Thursday Night Gumbo

Woodward: "Be Good for Goodness' Sake"

2009-11-27T17:46:00.014-06:00

It's a bit of conventional moral advice best known by most people as a lyric from "Santa Clause Is Coming to Town." Doing something "for goodness' sake" originated, the linguists tell us, as a euphemism, a circumspect alternative to doing something "for God's sake." The earliest example of the phrase I can find is in Shakespeare. It is spoken by Cardinal Wolsey in Act III, Scene 1 of Henry VIIII. The Cardinal (not one of the good guys of the play, or of history) is urging Queen Catherine of Aragon not to make trouble for the King in his pursuit of a dissolution of their marriage. Catherine remains unpersuaded, and the Cardinal lobs an oblique threat in her direction: "For goodness' sake, consider what you do." Elizabethan Englishmen were not shy about swearing what we moderns (or at least we modern Christians) would consider blasphemous oaths. So perhaps Wolsey's "for goodness' sake" -- which would have sounded in the ears of Shakespeare's audience much the way "gosh darn" would sound in our own -- was intended to make the Cardinal seem a bit prissy, or perhaps even hypocritical. Everybody in the audience would have known that Wolsey was thinking "for God's sake," no matter what he actually said.

Well, enough of linguistic history. The American Humanist Association has launched its 2009 "holiday ad campaign," which will involve the placement of public transit ads in four cities offering commuters the following bit of philosophical insight:

No God?

No Problem!
Be good for goodness' sake.

Humanism is the idea that you can be good without a belief in God.

Umm...okay. I am apparently a humanist, much to my own surprise. I freely acknowledge an acquaintance with at least six people whom I know to be good and whom I also know to be disbelievers in the existence of God.

So what?

As a Catholic, I too maintain that one can be good without believing in God. That's not the same thing as saying -- and I wonder how long it would take me to explain this distinction to a member of the American Humanist Association -- that one could be good if God did not exist.

Every sane person goes about his business every day as if he assumes that (1) there is an objective order of good and evil; (2) life has some meaning in a realm of absolute value ; and (3) the perceptions and conclusions of the human mind bear an ontological relationship to an objective reality outside itself.

As a Catholic (again), I believe that those three premises are grounded necessarily in a belief in the existence of the Christian God. If you want to have some fun with a humanist interested in following up on the conversation suggested by his "2009 holiday ad campaign," ask him to name something he thinks is good. Then ask him to explain why the thing he has mentioned is good. Then ask him to explain why that makes it good. Then ask him...oh, you get the idea. If you're persistent -- and polite -- maybe he'll begin to wonder whether ethics is a subject small enough to fit in a transit ad. Maybe he'll even begin to wonder whether doing something "for goodness' sake" isn't a lot like doing it for God's sake.

Woodward: Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T08:39:00.005-06:00

Some very random thoughts on the day:

Abraham Lincoln's November 1863 proclamation of a national "day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens" makes for interesting reading. It moves well beyond the customarily vague and treacly religiosity of other such presidential documents to make a substantive theological point. We owe God not only thanks for the material blessings he has showered on us as a nation, but also penitence for the sins we have committed as a nation. Collective guilt would understandably have been on Lincoln's mind in the middle of the Civil War; but every generation of Americans can profitably be exhorted to meditate on "our national perverseness and disobedience" and be mindful of those who suffer as a result. (I wonder if Lincoln's proclamation makes him one of those "America-hating liberals.")

Like other presidents before him, Barack Obama yesterday "pardoned" the official White House Thanksgiving turkey. Every year, this ceremony strikes me as perhaps the stupidest thing a president is required by his office to do. Does anyone believe that the Obamas don't (or that the Bushes or Clintons or Reagans before them didn't) eat turkey on Thanksgiving? Of course they do and did -- some anonymous turkey killed dispassionately and efficiently in some undesignated packing plant. But the fortunate bird that gets a name and a photo op on the South Lawn is magnanimously spared and goes to a petting zoo (or, this year, Disneyland -- perfect). Does this foolish annual charade, I wonder, have some ominous sociological significance? Is it a symptom of creeping vegetarianism? Or is it merely the age-old spectacle of politicians trying to look like "nicer" people than they really are? Just once I'd like to see the President of the United States stride briskly out of the White House with the official Thanksgiving turkey Robespierre clamped firmly under his arm, make a few brief remarks about the significance of Meleagris gallopavo in the settling of America and the history of Thanksgiving, thank the National Turkey Federation and the Poultry and Egg National Board...and then chop the turkey's head off.

As we dress our children up as pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians and sing "Come, Ye Thankful People, Come," it might be well to remember that Thanksgiving began not in the Plymouth Colony in 1621 but 80 years earlier than that. Francisco Coronado and his expedition camped in May 1541 on the rim of Palo Duro Canyon and celebrated a thanksgiving service in gratitude for abundant game and deliverance from severe weather. Which means that the first Thanksgiving on the North American continent was both (1) Catholic and (2) Texan. We win again.

