indifferent to the promise of attaining it by association with a rich and powerful man. What a silly delusion. If there’s another thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is something elemental in desires of this sort, something that can’t be  explained away with socio-economic arguments (even if they’re plausible, which I don’t think these are). Even at its best feminism was never more than a very incomplete account of what women really think and, as Freud wondered, what they really want.

Is it arrogant of me, as a man, to say that? Too bad; I am only proceeding according to the common-sense maxim watch what they do, not what they say. If nothing else has emerged clearly from the gender debates of the past forty years, it is that the presence of “reactionary gender politics” does not in the least deter most women from liking some piece of art or entertainment that otherwise appeals to them. The career of Madonna alone is proof of that (no matter how such sexual exhibitionism is dressed up as “empowerment”).

I suspect, and hope, that women having good relationships with men and a grounding in faith are less susceptible to the likes of this novel. It’s almost an axiom in many intellectual circles—and nowadays not only there, but in decidedly non-intellectual circles, as a result of ideas being propagated into fashion and popular culture—that religion is frequently the expression of a repressed sexual impulse. But I think it’s more often the other way around, that erotic obsessions and perversions are frequently misplaced religious longings. The desire to surrender oneself to a sadist is a perversion of the desire to surrender oneself to God. And, on the earthly level, no matter how reactionary it is to say so, it seems pretty clear that most women want their husbands to be, in a sense, and most certainly a non-abusive sense, in some degree of authority over them—this is only another way of describing the oft-stated preference of women for men who are “confident,” “in command,” etc.

In fact—and this is pure speculation—I wouldn’t be surprised if women who, as a matter of principle and perhaps as an effect of anger, are in the habit of pushing aggressively against the men in their lives are more susceptible to the pornography of submission than those who are at ease with...how do I say this without using words that carrying implications I don’t intend?...in some fundamental psychological way looking up to their husbands? Nature will have the penultimate, though not the last, word in these things.

Smart Kids in Small Towns

I found this post by Pentimento an interesting twist on a phenomenon I’ve noticed more than once, first of all in myself. She describes her reaction to moving from the life of an artist and intellectual in New York (City) to the life of a wife and mother in a much smaller city in the same state:

I felt that I was in a dull, dreary place that was a poor match for my ...specialness, the specialness I'd long believed to be my birthright.

This is exactly what I and no doubt millions of others have felt while growing up in places like the one to which Pentimento has moved. If you’re one of the bright kids, interested in art and ideas and other things which are not generally high on the list of concerns for most people in such places, you almost inevitably start thinking of yourself as special, by which of course you mean superior.

The usual or classic pattern is that this smart kid escapes from the country or the small town to the metropolis (or perhaps only to the university) and there suffers the humiliating passage from big fish in small pond to very ordinary fish in big pond. This may, but doesn’t necessarily, lead to some degree of humility. I would expect that to go in the opposite direction—from the intellectual life of the metropolis to the dullness of the provinces—would provoke a strong impulse to hold oneself forever above the natives, and it speaks well of Pentimento that she wants to choose otherwise.

Sometimes, whether or not he leaves the small town behind, the smart kid’s sense of superiority hardens into lasting contempt. I think of an Alabama native who used to write for a newspaper here and who, on leaving to take a job in the northeast, bade farewell to the state with a sneer that he was happy to be leaving a place he’d never liked anyway and which was notable only for football and racism. I wonder how he fared in his new place. If he found appreciation there for the abilities that went under-praised at home, it has not achieved enough notice to reach us here.

That person was very proud of being a liberal in this heavily right-wing state. The path of the smart kid often leads to conventional liberalism. The provinces tend to be conservative in an instinctive and unreflective way. The smart kid looks beyond that, criticizes the simplistic and conventional views he encounters all around him, reads books and magazines that present him with other and more well-thought-out opinions, and decides that if his townspeople are conservatives, then he must be a liberal. And that’s perfectly understandable. But if he escapes to the metropolis (perhaps only in his mind—with modern communications one may mentally escape while remaining physically in place), he may find himself again among people who all think alike; only now he may not recognize the force of convention and fashion in maintaining the prevailing opinions, and so become as locked in to a set of received ideas as the people back home.

As one of those smart kids, the thing I had to learn, first, was that I was  not special in the way that I thought I was. Later, I learned that everyone else is special, that those people I thought were dumbbells are every bit as complex and interesting as I thought I was, and often also smarter in some ways than me and my intellectual heroes and friends. And then I could come back around to seeing myself as special, but this time without pride: special not because I am superior to others but because I’m just like them: unique and important in God’s eyes, a fact in which everyone’s sense of being special originates and is objectively justified.

April Fool’s Day

I was planning what I thought would be an amusing April Fool’s Day post, but when I realized that April 1 would fall on Palm Sunday decided it would be inappropriate. Check back next year.

Speaking of Palm Sunday, I’ve always been a little puzzled by the fact that we have a Passion narrative on this day. It seems out of place. Shouldn’t we celebrate the entry into Jerusalem today, the better to acknowledge our perfidy on Thursday?

Staying focused

on the fundamentals.