We're All Bad Catholics Now (...I Wish)

If you've never read Bad Catholic, you should; if you're an occasional reader (like me), you should start checking in more often (as I have this past week.) Of all the enjoyable stuff I've seen there, I don't think anything has given me the pleasure of a simple picture he posted three days ago. After pointing out that, "Your plan backfired, Barry: Instead of painting the Church as ridiculously oppressive, you managed to usher America into an incredible zeitgest, in which NPR dislikes you and Mike Huckabee can declare “We are all Catholic now,” without being damned to hell thrice over.", he offers this picture:

with the legend, "When any creature that normally takes half a century to form a complete statement starts a united effort to destroy your plans, think twice about your own brilliance."

Good advice to Saruman, good advice to all the proponents of this horrible HHS mandate.

How horrible is it? When this came down, I--the queen of mean-spirited pettiness--could not direct even a millisecond of "told you so" schadenfreude toward the bishops who had supported the passage of Obamacare.


So, inspired by the above and some of Bad Catholic's other recent pics, here's my less-good picture contribution:

Left Untried

My lunchtime reading recently was Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, a memoir by Immaculée Ilibagiza. The author hid for nearly three months in a tiny bathroom with six other women. There was little food, little water, no bathing; and it was still preferable to what would have been their fate outside. These women were not criminals hiding from the law but members of the wrong tribe in a time when their country had gone mad with hatred and resentment. They were hiding from machete-wielding rapists and murderers who had the full backing of their government.

While she sat in the bathroom, Ilibagiza prayed all day. And while she prayed, she came to know that God required that she forgive the people who were slaughtering so many of her fellow countrymen and who would kill her if they found her--that the command to forgive our enemies is not just empty words, but a requirement if we are to continue to grow in holiness. By then her closeness to God was the only thing keeping her going, so somehow she did find the will to forgive them (though as you can imagine that was an act that took renewal as further news of atrocities reached.)

The mind boggles.

Really.

I can think of no better illustration of the G. K. Chesterton line, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

No human acting alone--i.e. without God's grace--could forgive such an enormity. It is hard enough for us to forgive relatively small insults from the petty-minded among our relatives and neighbors, but to forgive the utterly senseless murders of our family and countrymen, having our home burned and the whole course of our life disrupted, being forced to huddle together with strangers in fear of our life for week after week--everything natural in us recoils at this idea. But Christianity requires it.

I know enough from my own small troubles about how it can feel to rely on God in a time of stress, that I can understand something of the way she was resting in God's presence in that bathroom. No one would want to lose that closeness. So I know why she had to choose forgiveness, but that she actually succeeded at it is an enormous thing to me and I'm sure that this is one of the rare instances in my life when I'm firmly in the majority--utterly normal, fitting right in.

Forgiveness in a situation like Ilibagiza's would be impossible without God, and many of us would think God is not only cruel to allow the situation but unnatural to expect us to forgive those who caused it. But what's the alternative to forgiveness? Carrying the burden of resentment and hatred and vengeful desires all our lives? Letting the (justifiable) anger go on so long it poisons everything else we have? Letting it all build and grow in the society until it becomes another round of violence, with different names on the victims list?

So what to do? Forgive. Temper justice with mercy. Seek God. It's all easier said than done (!), and in the end it comes down to each of us in our own heart and head, deciding what to do, whether we will listen to God or to the Evil One.

Long Quote of the Month

I recently found Crisis Magazine's archived articles by John Zmirak (of the Bad Catholic guides fame) and have been enjoying them one or a few at a time. A longish bit from one of them--"Satan: A Tapeworm"--leapt off the screen and right for my brain. Zmirak was saying that it bothered him how many supposedly uplifting Christian movies "are not really “spiritual,” much less Christian; they’re simply bland and inoffensive."

The Catholic faith is neither. In fact, like really authentic Mexican food
(think habeneros and fried crickets), it is at once both pungent and offensive.
It offends me all the time, with the outrageous demands it makes of my fallen
nature and the sheer weirdness of its claims. It asserts that, behind the veil
of day-to-day schlepping, of work and laundry and television and microwaved
burritos, we live on the front lines of a savage spiritual war waged by
invisible entities (deathless malevolent demons and benevolent dead saints)
whose winners will enjoy eternal happiness with a resurrected rabbi, and whose
losers will writhe forever in unquenchable fire. Sometimes I step back and find
myself saying in Jerry Seinfeld’s voice: What’s with all the craziness? Why
can’t I just enjoy my soup?

The Church’s heroes, seen from a worldly
point of view, are a pack of self-destructive zealots who embark on crackpot
projects like lifelong celibacy, voluntary poverty, and (worst of all)
obedience; who leave perfectly serviceable chateaus in France to go preach the
Beatitudes to scalp-collecting Indians in freezing Canada; who volunteer to
sneak into Stalin’s Russia precisely because he has imprisoned so many priests,
then spend decades saying secret Masses in labor camps; who open up pro-life
pregnancy centers in crappy neighborhoods so they can talk welfare queens into
having still more babies we’ll have to pay for . . .

And so on. A
religion like this doesn’t need after-school specials; it needs science fiction
and fantasy, horror films and surrealism to convey the fundamental strangeness
that it believes lies just beneath the surface of day-to-day “reality.”

And that, my friends, goes a long way toward explaining why I am Catholic. The weirdness is palpable and the stakes are high (the highest) and the witness of those who have gone before is amazing.

A Story for Corpus Christi--Really Early

A while back, while returning from a trip to the coast, my husband and his friend were talking geek stuff and my mind was wandering somewhere far outside the car window, when it suddenly came back inside just in time to catch the tail end of a mini-rant from our friend on comics or Transformers or something: "The main problem I have with it is they should have paid more attention to it. I mean, he basically ate God. You can't do that and not have it affect you!" My husband looked over (at least his voice sounded as if he looked over) and said, "You should become Catholic."