Msgr. Ronald Knox: Feast of Christ the King

2009-11-22T14:04:00.004-06:00

"The substantial victories of the Church have lain, always, in the sphere of the human conscience. Christ has reigned, not in the councils of nations, but in men's hearts. If every country in the world professed the Catholic religion, set up religious emblems in its market places and voted special honors, special privileges, special revenues to the clergy -- that would not be the reign of Christ on earth. It would not be the reign of Christ on earth if the homage which men paid to religion was merely external, merely political; if they treated the emblems of Christianity merely as an ancestral tradition they were proud of, and a convenient rallying-point for civic sentiment, no more. Christ will reign in the world only where, only in so far as, he rules in human hearts."

Woodward: Veterans' Day

2009-11-11T11:15:00.005-06:00

Woodward: Dame Joan Sutherland

2009-11-08T17:28:00.010-06:00

I'm ashamed to have forgotten her birthday yesterday. The great lady is 83.

In 40 years of opera-going, I never experienced anything else like the excitement of a Sutherland performance. From a Lucia di Lammermoor in Philadelphia in 1972 to her final U. S. appearance in a staged opera -- a Dallas Merry Widow 20 years ago this coming Wednesday -- I went to hear Dame Joan every chance I got. In retrospect (which is, alas, all we have left now) she represents a standard of classical singing that is pretty much gone. (Every generation of opera fans says that, of course. And the sad truth, which is dawning on me now in late middle age, is that every generation of opera fans has probably been right.)

There is in music a kind of transcendent expression that prompts religious thoughts. At various times in my life I have genuinely believed that the Mozart clarinet concerto might be the most persuasive argument for the existence of God. I realize that evolutionary psychologists probably have a stock explanation handy for the ability of music to exalt the human spirit. Probably has something to do with drums and hunting -- I really don't want to know.

One thing I do know is that listening to Joan Sutherland sing has made me happy every single time I've done it. Here are a couple of reasons why.

For some reason, this wonderful performance of an old Victorian song can't be embedded.

Woodward: October 16, 1978

2009-10-16T18:25:00.006-05:00

Thirty-one years ago today:

O Blessed Trinity, we thank You for having graced the Church with Pope John Paul II and for allowing the tenderness of Your fatherly care, the glory of the Cross of Christ, and the splendor of the Spirit of love to shine through him. Trusting fully in Your infinite mercy and in the maternal intercession of Mary, he has given us a living image of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and has shown us that holiness is the necessary measure of ordinary Christian life and is the way of achieving eternal communion with You. Grant us, by his intercession, and according to Your will, the graces we implore, hoping that he will soon be numbered among Your saints.

Amen.

Woodward: St. Teresa of Avila

2009-10-14T22:38:00.006-05:00

The feast of this great saint is October 15.

I have read a great many Catholic mystics without managing to move even one inch towards mysticism. But if I ever do make any progress, I have a feeling that it will be under the tutelage of St. Teresa. There is something so down-to-earth, so (this sounds wrong) commonsensical in her mysticism that she really does make it sound like a path that anyone could follow. For example:

There's no need for us to be advising God about what He should give us, for He can rightly tell us that we don't know what we're asking for [Mt. 20:22]. The whole aim of any person who is beginning prayer -- and don't forget this, because it's very important -- should be that he work and prepare himself with determination and every possible effort to bring his will into conformity with God's will...It is the person who lives in more perfect conformity who will receive more from the Lord and be more advanced on this road. Don't think that in what concerns perfection there is some mystery or things unknown or still to be understood, for in perfect conformity to God's will lies all our good.

--The Interior Castle II:1

Perfect conformity to God's will. I knew there was a catch....

Hear our prayer, O God our Savior. The feast of the blessed virgin Teresa fills us with joy; may her holy teaching also inspire us, and the example of her virtuous life guide us.

Woodward: St. Edward the Confessor

2009-10-13T22:15:00.004-05:00

His life is practically a whole chapter in English history all by itself. He was instrumental in bringing about the Norman Conquest by promising the throne to two different successors at two different times. Upon his canonization in 1163, the translation of his incorrupt remains to their final resting place in Westminster Abbey was presided over by Archbishop Thomas Becket, with his good friend King Henry II in attendance. And the gold crown that he wore was, according to some reports, destroyed in the wake of the English Civil War by Oliver Cromwell, who was good at destroying things.

Edward was a model of Christian piety, if not a particularly forceful king. And he is the patron saint of the British royal family, which perhaps explains that tired expression on his face.

His feast day is today.

O God, you gave the blessed confessor king Edward a crown of everlasting glory. May we who honor him on earth be worthy to rule with him in heaven.

