Week in Review

The film "Stranger than Fiction" is about death and I realized anew after seeing it how unbelievably hard to accept death even for Christians. Let alone to volunteer for it as this fictional character did, or as Jesus did.

Part of the thing that I think I sometimes missed when I was younger was how Jesus avoided escaping despite having the means to escape. He could’ve avoided the Cross. Or the Incarnation itself. (I used to imagine a conference between the Trinity: “Someone’s gotta go down there…Who’s it gonna be?” says the Father, and the Son volunteers.) I've always been overly fond of a means of escape. I imagined that if I did something wrong, I’d jump bail and flee to another country. (I was surprised in my youth by the seeming nobility of criminals: they so infrequently jumped the bail their loved ones had put up.) I couldn’t understand the concept of suicide because I thought when I was young, “why don’t they just run away?”. I’d tied the impulse of suicide not to self, but to others. I couldn’t imagine a circumstance where one’s own self, and not other people, was the source of problems.

The gospels speak a lot of inescapability. Jesus prays to the Father that this cup might pass, but it doesn’t. He couldn’t escape it. The means of death was telling -- is there an instrument more binding than a crucifixion, in which you are literally nailed to wood while slowly dying? Even in His birth, “swaddling” clothes are often depicted in Eastern iconography as being tightly bound. We say that within our tabernacles Jesus willingly imprisons Himself.
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Thursday night was a godsend. I decided to go to the Immaculate Conception Mass on the eve before, rather than the day of, Dec. 8. The music was spectacular: “Immaculate Mary”, a beautiful solo of “Ave Maria” at the offertory, and “Hail Holy Queen”. For years I’d been going to noon Mass on Dec. 8th at St. Pat’s and it’s always musically uninspired, being as it is a workday noon Mass and thus sans choirs or singers. But I always have a preference for the actual feast day though the night of the actual day we always celebrate my wife's birthday. But not this time, and I got there early and prayed the indulgenced Poor Clare’s Adoration prayer, said every hour of every day by the cloistered nuns in Portsmouth, Ohio.
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Grandma almost died this week. At 95 I really thought this was her time since even the experienced hostice workers were saying that her organs were failing. I had romantic notions that she’d die on Dec. 9th – the same day as both her husband and Fulton J. Sheen, the latter whom I’d been praying to so much lately for her situation. Grandma prays for only two modest things: to die before her beloved 94-year old cousin Fr. Jim (so that he can attend her funeral) and to die before she runs out of money and has to go to a Medicaid-supported facility. It seemed her prayers were being answered this week but Mom called tonite and said she made a remarkable recovery.
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Work was a joy this week, where joy is defined by its lack. I didn’t have much to do – first time in quite some time – and I was surprised how quickly the days passed despite that lack. When I had brain-numbing work to do I listened to Willie Cunningham on WLW via Internet streaming or Ave Maria radio. Bought a couple things I’d wanted for a long, long time: the first volume of the Liturgy of the Hours, and, even more so, the famous 1962 Roman Missale. Giddy, me, at the prospect of holding that old war horse and praying those antique prayers and seeing the Victorian-era illustrations that rend your heart. The leather-bound missale, published by the euphoniously-named Baronius press, has that same glowing association in memory that “Strange but True Baseball Stories” held in 1973 and “The Complete Works of Shakespeare” held in 1985. A good trend I suppose, a "trading up", though service to neighbor seems a far more accurate leading indicator of one’s spiritual temperature.
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Jesus said not to let the anxieties of this world distract us from Him and yet I seem to violate this every ten minutes or so. For example, I read of a Christian blogger saying that he “no longer thinks of swimming the Tiber” and began to conjure up responses of varying usefulness (mostly approaching zero) even though no response was called or asked for. Thomas really opened my eyes to the fact that being theologically and historically well-read is no guarantee of becoming Catholic, notwithstanding Newman’s line that to become deeply immersed in history is to to cease being Protestant. He seems to have that combination of keen intelligence and ecclesiastical rootlessness – a combination I imagined was an engraved invitation from the Mother Kirche. And yet there he is in his rootlessness and I’m struck yet again by how elusive unity is and how so much depends on God, not intelligence or anything else.
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AO wanted to talk about the train wreck that C. is participating in and it felt close to gossip. I sense that if we made it a rule to pray for someone as much as we talked about them we’d pray a lot more and talk a lot less. Economically AO believes as you sow as you should reap but as Christians we hope that we reap what we did not sow since salvation is impossible without God. So our economic system is to some extent the opposite of our spiritual system; we rely completely on God’s welfare while eschewing the idea of persistent governmental welfare, though St. Paul said that if you don’t work you don’t eat so it’s not counter-Scriptural. But part of what bothers me about my wife's niece's situation is its very predictability. She got pregnant in October, met another guy in November and quit her job, moved into his mother's garage. Married him last week. He's 18, she's 21. It seems you might be successful in America at least in earthly terms if you’re smart or you’re ambitious, but if you’re neither than you seem doomed to a life of stress and poverty. And what if you had non-churchgoing high-school educated parents who acrimoniously divorce – what chance do the children have? Slim? And yet the first reaction is that it seems a lack of human dignity that we should be so predictable. Predictability suggests a lack of free will and part of our dignity is our free will, much as we might disparage it. Isn't the phrase "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" a denial of our free will? Of course it is a truth of the faith that we are fallen, that our free will is far more limited than our first parent's and is then additionally limited by our immediate parents.
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Update: Steven emails a much better take on our "predictability" and free will:

I would say rather the predicatbility is the accumulation of circumstance and probability and that we are so much alike that we can know within limits what the likely reaction is. That's why we're always so pleased and gratified by someone who "beats the odds." I think I'd look at it as demonstrating the perfect equality of humankind. We're predictable because no matter what the outer accidents the inner processes and spiritual realities are the same...I wonder if what you are observing isn't a kind of "spiritual law?" That is, if you break certain "rules" or ways of being, they carry with them certain consequences.