Robin Hood

A few weeks ago Uncle Pookie and I watched The Adventures of Robin Hood--that's the 1938 film with Errol Flynn. Despite watching Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny in parodies of it when we were children, neither of us had seen the original. And I have to tell ya--Technicolor-look or not, lack of gritty realism or not--it beats the pants off the later Robin Hood films. Kevin Costner's Robin Hood couldn't have gotten an IT team to follow him if he offered free doughnuts, but it's easy to see why men followed Errol Flynn. Flynn's Robin Hood was charismatic, as a man leading a rebellion/guerilla movement in the woods needs to be. The whole movie is just plain fun.

My only regret is not to have seen it when I was eight. I would have loved it and spent hours afterward swashbuckling with a pretend sword. And I was a girl! Imagine how much fun a little boy who'd seen it would have. (Assuming he's not already jaded from years of video games and the cynical, crude, and oh-so-ironic programs and commercials on contemporary TV.)

Another, small thing about The Adventures of Robin Hood is that they remembered something I've been saying for years: Merrie Olde England was Catholic England. Religion is treated more respectfully here than it would be in any contemporary film. Yes, the Cardinal is in cahoots with Prince John and Friar Tuck is a hothead, but Friar Tuck is on the side of the good guys, at the beginning we see a priest or monk shown among the few willing to stand up to the oppressive Normans, and Robin Hood recruits Friar Tuck because he's out looking for a priest to tend to his men's spiritual needs. There's a few "by'r Lady"s scattered in there. More important, when the Merrie Men want to determine whether Maid Marian is really sincere, they ask her to swear by Our Lady--clearly, a serious oath to them.

No, this isn't a religious film; it's not even a serious film. It's just lighthearted fun from a time when religion was considered a normal part of life (there in the background, even if it wasn't up front) and Hollywood didn't automatically sneer at religious people, and which happened to depict a time when England was still Catholic.


If you're still with me, here's a little more Robin Hood fun from The Real Mother Goose, copyright 1916 by Rand McNally & Company:


Robin Hood and Little John

Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Is in the mickle* wood!
Little John, Little John,
He to the town is gone.

Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Telling his beads,
All in the greenwood
Among the green weeds.

Little John, Little John,
If he comes no more,
Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
We shall fret full sore!

* mickle = big


This rhyme was accompanied in the book I have with a fullpage illustration of Robin hood kneeling before a cross praying his rosary (i.e. "telling his beads"; "beads" refers to the physical beads of the rosary, but also to the older "bede", meaning prayer). You can see a small version of this picture online here.

A Bumpersticker That Made Me Happy

Two or three days ago Uncle Pookie and I were going to see a movie with a friend. They were talking games or comics or something when I nearly squealed, "That car has something about black Catholics!" "What?" "The bumpersticker on that van over there," [I indicated one in the next lane] "it has something about black Catholics on it." UP drove up a bit closer so I could read it:

"No matter what,
no matter when,
black Catholics respect life."

I felt really happy seeing that bumpersticker; not even the laughing comment of our friend (who is black himself), "As if they exist!" could dampen my enthusiasm at seeing it. I guess technically it was a pro-life bumpersticker, but I see those frequently (and the "Choose Life" car tags even more frequently) and I'd never before seen a bumpersticker about black Catholics.

I don't have time right now to go into why that made me so happy to see that I'm telling you about it several days later, but it did. For now, suffice it to say I have occasionally looked around at the pews in mass and, seeing only a few black faces, found myself wondering, "Where are all the black people?" Say I'm racist for even noticing the color of my fellow parishioners, fine, whatever, I'm a racist who wants more black people to have the fullness of truth available in the Caholic Church. Say instead I ought to keep myself more focused on what's going on in mass instead of looking around at my fellow parishioners, and I'll agree with you on that.

Happy Pentecost

Happy Pentecost to any and all Christians reading this. To any Jewish people reading this, I hope you had a happy Shavuot. And to anyone reading this who doesn't know what Pentecost is, you can try here and here for some more information, but the short answer is that it commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit as described in the second chapter of the biblical book of Acts.

And since the word Pentecost makes many of us think of Pentecostalism, here's as good a place as any to mention one of the many things becoming Catholic has done for me: it got rid of my culturally-absorbed prejudice against Pentecostals. I grew up among fairly mainstream Baptists and Methodists in the American South and there was a bit of a prejudice against Pentecostals (though of course, it being the South, everyone was too polite to be rude about it to anyone's face). Pentecostals and Holiness people were often called by the derogatory term "holy rollers" and were considered to have unseemly and overemotional, even tacky, religious services. People shook their heads at what they'd heard those Pentecostals got up to, with their fervent preaching and shouting and falling out on the floor and talking in tongues and--especially hard for Baptists to take--dancing. Some mainstream women might also shake their heads at the grooming restrictions many Holiness women adhered to, with their lack of makeup and their long hair.

I absorbed some of this prejudice myself, although I'm not sure if I ever realized it before I had to read The Grapes of Wrath for a class and found the Pentecostal Joads irritating to read about.

The ugly truth is that class snobbery was what was behind a lot of the head shaking, not doctrinal problems. Kathleen Norris has written about this a bit in her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. Pentecostals in the past often came from the poorer, less educated parts of society, and I think that still holds true, although I've heard that in the last twenty to thirty years the average wealth and education level has gone up. I think for some people a bit of that lower class tinge remains in their perception of Pentecostals.

For me, becoming Catholic got rid of my mild prejudice. For one thing I came into the Church on the Pentecost Vigil. That kind of makes you think about the Holy Spirit, even if you don't think that deeply. I believe in the Holy Spirit; I publicly affirm it along with my fellow Catholics every time I go to mass and privately every time I pray the rosary or the Divine Mercy chaplet. I believe in the Pentecost account in Acts. I believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the fruits of the Holy Spirit, even if my understanding is not good. So why should I or anyone who believes these things be bothered by people seeking the Holy Spirit?