Woodward: Shakespeare and Religion

2009-10-07T23:10:00.009-05:00

My wife and I encounter at least ten reasons a day to be glad we home school our children. The most recent occasion of rejoicing for me was the text I'm using to teach Twelfth Night to our eleventh-grade daughter. It's a highly respected and widely used edition of the play, part of the Oxford School Shakespeare series, complete with copious and illuminating notes on the text, and appendices that offer suggestions for classwork, outside research projects, and -- here's where the problem presents itself -- "background" information on Shakespeare's England. I'm beginning to learn that one man's (excuse me -- one person's) "background" is another person's collection of ideological hobbyhorses.

The text's "background" information on the subject of "Religion" contains this bit of historical analysis:

Following Henry VIII's break away from the Church of Rome, all people in England were able to hear the church services in their own language. The Book of Common Prayer was used in every church, and an English translation of the Bible was read aloud in public. The Christian religion had never been so well taught before! [exclamation point in the original]

Where to begin? "The Book of Common Prayer was used in every church." True, because Roman Catholic churches had all been destroyed and outlawed. "An English translation of the Bible was read aloud in public." That "in public" is a nice rhetorical touch, suggesting that reading the Bible in public, or in English, or in public in English, had been impossible under the tyrannical "Church of Rome." In fact, English Catholics had an English New Testament 29 years before the King James Bible was published. As for the assertion that "the Christian religion had never been so well taught before," that is a matter of prudential judgment, as we Catholics say. And the prudential judgment of the Oxford School Shakespeare series on this point (in the prudential judgment of this Catholic) leaves something to be desired.

But then there is this:

Attendance at divine service was compulsory. By such means, the authorities were able to keep some check on the populace -- ensuring a minimum of orthodox instruction through the official "Homilies" which were regularly preached from the pulpits of all parish churches throughout the realm.

"A minimum of orthodox instruction" sounds about right.

There is no such thing as unbiased history. Home-schooled children, at least, know that, and they know what their teachers' biases are. Government-schooled children are allowed -- no, encouraged -- to believe that all biases have been conscientiously purged from the intellectual atmosphere in which they breathe. That is the most dangerous intellectual atmosphere of all.

Woodward: Seedtime and Harvest

2009-10-07T22:30:00.004-05:00

Maclin Horton's picture of a magnolia seed got me thinking about seeds in general, and red seeds in particular. We have a Texas mountain laurel by our front door that produces huge clumps of purple blooms in the spring (they smell like grapes) and, thereafter, leathery little seed pods each of which contains a single large red seed, about the size of a pinto bean. (In fact, one of the names of the Texas mountain laurel out in far west Texas is frijolillo -- the little bean tree.)

The seeds -- impossibly, almost cartoonishly red -- look like something you might trade a cow for and then pay a visit to a giant. And while Maclin considers it a wonder that he never ate a magnolia seed, I consider it a blessing that I never ate a Texas mountain laurel seed. They are reportedly hallucinogenic in small doses, deadly in larger doses, and the dosage is tricky.

Our Texas mountain laurel was about four feet tall when we planted it 12 years ago and is only about eight feet tall now. It is -- in the words of Neil Sperry, the dean of Texas horticulturists -- a "deliberate grower." Perhaps my grandchildren will be able to rest in its shade. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure I don't have time to grow any more from these seeds.

Woodward: The End of the Season

2009-10-03T17:51:00.005-05:00

Tomorrow marks the end of the regular baseball season (and the season, period) for the Texas Rangers. Time to go into hibernation until spring training. (Well, not quite. I guess I'll stay awake and watch the Phillies win the World Series.)

To be a baseball fan in Dallas is to cultivate, of necessity, a taste for the kind of goofy (yet somehow endearing) existential optimism exemplified by MLB.com's account of the Rangers' performance this season:

"The victory allowed the Rangers to clinch second place in the American League West for the second straight year after eight straight seasons of having finished no higher than third."

Ah, yes, the coveted AL West Second Place Trophy. Again. One word of advice to all you struggling major-league clubs out there: Before accepting Lucifer's offer to make you the "Team of Destiny," find out exactly what destiny he has in mind.

I don't mean to sound bitter. The Rangers gave me some genuinely thrilling moments this year, and some reasons (I think, I hope, I pray) to look forward to next year (when we'll be defending our second-place title with everything we've got). But I worry about how long a place like Dallas-Ft. Worth can keep on going without a pennant and still preserve any semblance of being a baseball town. It's not like we have a century-long tradition of being a loser. We're not Chicago. Or Boston. When it comes to professional sports, we're used to instant gratification.

I try to post either at the beginning of each baseball season or at the end. So I'll close out Baseball 2009 with a recent picture of Michael Young (my middle daughter's favorite player) tagging out the Angels' Erick Aybar at third:

...and a suggestion to Vehige about adding this to our reading list:

Woodward: Moral and Linguistic Chaos

2009-10-03T17:26:00.004-05:00

Orwell might say that they are sometimes the same thing, and so it would seem to be with this report about the exciting strides being made in Britain toward what the headline writer cheerily calls "assisted suicide reform." That phrase is Newspeak-y enough, but then we get this:

The Australian doctor...is travelling the world to teach people how to end their lives safely with a suicide drug-testing kit.

"End their lives safely"??? I guess it's all fun and games until somebody winds up still alive....

Woodward: New English Translation of the Mass

2009-10-03T13:24:00.011-05:00

Sometime next year, English-speaking Catholics at celebrations of the ordinary form of the Mass in the Roman rite will stop professing a belief that God created everything "seen and unseen" and start professing instead their belief that God created everything "visible and invisible." They will no longer proclaim that Jesus was "born of the Virgin Mary and became man" but rather that he was "incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man." When the priest, in the Consecration, narrates the institution of the Eucharist, he will no longer say that Jesus took "the cup" but rather that he took "this precious chalice into his holy and venerable hands." Most controversially, perhaps, the priest will no longer say that Christ's blood will be "shed for you and for all" but that it will be "poured out for you and for many."

Does any of this make any difference?

In the way that counts most, the answer (I believe) must be no. The Mass is the Mass -- ordinary form or extraordinary, Latin or vernacular, well translated or ill. The Mass is what the Church says it is. If you disagree with that, then you understand neither the Church nor the Mass.

In another way, the answer must be yes -- it does make a difference. There are good translations of Latin texts and bad translations. On purely linguistic grounds, the English translation of the Roman Missal that has been in use for almost 40 years is a pretty bad one. It is denotatively inaccurate (prompting each of the changes cited in my first paragraph). It is clunky and tin-eared in innumerable places. For instance, I can never hear the Prayer after Communion for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time...

Lord, bring to perfection within us the communion we share in this sacrament. May our celebration have an effect in our lives.

...without feeling sorry for the priest who has to pray it. "May our celebration have an effect in our lives"?? That's really laying siege to heaven, isn't it? (Needless to say, the original Latin of that prayer bears no discernible resemblance to the absurd English rendering -- so I guess that particular translation belongs in both the "clunky" and "inaccurate" categories.)

And occasionally, the current English translation -- beyond being inexact and graceless -- even descends into outright ungrammaticality. I can't be the only former English teacher who cringes at "all glory and honor is yours."

For years, liberal and conservative liturgists argued not so much about the quality of the English Mass translation (nobody claims it's a masterpiece), but about the alleged motives of the translators. Was the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), which produced the current translation, devoted simply to a particular philosophy of translation (simplified vocabulary and sentence structure, avoidance of rhetorical decoration, paraphrase when necessary to achieve wide intelligibility), or was it committed to something more ambitious -- putting its own stamp on the Mass, emphasizing inordinately a communal, lay-centered, "spirit-of-Vatican-II" understanding of the Sacrament?

At one time I had a firmly held opinion on that question, but with the new translation on its way I find, blessedly, that I don't have to have an opinion any more. The old ICEL "dynamic equivalence" philosophy of translation is gone, relegated to a footnote in liturgical history by the Vatican's directive Liturgiam Authenticam and the subsequent ratio translationis for English-language translations, in which the Vatican undertook to give English-language translators of liturgical texts fairly explicit instructions on how to do their job. So the new translation that is nearing final approval reflects translating principles like these:

The translator should strive to maintain the denotation, or primary sense of the words and expressions found in the original text, as well as their connotation, that is, the finer shades of meaning or emotion evoked by them, and thus to ensure that the text be open to other orders of meaning that may have been intended in the original text.
To be avoided in translations is any psychologizing tendency, especially a tendency to replace words treating of the theological virtues by others expressing merely human emotions.
Certain expressions that belong to the heritage of the whole or of a great part of the ancient Church, as well as others that have become part of the general human patrimony, are to be respected by a translation that is as literal as possible, as for example the words of the people’s response Et cum spiritu tuo, or the expression mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa in the Act of Penance of the Order of Mass.
That notable feature of the Roman Rite, namely its straightforward, concise and compact manner of expression, is to be maintained insofar as possible in the translation. Furthermore, the same manner of rendering a given expression is to be maintained throughout the translation, insofar as feasible.
In the translation of terms contained in the original text, the same person, number, and gender is to be maintained insofar as possible.
The literary and rhetorical genres of the various texts of the Roman Liturgy are to be maintained.

--Liturgiam Authenticam

Not surprisingly, a translation of the Mass that is as close as possible to the original Latin text will also be as close as possible to the actual faith of the Church. There are things in this world that are not merely unseen but invisible. Jesus did not "become man" when he was born but when he was incarnate, conceived in his mother's womb (a particularly important truth for us to be reminding the world of nowadays).