For another, I was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church teaches that everyone who is baptized thusly is part of the Body of Christ, even if they are not in full communion with Rome, and thus all other Christians are my brothers and sisters in Christ. (Yes, I know some Pentecostals baptize in the name of Jesus only, but I figure they are at least trying, so I tend to think of them as siblings in Christ too.)

For another, I was made aware of Charismatic Catholics--Catholics who pay a lot of attention to the Holy Spirit and enjoy more emotionalized or "spirit-filled" devotions outside of mass; some of them even "pray in a spirit language" (i.e. "speak in tongues".) This is not attractive to me, but the Church is both worldwide and ancient, creating room for a multiplicity of personal devotional practices, no one of which will appeal to everyone--and that is fantastic.

For another, even before I came into the Church I was very attracted to the line in Galatians about there being neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female in Christ Jesus. That seems to me a clear indication that we are to leave our worldy considerations, such as class consciousness or wondering if other people's cultural-acquired preferences are "tacky" or not, outside the Church door. I also did a fair amount of thinking around the idea that God's standards are not our standards. Remember that Flannery O'Conner story in which the smugly self-content Southern farm lady has a vision of all kinds of poor people and freaks going up to heaven before her, shouting and clapping and dancing on their way? It's like that. With God, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. You only have to hear "blessed are the meek" to know you are not in worldy territory; this is not how we think, but how God thinks.

For another, as a Catholic I'm now part of a religion that a lot of people look down on and consider full of tacky things. Pilgrims going in bare feet or on their knees up the steps to a shrine--how gauche. Crucifixes with blood dripping from them--a little too real to be in good taste. The Sacred Heart--what's that about? The Way of the Cross? Probably something "ethnic" people do.

And for yet another thing, Catholics receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit at confirmation. No doubt that helped.

So why am I going on at such length about my having shed what was only ever a mild prejudice? Well, for starters I'm glad it's gone; I'm glad I'm no longer bigoted against Christians in general, no longer inclined to demean myself by sneering at "fundies", and no longer prejudiced against "holy rollers". For another, in a time when any stick will do to beat the Church, I think it's good to tell some of the good we find there, even something as minor as this. American society has for forty-plus years held up prejudice as the greatest of secular sins. Well, the Catholic Church helped rid me of one subset of prejudice. That is a good thing, right? She deserves props for it, right?

Not Having to Dress Up for Church

OR

Why I'm Ambivalent When I Hear Other Catholics Say We Should Dress Up for Church

Saturday I was driving home from a casual trip out and thinking about stopping at a store to browse, when a glance at the clock suggested that, if I skipped the store, I had time to get to vigil mass in time to go to confession beforehand. So I did. As it turned out I didn't go to confession because the line was too long (mass was late starting without my adding to the line), but it was good anyway: I got to be at mass, to hear the scripture readings and make a spiritual communion, and (presumably because it was May Day) to hear some Marian music I don't get to hear often. This included a lovely Ave Maria sung by a man in the choir loft and Salve Regina as the recessional; I'm no singer, but I enthusiastically joined in on the recessional.

This experience was the highlight of an already good day, and it couldn't have happened if I had had to "dress up" for church, rather than being able to go as I was. Which was in blue jeans and a pretty, new-to-me knit top and tennis shoes.

Catholics online often bemoan the way contemporary Catholics dress for church, and I agree with them that we--or at least we here in America--can and should do better. But at the same time I am really glad I have the freedom not to worry too much about how I'm dressed when I go to church. I'm glad that I had the freedom to just go Saturday, knowing that noone would turn me away or talk about me viciously behind my back.

When I was growing up (Baptist), we had to dress a certain way for church services; this seemed to be the case in all the churches around where I lived (Bible Belt). Everyone had to dress up to the best of his ability; women couldn't wear pants, however nice, to Sunday services; and blue jeans were verboten, especially for women. Shorts were only for the small children at Vacation Bible School, not older girls. The first instances of women showing up in pants suits for Wednesday night prayer meeting or, worse, a teenage girl in blue jeans for Sunday night service were occasions for talk.

My mother paid a lot of attention to dress for church. I can't say if she was representative of others or not (I hope she was not), but she placed what I consider an excessive amount of importance on dressing for church. It was more a matter of vanity and pride for her than a matter of being decently clad for worship. I'm sure that, had anyone brought such a thing up, she would have given verbal agreement that just being clean, respectable, and there was more important than being expensively dressed, but that's what it would have been--verbal agreement. In actual fact she fretted about not having clothes and shoes nice enough to make a good showing among the other women and about her daughters not being as expensively dressed as the children of some other families. She fretted about it to the point she considered not having nice enough clothes to be an excuse to stay home. What does that say to a child?

My sister absorbed just enough of this attitude that, when I once suggested she visit one of the local Catholic churches, her "considering-it" question was, "How do they dress?" I understand the desire to be approriately dressed, but somehow that didn't seem like the most pertinent question to me.

For me, church could never be about clothes. One of the things I like about mass is that it is centered around Jesus; it is not about the minister or the quality of the preaching or the socio-economic status of the worshippers or my appearance, but about Jesus. If it were about me and my appearance, it wouldn't be worth going.

Now, because it is about Jesus, it is worth dressing up, even if we don't always do it. I don't wear immodest clothes to church, nor do I wear anything dirty and torn or anything that might reasonably be distracting or offensive to others. I would insist on similar minimal standards (probably higher) if I had children I was responsible for, and I would complain if my husband said he was going to wear, say, his Viking World Tour tee-shirt. If I'm too casual too often--and I am and I admit it's largely laziness--I at least try not to be a total slob in my dress. I also make sure I am clean, hair combed, etc., because I do know I am going to meet Jesus in the Eucharist. (Also, as a matter of charity, I don't want to become a form of involuntary penance for my pew-mates, due to bad breath, body odor, or head-swimmingly thick cologne.)