The Mass is the Mass, despite whatever little distractions may come by way of inept translation. But it will be nice when those little distractions are gone. I'm really looking forward to the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2010.

[NOTE: For a handy overview of the changes made in the new English translation of the Mass, go here.]

Woodward: The Alamo, Part II

2009-09-20T19:12:00.006-05:00

My nine-year-old sons were captivated by the story of the Alamo, especially after watching -- from the edges of their seats -- the very loud and gunpowder-laden movie. They came away from the gift shop with a set of toy soldiers -- half Mexican regulars, half Texan volunteers (which inaccurately represents the relative strength of the contending forces). As I should have been able to foresee, this purchase required the construction of a scale-model Alamo once we got home, so that the belligerants could fight it out in front of an authentic-looking backdrop.

Thanks to Google images, Photoshop, cardboard, and Elmer's glue, the forces of Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and Col. William Barret Travis can now battle it out over and over again until we get it right.

According to the Woodward family's resident nine-year-old military historians, Davy Crockett met his death more or less like this:

Charles Kuralt: The Interstate

2009-09-20T17:17:00.003-05:00

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. -- Charles Kuralt

Woodward: The Alamo, Part I

2009-09-20T17:14:00.008-05:00

My wife (a native Texan) and I (not) have been waiting until the youngest of our children, twin boys now 9, were old enough to appreciate it before embarking on the preeminently obligatory Texas family trip -- a visit (make that a pilgrimage) to the Alamo. Last weekend, a brief vacation with some old friends in the hill country of central Texas made such a trip easily do-able, and so down to San Antonio we went.

Perhaps this registers on me more than it does on my wife, for whom it is simply an accepted fact of life, but I have never lived in another state that inspires as much patriotic fervor in the hearts of its citizens as Texas does. I realize that such fervor fits perfectly with the rest of the country's stereotyped view of the loud and boastful Texan, but it is a reality nonetheless, and it works in a more wholesome and admirable way than most people who never come here would ever be able to see. Texans are proud of everything about Texas, but there is nothing they're prouder of than the Alamo and the chapter in Texan and American history of which it is the emblem. People refer down here to the Battle of the Alamo as "America's Thermopylae" and, in doing so, they mean to pay Thermopylae a compliment.

After watching the slightly romanticized but roughly accurate IMAX movie, the Woodwards moved on to the shrine itself -- and yes, that's right, the Alamo is officially a shrine -- where the younger members of the family dutifully listened to Dad's exhaustive running commentary on the historical and cultural significance of what they were looking at. Rent those touristy headphones with the pre-recorded guided tour? Please. Not when Dad is around....

If one knows in any detail what happened at the Alamo, it is impossible to stand within its walls and not feel something. The first time I was ever in San Antonio, it was to attend a professional conference. I befriended an attendee from Connecticut, who was absolutely as far west and as far south as he had ever been in his life. One free afternoon, we ran into each other by chance at the Alamo. With a funny look on his face and a note of urgency in his voice, he grabbed me by the sleeve and said, "Come here and look at this." He literally pulled me across the room to a plaque on the wall on which were inscribed the words of William Barret Travis's "Letter from the Alamo" -- the one that ends with these words:

"The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken -- I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls -- I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch -- The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country -- Victory or Death."

"Isn't that something?" my friend asked. Yes, I said; it was, indeed, something.

Heroism is more common in this world than is often thought. There are lives of quiet heroism being lived all around us every day -- the heroism of accepting the terms that life offers us and performing our obligations -- often onerous ones -- willingly, happily, and without complaint. But there are, just occasionally, acts of exceptional heroism, the heroism of doing more than simply accepting the terms life offers us -- the heroism of taking upon ourselves the terms life has imposed on someone else, and of making those terms voluntarily our own. That's what the heroes of the Alamo did. They did what others would not do and what they themselves need not have done. They died -- "a death they freely accepted," to paraphrase one eloquent description of heroism in its most absolute example -- for an abstraction. In a materialist age that mistrusts and usually ridicules abstractions (truth, liberty, virtue), their example is all the more to be revered.

Woodward: St. Joseph of Cupertino (September 18)

2009-09-17T21:16:00.006-05:00

I've already gone on record with the opinion that St. Augustine is probably the Church's greatest saint. But my favorite saint is Joseph of Cupertino, in part because he reminds us that God delights in making saints out of what the world would regard as very unpromising raw material. (Being very unpromising raw material myself, I always contemplate St. Joseph with a feeling of hope.)