An interesting thing, though, is that we meet Jesus in the Eucharist in every mass, not just Sunday mass, and people saying we should dress up are usually talking about Sunday mass. I think everyone expects people at daily mass to wear their daily clothes, whether it's formal business wear, business casual, uniforms, or the stay-at-home mom or retiree look. (Or maybe they just expect daily communicants to know how to comport themselves.) Personally, I like that expectation--that idea that worship can take place every day and is not just something that happens when you are dressed a certain way. Mass happens, whether it's Sunday or not, whether you are dressed in your best or not, whether you feel like it or not. I smell a bumpersticker: Mass Happens. ... Eh, maybe not. My "Haiku Happens" idea was a lot better.

Oh, and in the unlikely event any non-Catholics want my advice on clothes before visiting a Catholic church, here's what I told my sister when she asked: "It would be more respectful not to wear anything skin-tight or low-cut but other than that, wear whatever you want. I can pretty much guarantee that no matter what you wear to a Catholic church, there will be someone there dressed better than you and someone dressed worse than you."

Happy Easter

Christ is risen!

I hope everyone reading this has a happy Easter season.

A Little Round-up

Sometimes I wish I had a digital camera set up for easy posting of pictures to the blog. It's been good weather recently and everything is in bloom, but it's not too hot to walk in the daytime yet, so we've had some nice walks recently where we could actually see things other than streetlight-illuminated pavement. There are still lots of azaleas, both in full flower and in bud (they seemed to bloom late this year due to the cold winter), but there are also spiderwort here and there, though it is earlier than I usually see them. There are all sorts of weedy things: the little four-leaved flowers some other children and I used to call "wishing violets", but which are probably a form of bluet; henbit; wood sorrel (pink); and all sorts of other things, mostly yellow flowers, some white, a lesser amount of pink and lavendar. Best of all are the wild violets. I've seen several little patches of them on our recent walks. In addition to their beauty, they are unexpected and so easily overlooked that they seem more of a treat than the equally beautiful spiderwort I see every year in south Mississippi.

Last Sunday (Palm Sunday) Uncle Pookie and I took sandwiches to a little park and, as I said, everything is in bloom. The weather was wonderful and it was great seeing everything in bloom. We also saw our first snake of the year. It was a big one, and an ugly bastard, rough-looking and mottled brown; I think I saw a triangular head as I moved quickly backwards, but it was ugly regardless. We were surprised to see it, because it didn't seem that warm yet. We'd stopped on a little place where the road went over a large drainage ditch (there's often fish in there and we like to look at them) and the snake was sunning itself on a kind of metal pipe or support that stretched across the ditch. As we started walking away the snake flopped itself into the presumably cold water and we couldn't see it anymore. Nearby was a larger patch of wild violets than I'd yet seen and for just a moment it seemed a shame that they grow closer to the snake's home than to mine. Also that that snake, so ugly compared to, say, a little green garter snake, could crawl all over the beautiful violets. This is fanciful thinking of course, to call one bit of nature touching another unfair, because it is ugly and the other is beautiful.





Holy Thursday I actually made it to mass. I'm ashamed to say I've never been to Holy Thursday mass before; although it's not a holy day of obligation, it is still a holy day and I have often meant to go and somehow never made it. In the past I've sometimes had to resist the urge to refer to it as "foot-washin' Thursday". When I was growing up I would, rarely, hear my elders refer to "foot-washing Baptists"--fellow Baptists, perceived as perhaps a bit "backwoods" or old-fashioned, who practiced foot-washing in church. (For the record, I also heard my mother say to another relative that we should not put it down because her father, who was a respected preacher, believed in it as a potentially good thing, albeit something they did not practice.) In the Roman Catholic rite, the Holy Thursday readings all relate to the Last Supper and early in the priest emulates Jesus by washing the feet of a token number of male parishioners. My understanding of this is that it is symbolic not just of emulating Jesus in a rote way but of the Christian understanding of leadership--the one who would lead must serve; the one who would lead all must serve all. The ritual is actually rather beautiful at its heart.

Leaders humbling themselves before the people they have the privilege to serve? Reminding themselves they are servants? Some United States Congressmen might benefit from that.



Uncle Pookie and I went to see How to Train Your Dragon with a friend earlier this week. I wasn't thrilled about going because, although the trailer looked okay and there were some seriously cool promotional children's playsets for the movie in Wal-mart, I have a long-standing problem with de-monsterfying monsters, especially dragons. I like my dragons Western and dangerous and in need of slayers, not Eastern and personifying neutral forces in nature, let alone friendly and misunderstood. The "Which is cooler, Western dragons or Eastern dragons" thing is merely a matter of inidividual taste, but the rest is not. We do our children and our culture a disservice when we try to get rid of every monster out there and paint them as merely misunderstood. The world is dangerous and populated by monsters who can do more damage than dragons, who after all are easy to see coming. Children, like adults, need stories that say, yes, there are monsters, but monsters can be slain and sometimes that slayer can be a very ordinary person who reached within and summoned up the necessary bravery and faith and cunning and stamina to do what needed doing.

However How to Train Your Dragon won me over. The whole "the monsters aren't really monsters, just misunderstood" thing is dangerous territory and now old and tired territory, yes, but in the case of this particular movie's story, think of it as a pet-taming story and you're there. It's actually a pretty good animal-taming story. And if the "big, burly father misunderstanding his son" bit is also rather tired, at least Dad wasn't malicious or hopeless and there was a a lot of good animation and humor along the way. I liked the designs of the houses and such, the "nature" visuals were good too, some of the Vikings (especially the one Craig Ferguson voiced) were funny, and I like that the hero was a builder/engineer sort and that we saw him not get his design right the first time, but have to test and modify it. The Night Fury dragon was sometimes like an overgrown domestic cat--most delightfully when he's hiding and watching, and he can't help but give that slight butt wiggle cats sometimes can't contain when they're contemplating the joy of pouncing. The movie also has a great line near the beginning, which I expect to see in sig lines before long: "We're Vikings. We have stubborness issues." Uncle Pookie and I, who both probably have some Viking ancestry, really liked that line.