His life story can be found here. The flying business, while undeniably interesting in its own right, is far from being the most interesting thing about him. In an age when Catholic spirituality was beginning to run the risk of becoming over-intellectualized, Joseph showed the world that a pure heart is more important to God -- and ultimately more eloquent -- than a subtle mind. This is what my old St. John's Missal has to say about him:

Despised and afflicted with infirmities, he appeared as an object of scorn even to his own. By a singular disposition of Divine Providence, he passed successively through the three great branches of the Order of St. Francis. Finally he remained with the Minors Conventual, where his virtues became so striking that, in spite of himself, he was raised to the priesthood. The almost illiterate Joseph became the preaching companion of his Provincial, and it was his words that the people wanted to hear. He became the counsellor of all the great men of Italy of the 17th century, and he died in a radiance of honor and glory in 1664.

He is the subject of one of the finest films ever to be made about the life of a saint. If you've never seen it, you should give it a look.

O God, at your command your only-begotten Son was lifted up above the earth that he might draw all things to himself. May the merits and example of your seraphic confessor Joseph help to raise us above all earthly desires so that we may come to Jesus.

Vehige: Not from Books

2009-09-16T17:39:00.010-05:00

From the Catholic News Agency:

Symeon teaches us that Christian life is an intimate and personal communion with God, the Pope explained. "If, in fact, we are rightly concerned with tending to our physical, human and intellectual development, it is even more important not to overlook our inner development which consists in knowledge of God and communion with Him, so as to experience His help at all times and in all circumstances," he added.

In the nine volumes of his works, Symeon “insisted that true knowledge of God comes not from books but from the spiritual life, born of a journey of inner purification that begins with conversion,” the Pope summarized. The New Theologian "calls us all to the spiritual life, the hidden presence of God in us, to the purification of conscience, so the Holy Spirit becomes present in us and guides us."

Adding his own reflection to Symeon's teaching, Pope Benedict said, “the love of God grows within us if we remain united to Him through prayer and listening to His Word. Only divine love makes us open our hearts to others and renders us sensitive to their needs, bringing us to consider everyone as our brothers and sisters and inviting us to respond to hatred with love and to offense with forgiveness.”

As someone with two degrees in theology, I can personally attest to the truth of what the Pope is saying. Simply put, without a commitment to prayer, we cannot have a true and intimate knowledge of God.

Woodward: Manolete

2009-08-28T22:06:00.004-05:00

Sixty-two years ago today, in the Spanish town of Linares, the man who was probably the greatest bullfighter of all time was killed by a bull which he had, in turn, just mortally wounded.

Few cultural totems of Western civilization challenge political correctness more than bullfighting. Being appalled by it (or pretending to be) is one of the cheaper ways of establishing one's moral refinement nowadays -- more surefire even than professing an abhorrence of boxing, and certainly more welcome at cocktail parties than voicing any ethical scruples regarding abortion or assisted suicide.

Bullfighting is not sport but ritual, which goes a long way towards explaining why it's not understood -- let alone appreciated -- by the modern world.

Woodward: The Feast of St. Augustine

2009-08-28T21:49:00.004-05:00

Setting aside the apostles (who must be kept in a category by themselves), a debate on the question of who is the greatest saint might make an amusing parlor game. My candidate would very probably be the man whose feast is commemorated today. Not just a great theologian, philosopher, and pastor, but a great writer. Who has ever understood sin better -- or described its attractions more accurately?

Thus with the baggage of the world was I sweetly burdened, as when in slumber; and the thoughts wherein I meditated upon You were like the efforts of those desiring to awake, who, still overpowered with a heavy drowsiness, are again steeped therein. And as no one desires to sleep always, and in the sober judgment of all waking is better, yet does a man generally defer to shake off drowsiness, when there is a heavy lethargy in all his limbs, and, though displeased, yet even after it is time to rise with pleasure yields to it, so was I assured that it were much better for me to give up myself to Your charity, than to yield myself to my own cupidity; but the former course satisfied and vanquished me, the latter pleased me and fettered me. Nor had I anything to answer You calling to me, Awake, you that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light. (Ephesians 5:14) And to You showing me on every side, that what You said was true, I, convicted by the truth, had nothing at all to reply, but the drawling and drowsy words: Presently, lo, presently; Leave me a little while. But presently, presently, had no present; and my leave me a little while went on for a long while.

Confessions 8.5.12

Vehige: Wondering What to Read?

2009-06-26T14:33:00.005-05:00

Well, here's some old -- but true -- advice.

Keep reading the Holy Scriptures over and over again. With the Bible and the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, one can attain anything.

Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, Letters to Young Men, 1902.

Can't get much more basic than that.

Woodward: The Feast of Corpus Christi

2009-06-14T13:03:00.014-05:00

Jesus' use of similes and metaphors in his teaching -- the expression of spiritual truths by likening them to very material facts of everyday life -- invites a kind of backwards thinking when we come to interpret these scriptural images. Our tendency is to treat them in the same way we treat the use of metaphor and simile in ordinary literature. A writer seeks some vivid way of conveying what his beloved is like, and so he looks around at the world and picks something beautiful or pure or mysterious or rare out of it to liken his beloved to. He may decide (as Robert Burns did) that she is "like a red red rose." Or he may decide (as William Shakespeare did) that she isn't very much like "a summer's day" after all.

Burns and Shakespeare (and every other writer), in searching for likenesses between something they want to describe and something that all their readers will know, are forced to take the world as they find it and pick the imperfect simile or metaphor that comes closest to serving their purpose. Burns in my example is satisfied with his comparison; Shakespeare is not quite.

But when Jesus likened God to a father, or himself to a shepherd or a bridegroom or a vine, he was not having to take the world as he found it. The world, after all, was made for and through him. God knew that his son would someday compare himself to a shepherd long before he created either shepherds or sheep. He knew that he would characterize his relationship to his creatures as that between a father and children before there were any human fathers or human children. God as metaphor-maker has the unique advantage of creating the raw material for his own metaphors.

Today is the day set aside by the universal Church to celebrate Jesus as the "bread come down from heaven." So here are three brief meditations by Msgr. Ronald Knox that get to the heart of this great feast. The first elaborates this point about divine metaphors.

The true bread, the living bread, is not the common bread which we eat. The common bread which we eat is only a sham, a copy, an image of that true bread which came down from heaven. And if we ask what is the true bread which came down from heaven, he has given us the answer: "I myself am the living bread; the man who eats my flesh and drinks my blood enjoys eternal life." You see, we are so materialistic, our minds are so chained to the things of sense, that we imagine our Lord as instituting the Blessed Sacrament with bread and wine as the remote matter of it because bread and wine reminded him of that grace which he intended the Blessed Sacrament to bestow. But, if you come to think of it, it was just the other way about. When he created the world, he gave common bread and wine for our use in order that we might understand what the Blessed Sacrament was when it came to be instituted. He did not design the sacred Host to be something like bread. He designed bread to be something like the sacred Host.

And here is another passage from the same homily. It's one I try to call to mind at every Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.

Always, it is the things which affect us outwardly and impress themselves on our senses that are the shams, the imaginaries; reality belongs to the things of the spirit. All the din and clatter of the streets, all the great factories which dominate our landscape, are only echoes and shadows if you think of them for a moment in the light of eternity; the reality is in here, is there above the altar, is that part of it which our eyes cannot see and our senses cannot distinguish. The motto on Cardinal Newman's tomb ought to be the funeral motto of every Catholic, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, Out of shadows and appearances into the truth. When death brings us into another world, the experience will not be that of one who falls asleep and dreams, but that of one who wakes from a dream into the full light of day. Here, we are so surrounded by the things of sense that we take them for the full reality. Only sometimes we have a glimpse which corrects that wrong perspective. And above all, when we see the Blessed Sacrament enthroned, we should look up towards that white disc which shines in the monstrance as towards a chink through which, just for a moment, the light of the other world shines through.

And finally, here is Msgr. Knox -- who died five years before the Second Vatican Council was convened -- sounding quite Vatican II-ish indeed.

The sacrament of Holy Eucharist is meant to have a social value -- a social value to which, I am afraid, we Catholics are sometimes less alive than our Protestant neighbours. We think of receiving holy communion as a solitary act which only affects ourselves; if others are receiving it at the same time, that is only to save the priest trouble....That is not, you know, the way in which our Lord meant us, or the way in which the Church means us, to look upon holy communion. It is a sacramental assertion of that bond of fellowship which unites all the faithful, which should unite them, alas, more closely and more sensibly than it does. As the bread is made from hundreds of ears ground in the same mill, as the wine is made from hundreds of grapes trodden in the wine-press, so we, being many, are one in Christ; we become one body among ourselves through our incorporation into him.

[The quoted passages are from "Real Bread" and "Bread and Wine," collected in The Pastoral Sermons of Ronald A. Knox, published by Franciscan Herald Press.]

Msgr. Ronald Knox: Pentecost

2009-05-31T16:13:00.008-05:00

Our Lord in his mortal life began a work which was not finished when he ascended into heaven. He does not suffer, he does not labor now. And yet, it must be he who continues the work which he began; no human postscript could add to its value or enhance its efficacy. How is it, then, that he continues the work which his Ascension interrupted? For there is none that can continue it, save he.

The answer to that is the mystery of Pentecost. Pentecost commemorates the birth of the Church, and the birth of the Church is the second birth of Christ.

Think of Our Lady, as she was when the Angel Gabriel came to her at the Annunciation. The world all around lay overwhelmed by the deluge of sin; the Holy Spirit, like the dove that could find no rest for her feet when the waters were over the face of the earth, could find no lodgment among the souls of men, save here. Or, if you will, here was Gedeon's fleece, that alone, in a world of drought, was visited by the dew in the morning. Hers was the one heart that could be the accomplice of that momentous inspiration. Her virginity defied the assaults of sin, a fortress, locked safely against all human approach, yielding entrance only to the King. In devout expectation, scarce knowing what she was to expect, she waited until the angelic message came to her. And with that, the Holy Spirit overshadowed her, and in fullness of time she gave birth to the Christ.