Should you shell out extra to see it in 3D? I'm not sure. I've been impressed with the quality of the new 3D in the movies I've seen it in previously, but I really only noticed the 3D effect once or twice in this movie (once was when ash was falling at the end). I'm not sure if that's because it wasn't that amazing this time or if this movie had enough story to keep the viewers focused on the story or overall experience rather than singling out special effects. By contrast, the first 3D movie I saw (the one with the giant girl) I oohed and ahhed over the 3D for a while then fell asleep right there in the theater.

A note for people who suffer from motion sickness: This is a safe movie, despite all the flying. I didn't get queasy at all. I only glanced away preventively once, for the briefest of moments, and it turned out not to be necessary.

An Anecdote for the Beginning of Holy Week

One day, a little over a year before I came into the Church, two women at my workplace were denouncing the manager of my department--a devout Pentecostal and family man--because, when all the managers had been asked to come in on Easter Sunday to catch up on some things, he'd said "no, he needed to be with his family on Easter." The matter had little or nothing to do with them, but one of them, especially, was quite exercised about it. She didn't accept his reason for not working that day and declared "Easter isn't even an important holiday, not like Christmas!"

"Actually, for Christians it's the most important holiday of the year," was on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it. (As a nice Southern girl or possibly as what Amy Welborn calls a "not nice girl", I do that a lot.) It's probably just as well I bit my tongue, because I later learned she went to church, suggesting she probably was some stripe of Christian and so my telling her what Christians do might have seemed presumptuous.

But it's an interesting attitude.

We moderns, at least here in America, seem to have let advertisers tell us which holiday is the more important, and oddly enough they picked the one that let them sell us more stuff.

I know which of the two I looked forward to as a child. I mean, hunting Easter eggs and eating a basketful of candy was nice and all, but we usually had to go to church (bor-ing!) and I was a little vague on the whole why of the thing anyway. Whereas Christmas, on the other hand, had a months long buildup, starting with the arrival of the Sears toy catalogue in early autumn and, once Thanksgiving came, special programs on TV and a visit to Santa and tree selecting and decorating, to fill the time pleasantly until that wonderful night came with all of its ritual of cookies and milk and being sent to bed early and then Christmas morning--finally--with toys from Santa and an extra-special dinner to look forward to. We usually didn't have to go to church (it not falling on Sunday most years), but I knew the Christmas story and it was relatively easy to grasp. Some years my mother would read it aloud on Christmas (starting with "And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus..."), and it was a great story that fit in easily enough with all the warm and cosy holiday programming; the Peanuts special even quoted from it.

There weren't any beloved Easter programs that quoted from the Resurrection story, let alone the Passion. We heard the story in Sunday school of course, but it was full of stuff that was incomprehensible to little kids who didn't have as much background on the subject as the adults around us may have assumed we did. (For example, who were all these people and why were they in Jerusalem, why palms on the ground, why a crown of thorns, who was Pilate, who were the Romans, etc.) Maybe some of the adults didn't think the Passion was a terribly nice story, at least not for little kids, because I don't remember hearing much about it. (Another possibility is I wasn't paying sufficient attention.) There was a picture of the Agony in the Garden I used to see all over the place, but the story we got sometimes seemed to skip from Jesus going into Jerusalem on a donkey (another popular illustration) to the stone being found already rolled back. I didn't know why the schools let us off on Good Friday. I didn't know why Good Friday was called good. My guess is I wasn't alone in that.

It's a shame. Because while the story of the Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus isn't going to sell as many dollars worth of merchandise as the story of his birth does, it is a very important story. Contrary to my coworker's opinion, Easter is a very important holiday. Even more important than Christmas. The Incarnation of the un-created Creator, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, into human form, subject to all the ills that flesh is heir to is a big story, yes, and one well worth celebrating with all the presents and feasting and strings of lights that people care to have. But that this Word made flesh then voluntarily chose to undergo terrible suffering on our behalf when he could have avoided it--that is also important to remember, is it not? And that he then rose from the dead and walked and talked with his apostles and was seen by over five hundred people--kind of a big story, too, right? And that all of this has profound implications for those who take him to heart and are willing to accept what he offers? Yeah, that's big. If none of it had happened, we might not even remember the Incarnation at Christmas.

Just something to think about this week.

Here's An Idea for Someone Else

When I saw the movie Ushpizin (mentioned a couple of posts ago), I got to experience one of those minor pleasures of life that people seldom talk about: unexpectedly hearing words you know in a stream of what are, to you, meaningless sounds. In the movie when the wife walked to the sink and started the hand-washing blessing, it took a moment for the penny to drop and me to realize, "Hey I heard that, I didn't understand it by reading subtitles". I knew the whole beginning of the blessing (Baruch atah adonai melech haolam...), because they are the beginning of other blessings and I Iearned them a long time ago. In the middle of this flow of sounds I couldn't understand was a sentence--or partial sentence--I did understand. Usually when I have this experience it's only a word: some busboys saying manana, for example, or one of the handful of Japanese words I know (oba-chan, konichiwa--words like that) coming out of an anime character's mouth. Suddenly hearing an English word in a stream of foreign language is also pretty good, but not quite as good.

Anyway, this is only preparatory to recommending a website that has some Hebrew blessings with the words in both Hebrew characters and roman letters and audio of each word being said or sung so that you can learn correct pronunciation: Learn Hebrew Prayers.com. Presumably the site will eventually be expanded to include more prayers.

And recommending that website is only preparatory to asking why some Catholic somewhere doesn't do this for Latin prayers? I've read advice to pronounce Church Latin like Italian (rather than Classical Latin), and I once somewhere saw a few Latin prayers spelled out phonetically for English speakers, but that's it. Any media-savvy speakers of Church Latin want to perform this service for us slobs who never studied Latin and are too lazy to start but would like to know a few prayers?

If I'm complaining about a lack that has already been filled, please tell me.

Practicing Advent

Today is the third Sunday of Advent. Perhaps now, only two weeks after I installed it, is the time to thank the Curt Jester for the very nice Advent wreath graphic and counter he provided free to anyone. It's nicer to open someone's blog and see "12 praying days till Christmas" than to look at a newspaper and see "12 shopping days till Christmas".

When I was a child, I didn't know anything about Advent. The only time I ever heard of it was to see, once or twice, Advent calendars in this little mail order catalogue we got a few times. There was a little "letter from our customers" type testimonial from someone thanking them for carrying them, saying she'd fondly remembered Advent calendars from her youth but had been unable to find them for years. So I knew that this "new", Christmas-related thing I'd never heard of before had been around for a while, but I still didn't know what it was. (In recent years, I've come across a few articles saying that some evangelical Christians are starting to incorporate the liturgical calendar into their religious life, so between that and the Internet, maybe little children today won't be as ignorant as I was.)

Now, as an adult and a convert to Catholicism, I know what Advent is and participate in it to some extent (translation: in my own lazy, half-arsed way.) I had some notion back in the summer about making a Jesse tree or two (one to give away), but I never got around to it. I really like the idea of Jesse trees for helping to teach children about salvation history, and there are some good resources online for making them. I like the Domestic Church's pages here and here, but you can easily find more elsewhere: try here, here, and here for starters. But like festive Christmas decorations, it just seems kind of sad and pointless to do this only for myself.

Advent is generally considered the start of the liturgical year, when we sort of mentally put ourselves back into the time when the Messiah was still expected and not yet come. So it seems to me (maybe not to anyone else) that it might be a good time to make spiritual new year's resolutions. But I'm pretty used to the Christmas Day to New Year's Day thinking-about-resolutions thing, so I never got around to that either.

A couple of other ideas fell through as well, so Advent celebration for me so far has pretty much come down to a little extra reading and using a little purple on my blog. :-/ I've many times heard of Catholics selecting some spiritual books for "Lenten reading", so why not Advent reading? The Advent reading I decided on was Isaiah and Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. The book of Isaiah is an obvious scriptural choice, and The Case for Christ, which I first heard of from Jen at Conversion Diary, is a pretty good choice too; it'd make a fine Christmas gift.

Maybe the rest of Advent will hold a little more prayer and meditation on the Messiah, and a sacrifice or two. Or maybe I'll just dig out a purple scarf to wear to church.

Remembering 9/11 and "Psychological Comfort"

　
Today is the day we all remember (I hope) the Islamofascist terrorist attacks on the United States of America on 9/11/01. I will never willingly forget, although remembering is very unpleasant.

I remember what I was doing that morning when I found out, and all the rest of the day to boot. I remember what I did the night before: I went to my first RCIA meeting; when we walked into the next Monday's meeting, it felt as if the whole world had changed.

This year I once again prayed for the souls of the victims of those murderous attacks. I do not recall if I ever prayed for the souls of their murderers--I guess I figured they chose hell when they deliberately targeted innocent civilians for murder and were willing to die with that sin on their heads--but I did and have prayed for the souls of living terrorists and would-be terrorists. I do this because the religion I was moving toward at the time of the 9/11 attacks and am now part of requires it.
　
Today John C. Wright (whose blog I peek at occasionally, after having found it a few months ago), commenting on someone who sneeringly dismissed Christian faith as "psychologically comforting", says that

"...I would hesitate to call the conversion experience psychologically
comforting. Indeed, very much the opposite is the case: unlike my atheist self
of yore, I am now beholden to a higher authority, who pins me to a standard of
thought and deed very much against my nature and inclination."

Just so. I find nothing comforting or comfortable about praying for my enemies--whether terrorists who murder my countrymen or an arrogant coworker or someone who's threatened my family. I find nothing comfortable in reading a newspaper article about some disgusting child molester and being forced to consider that that person (someone even the very murders, thieves, and rapists in prison revile!) is a fellow child of God, whom Jesus died to save no less than he died to save me, and that I should pray for the person's repentance and reform. It is against my nature and my inclination. I don't like it and I don't want to do it.

Mr. Wright talks about trying to "obey the call to be charitable, loving, longsuffering, meek". I don't want to do any of that, except to be loving to my husband, and I probably fail at that as much as I do all the other stuff that I don't even want to try in the first place. But it's required, so I make my sporadic, grudging attempts at Christian virtue. And I don't find it comfortable to have to go into a confessional and name my failures aloud to another human being (much easier somehow to say in the privacy of my mind "God, I'm sorry I messed up" and leave it at that!), but it's required of me, so I do it, albeit less frequently than I should.

And I don't do these things just because I voluntarily joined this religion and my personal integrity demands that I follow its rules. I do it because I will have to answer to a higher authority than myself.

The part of the Narnia books that I keep coming back to is one that I think the books themselves repeated: Aslan is not a tame lion. I think that the real One whom Aslan is a fictionalized version of is also not a tame One. I think that He is not only "gentle Jesus, meek and mild", but the One who chased the moneylenders out of the temple with a whip, who came to bring not peace but a sword, who came to set a son against his father and a daughter against her mother. Demons feared him, and He defeated Satan with the shedding of his holy blood. One day I will have to stand before him. If you have less cause to tremble in that circumstance, then I am glad for you now, but I doubt I'll have room to give it a thought then. I have reason to tremble. Even leaving aside the thought of His fearsome justice, I don't know how I could ever raise my eyes to the presence of so much goodness.