Are we not to see, in the cenacle at Jerusalem, where Our Lady herself, with the apostles and those other faithful souls, waited for the day of Pentecost to be fulfilled, an image of that immaculate Mother whom the angel saluted at Nazareth? Those thirty-three years have come and gone, during which incarnate God walked on earth; and what is there to show for it in the end? A hundred and twenty souls waiting for the fulfillment of his promise. Others there may have been, perhaps, in Galilee, a faithful heart here and there which still cherished the memory of the Master who had been taken away from the earth. But this was all the nucleus left for the operation of the Holy Ghost, a hundred and twenty souls! All around, the world still went on its way, incredulous and unredeemed. But here the locked doors that keep the world at bay, and will open only to the touch of a divine hand, symbolize afresh the virginity of the Blessed Mother. In devout expectation, scarce knowing what they are to expect, they wait until the time appointed by the providence of God. And with that, the Holy Ghost overshadows them; and in a moment, Christ is born anew; this time in his mystical body, which is the Catholic Church.

--originally published in The Tablet, May 11, 1940

Woodward: Oak Apple Day

2009-05-29T18:53:00.007-05:00

Yes, it's that time of year again. Time to celebrate the 379th birthday of Charles the Second, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc.; and the 349th anniversary of his restoration to the throne of his fathers. (The name of the day derives from an unfortunate incident in which Charles, leading one last military campaign against the rebel army that had deposed and ultimately killed his father, was forced to hide from enemy troops in an oak tree.)

Unlike his more pious but less politic brother James, Charles recognized the practical difficulties attendant upon being the Catholic monarch of an unfortunately Protestant country. And so he postponed his reception into the Catholic Church until he was on his deathbed -- a risky strategy, admittedly, but...better late than never.

For a surprisingly entertaining fictional account of Charles's relationship with the Catholic Church, one could not do better than Robert Hugh Benson's Oddsfish! It's one of the most underrated of all historical novels, and provides a breathtakingly vivid portrait of the king who finally sent the Puritans packing and became known to history as the Merrie Monarch.

Long Live the King!

Woodward: Not With a Bang...

2009-05-23T20:39:00.016-05:00

Lots of people have theories about when the final decline of Western civilization began. My own theory involves an event that occurred on May 24, 1935. It happened, I'm ashamed to say, in Cincinnati, Ohio, a city I love. It was the first major-league night baseball game, an abomination that I'm certain God never had in mind when he invented the sport. On that infamous night exactly 74 years ago, and underneath the garish jury-rigged lights of Crosley Field, the Reds beat the Phillies 2 to 1. (Which is worse -- winning the first night baseball game or losing it?)

I have attended many, many baseball games in my life, both day games and night games. And I can say with absolute certitude that baseball is a game that should be played in daylight. That's the way baseball is played by children (which, after all, is the way baseball should be played no matter what the age of the players). That's the way baseball was played for the first 100 years of its history, until some marketing genius decided that more money could be made playing baseball at a time when most of the children who love it are supposed to be in bed. And that's the way baseball is played (I am quite certain) in heaven, although I am still searching for a citation from the Summa Theologica to support this contention.

Down here in Texas Rangers country, even night games are played mostly in the daylight during July and August, which minimizes the horror of the phenomenon somewhat. But there still comes that inevitable moment, along around the bottom of the sixth inning, when the lights are turned on and the great, sunny, American pastoral fantasia that is baseball becomes suddenly transformed into just one more Klieglight-illuminated showbiz spectacle. Anyone who has ever seen the difference knows the difference. (I was never a Chicago Cubs fan, but I always cherished Wrigley Field as a last outpost of civilization, until it too was swamped by the barbarian wave on August 8, 1988.)

This holiday weekend, the Rangers are involved in inter-league play (we'll leave that unfortunate innovation for a later discussion) with the Houston Astros (we'll leave indoor baseball for a later discussion as well), in a couple of day games. Good for them. I just wish there were a lot more day games to look forward to this season.

(The picture accompanying this post, by the way, is a riveting painting -- "Baseball at Night" -- by the Russian-American painter Morris Kantor. It depicts a night baseball game in West Nyack, New York, in 1934, a year before nocturnal illumination made it to the major leagues, and long before night baseball was anything other than a cultural -- or visual -- oddity. The ballfield in West Nyack where this game took place also featured professional wrestling matches and performances by trained elephants. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?)

UPDATE: What was I thinking? I don't need St. Thomas Aquinas to help me prove that there's no night baseball in heaven:

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day -- and there shall be no night there.

--Revelation 21:23-25