Fortunately, my religion also teaches that He is merciful to those who seek his mercy. I hope that my nation turns from immorality and seeks his mercy. I hope that all of the victims of terrorist attacks around the world have found his mercy. I also hope--though it comes far less naturally for me--that would-be terrorists will seek his mercy before they die, expecting a reward for their murders. There is a prayer for enemies in a little Catholic prayerbook I have that desires of God that we may be saved souls together in heaven with our enemies; considering some of the jerks I've known in my own unadventurous life, let alone terrorists, that is a line hard not to choke over, but such is my faith.

Reflections on the Psalms

The Psalms have been called the prayer book of the Church and a nice little introduction to them is Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis, which I read a month or so ago. Lewis does a good job of talking to the reader about things in the Psalms that might seem odd to modern Gentiles--cursings and anger (in a holy work?!) or the idea of God's law being sweet.

The most notable chapter, to my mind, was the chapter on praising. Lewis said that when he was on the cusp of Christianity the repeated exhortations of some Christians to praise God was one of the more hard to understand things for him. Why praise? Why would an omnipotent being care if he were praised or not? After a couple of brief bits on this, he shares the realization that came to him: that the everyday world is full of praise and that, in a sense, our enjoyment is not complete until we praise. When we see a movie we love, what do we do as soon as it's over? We turn to the people we saw it with and say, "That was great! Didn't you love that part where X happened?" If we talk to a friend or coworker who hasn't seen it, we say, "It was great, you have to go see it." If we have a good meal, it almost isn't complete until we express our enjoyment verbally. Most of us love the chance to praise a family member, even if it's only to outsiders and not to the person himself. And people who are healthy in mind and spirit are even more apt to praise than others; they will not stint their praise of something good in parts because it was not perfect in all.

But Lewis says all of this better than I do. Check it out. I found this book at my public library, but it's available inexpensively at Amazon in a paperback with a pretty cover, as well as in an audiobook download. I would recommend this book as a gift for nearly anyone. Being composed of short, more or less stand-alone type chapters, I should think it would suit people who don't read much, and it might be a good corrective to anyone who, never having read much of it, assume the Bible is full of Precious Moments moments.

My Daily Catholic Bible

It may seem odd, but I wanted to put in a plug for something I don't use myself.

In late 2007, I bought a copy of My Daily Catholic Bible: 20-minute Daily Readings. (Available from Amazon.) This is a fairly nice-looking paperback Bible--easy-to-read print in two columns per page, well-laid out, on decent paper. Each day (except Leap Day) has a short quote from a saint or other holy person, a reading from the Old Testament, then a reading from the New Testament. The Old Testament readings are in order, right through, but the New Testament books have been rearranged, presumably to spread the Gospels out through the year. (I say presumably, because the editor's introduction does not explain his method of dividing the texts up, except to say that it is similar to the method used in Carmen Rojas' How to Read the Bible Every Day.) There is no commentary or notes on the Scripture. The translation used is the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, so all of the OT books are there. All in all, it is a good choice for anyone wanting a daily Bible.

I bought mine because I wanted to foster a daily Scripture-reading habit and thought that having each day's portion already laid out for me would be easier than the various "read-the-Bible-in-a-year" plans I've seen online. (Easier than anything other than the uber-simple, "read four chapters a day" advice, that is.) And it is easy and convenient, if you want to do it this way. What I discovered, though, is that I don't like reading the Bible in this way. I like reading all of a Bible book I'm interested in--either straight through or in big chunks--and, if I'm really interested, going back and re-reading that book soon after. I don't like pre-planned menus, where I can only have so much OT and so much NT today and so much tomorrow. With the daily Bible, I found myself reading ahead, on either the OT or NT reading, but not usually both, so I had trouble remembering where I was. I felt lazy when I eventually gave up on it last summer, but now I've admitted the method just doesn't work for me, I don't mind my failure to last the whole year.

I'm happily back to my undisciplined, "read as my mood and interest take me" method. What I'm not happy about is the days with no Scripture reading I intersperse with the Scripture reading days. I'm having some good effect with, on some of those days, either reading a few psalms in a prayerful sort of way or saying prayers (mostly psalms and canticles) from the Divine Office at the Universalis site. Using the Psalms in this way, besides being a lovely way to pray, ensures some Scripture each day, but each psalm feels complete in itself, so I'm not caught up in the "must read more, more" mood.

For people who prefer the daily dose to the fits and starts--or feast and famine--method of Bible reading and for people who are so short on time they have trouble fitting scripture in any other way, I recommend My Daily Catholic Bible. The daily readings really can be done in twenty minutes or less. And one upside of having both a NT and an OT reading each day is that seriously time-constrained people could read the NT portion in the morning and the OT in the evening, or vice versa.

Apropos of Nothing

Here's a quote from that loveable old atheist, Florence King:

Now, a word to Catholics who would follow the dictates of their consciences instead of the dictates of the Vatican.

Congratulations, you're Protestant.

She remarks elsewhere that she's been irritable ever since Vatican II.

It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain

I recently found myself becoming attracted to the Divine Mercy prayer. I never used to be. In fact, I once described this chaplet to my husband as "not a beautiful prayer, like the rosary". Two to three months ago I suddenly began to be drawn to it; looking back, I realize I'd found myself noticing the image back even before Christmas, but my recent attraction to the prayer itself seemed out of the blue.

The chaplet of Divine Mercy is usually spoken, of course, but there is a lovely sung version that has been featured on EWTN and which you can hear multiple places. It is available on YouTube here: The Chaplet of Divine Mercy in Song, Part 1 of 3, Part 2, and Part 3. It is available as an audio file here. (I am not necessarily endorsing that site, BTW; this prayer is the only thing I have seen there and I know nothing about the site otherwise.) The CD is available from Amazon, and I heartily recommend it for praying in your car; not only is it lovely to hear, but as a prayer, it is easier to focus on while driving than the rosary is. If you'd like to pray along with others in real-time, EWTN television and radio airs the Divine Mercy prayer daily at 3PM Central Time, though it may not always be this same version.

I have never really gotten into praying this at the hour it is often prayed, 3PM, but I have sometimes wondered if would be good for more people to pray a mini mercy prayer then. Most people are busy with (secular) jobs or school at three in the afternoon. But if, when someone notices it's three o-clock (or a few minutes after), that person were to think of Jesus on the cross and offer a quick internal prayer for mercy, he could be in union with everyone else in his time zone praying for mercy. Just a fast "Lord have mercy", "God have mercy on us", "For the sake of Your Son's suffering, have mercy on us", or something similar. Anyway, it's just a thought. I figure the more people praying for mercy, the better.

Of course, my own recent attraction to this prayer was not really some happenstance out of the blue. Long story short, I needed to go to Confession and was, I'm ashamed to say, putting it off. My attraction to this devotion was in part a manifestation of my own largely subconscious need for mercy. I got it. I felt it. God's mercy is great.

Please pray for divine mercy for yourself, for your loved ones, for America, for the world. If not this particular prayer for mercy, then one you make up yourself. Or perhaps the Jesus Prayer, from Orthodox practice. (Salinger readers, you know it already! If not, you can learn about it from this book; I'm not qualified to comment on the translation, but it seemed a good book to me when I read it last November or December.) I did not realize at the time of my sudden inexplicable attraction that when I said "have mercy on us and on the whole world" I was praying for myself, except in a general way--in fact, the most urgent of my prayers were for someone else entirely--but I was blessed anyway. We all need mercy. And with God, if not always with our fellow humans, it is there for our asking.

Something Lovely for a Grey Day

I am a truly unmusical person. This is why I tend to prefer comical songs: I can appreciate interesting words (lyrics) better than I can the music itself. But everyone can be moved by some music at some time. I can remember being invigorated by some rousing bits of classical music when I was an adolescent and touched by an instrumental piece called "Vincent" I heard on the radio as a teen, the pleasant near-nostalgia I had as an adult non-believer hearing some of the hymns I'd heard sung in church as a child, the pleasure it always is to get to sing Christmas carols in a group. But nothing is as moving to this non-musical person as hearing someone who's good at it sing Ave Maria--no, not even hearing Amazing Grace, the one hymn that I liked even as an adult non-believer and that gives me a little shiver all down my body even when I sing it to myself in a voice that can't be made good at singing even inside my head. Amazing Grace, lovely though it is, is about the person or people singing--their downtroddeness and transformation through grace. The Ave Maria reaches above and beyond the person singing; it is lofty and inspiring, like a cathedral.

I can't sing it myself, but I love to hear other people sing it. I've often listened to Aaron Neville sing it in my car, through the gift of modern technology; buy a copy of his CD Believe and you can too. Here's a few links so you can listen right now:

The lyrics in Latin, English, German, and Slavic plus a few music clips.

Bobby McFerrin and audience doing an interesting version.

A site that has lyrics and music clips of a number of Catholic hymns (check out the Salve Regina; that is the only song other than the annual Christmas carols that I've enjoyed singing in church since I became Catholic).

And, saving the best for last, Luciano Pavarotti singing Ave Maria.

A Snatch of Conversation

A few weeks ago, Uncle Pookie and I were driving home one night. I was saying something about our general spiritual lameness, when suddenly I was struck by it more forcefully and exclaimed, "It's a good thing we don't have to live under oppression!"

"What do you mean?"

"You know, religious oppression, having to receive the sacraments in secret, things like that. We'd never make it."

"Oh, I don't know, we might rise to the occasion."

I thought about that for a few moments. "Well, yeah, I guess times like that can sometimes bring out the best in people."

The husband: "No, I meant our stubbornness might kick in."

And the next few fits and starts of sentences I tried to utter, I couldn't get out for my laughter. He knows us.


Oh, how he knows us! I am rather pliant until something hits up against my sense of personal integrity and then I become rooted and unyielding--more so than most people would consider good for me; and it can be triggered by things other people consider insignificant. As for Uncle Pookie, I've been known to call him The Immovable Object; we'll leave it at that. God forbid we should ever be faced with the prospect of martyrdom, either regular or "white" (bloodless), but if we are and we pass that test, stubbornness will surely play a big part in it.

Which I guess would just go to show that 1.) flaws often have a flip side that can be a strength, and 2.) God can even use our flaws.



So why did I choose to post this today, during the festive Christmas season? December 26th is the feast day of St. Stephen,the first Christian martyr. (See the book of Acts.) He wasn't the last. Whatever the number currently stands at, it's safe to say it will get bigger. The twentieth century saw a surprisingly large amount of persecution of Christians in general and Catholics in particular. This happened below the radar of most Americans (as does today's persecution of Christians in, for example, China), partly because we were insulated from it here. And we still are.

But we in the West live in societies where the Bible is rapidly being redefined as hate speech, where ignorance of Scriptures and Christian tradition are vast and spreading, where families are breaking down and all norms of morality and civilized behavior are suspect. Here in the US fairly large numbers of the population are indignant if religious believers involve themselves in the political process like citizens and the job of Supreme Court Justice now seems to be one with a "No Catholics Need Apply" in the job description. And the way the wind is blowing, a lot more jobs may be coming with that notice before long.

God forbid it should be so. I can not see the future any more than anyone else and I certainly hope that Christian persecution does not happen in the USA or in the rest of the Anglosphere or anywhere else it is not already going on. But in a society where a person can be jailed for quoting passages of the Bible that someone else does not like or be hounded out of his or her job for holding to traditional Christian teaching, it is time Christians have to begin to ask themselves what they will do if they are faced with martyrdom, red or white. And this goes extra for Catholic Christians, because if you'll notice, people who hate Christianity in general usually hate the Catholic Church extra hard.

Something to think about as 2008 ends.