R-rated Icon!

(Made ya look.)

Artist of Divine Mercy

Tommy Channing writes:

In our secularised culture of today saturated by images of every kind, the term ‘Beauty’ and ‘Image’ are sometimes very nebulous words meaning different things to different people. Due to the advent of the entertainment industry, music, movies, T.V. and magazines, advertising and the Internet, we are seeing a bombardment of images on a daily basis. Many of which promote models of life without God. It has had the cumulative effect of averting our eyes away from the purpose and beauty for which they were created and the One who created them. The images we see can form our attitudes and shape our culture. The advertising industry, mindful of the power of imagery tries to define what is our correct image and what is truly beautiful. But have we become de-sensitised in the process, especially our young people? What about the sense of the Eternal?

Here is his sketch page including one depicting Mary.

~ The Feast of the Immaculate Conception ~

The Solemnity of Mary, on January 1st, feels like an attempt to "baptize" a secular holiday, with limited success. College football games tend to predominate the landscape. And the Assumption falls in the middle of August when many are on vacations or just going, or just getting back. Say it with me: Distractions! But today we can lustily sing "Hail Holy Queen" with as little distraction as our poor human nature allows.

There's something wonderful about the timing, always in the beginning of Advent. The latest Word Among Us quotes Francis Carvajal:

"The spirit of Advent largely consists in living close to our Lady during the time she is carrying Jesus in her womb."

The Assumption is not as surprising as the Immaculate Conception. The preservation of Mary from Original Sin is, well, quite original post-Fall. There had been others possibly assumed into Heaven (Enoch and Elijah come to mind) but no one born post-Adam & Eve without the taint of sin. This is something to celebrate and savor and all the more so because of Mary's response to her wealth. Speaking of Mary's Magnificat, Joyce Rupp writes,

"In her canticle of praise, Mary acknowledges she is special in God's eyes, but she does not consider herself better than others. On the contrary, Mary continues her prayerful song by focusing on the mercy and compassion of God. "

Update: Philokalia Republic quotes Balthasar "Denial of the Immaculate Conception, then, is the very apogee of the Pelagian heresy!"

Interesting Perspective on Russia's Collapse

From The Corner:

Re: True Believers [Mark Krikorian]

Andrew and Roman are right, of course, that communism really did serve as a substitute religion in the Soviet Union (remember also "Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live!"). And I agree that this faith died, probably in the 1970s, but that's the point — Christianity died in Europe and communism, after it killed Christianity in Russia, itself died, probably in the 1970s, leaving people believing in nothing and sapping the Soviet state of what legitimacy it had (other than the fading memory of winning the "Great Patriotic War"). In other words, the fall of the Soviet Union didn't create a spiritual void in the hearts of Russians — it was the other way around.

As for vodka, the Reds themselves saw in the 1980s that it was becoming an increasingly serious social problem — remember that the first "reformist" initiative that Gorbachev undertook was to limit the amount of vodka a person could buy at any one time at the government liquor stores.

Maestro...Strike up the Band  

To the tune "Rudolph":

You know Jordan and Hamilton,
O'Connor and Eagleberger,
Simpson and Meese and
Panetta and Perry,
but do you recall
the most famous Iraq Study Group Member of all?

Baker, the red-nosed wise man
had a very large forehead.
And if you ever saw it,
you would even say it glows.

All of the other insiders
used to laugh and call him names.
They never let poor Jimmy
join in any wise man games.

Then one foggy Iraq war
W came to say:
“James there with your head so bright,
won't you guide this wreck tonight?”

But Baker had no answers,
No dramatic touchdown pass,
Ne'er were hopes so risen,
only to fade so fast!

_______

Thank you, may you have another?

To the tune "Lookin' For Love":

Looking for a democracy in all the wrong places
Looking for liberty in too many faces
Searching their eyes, looking for traces
Of what.. I'm dreaming of...
Hopin' to find a friend and an ally
God bless the day I discover
Another heart, lookin' for democracy.

Hussein came a'knockin' at a trap door,
He was so brutal I figured they'd want something more.
I thought he was packin', he flaunted the rules
I made a bet and threw the jewels...

No more looking for democracy in all the wrong places
Looking for freedom in too many faces
Searching your eyes, looking for traces
Of what.. I'm dreaming of...
Now that I've found no friends or cover
God bless the day I discover
Another heart, lookin' for democracy.

Excerpt of a poem found on First Things:

Faint, the Little Matchgirl, falling,
Strikes a match to ward off winter,
Sees it blaze like phoenix feathers,
Green and gold and Hope’s bright whiteness—
Like a dying moth, it flutters.

Mary rides; her heart still flutters,
Though she does not know of snowflakes
Save a star whose wondrous whiteness
Blazes forth to stop man’s falling,
Heralds Hope like angel feathers
Left within her lap last winter.

Hope still flutters, icons falling,
Six-vaned snowflakes, Heaven’s feathers,
Stars of whiteness lighting winter.

—Kevin Andrew Murphy

Effective Ad

A French tourism agency has a new ad up on Yahoo Mail, and it certainly caught my attention:



I went out to Franceguide.com to see what else was there, picture-wise:

 

Those Heartless Conservatives



The liberal line on conservatism is that it's heartless and lacks emotion, but anyone who's read the life of Russell Kirk, one of the founding paleoconservatives, knows that he was the opposite of heartless and emotionless. He once let a beggar live in his house for an extended period of time - how many liberal giants have? Conservatism might sometimes actually be the product of TOO much heart and emotion because of its intense suspicion of change. Why the suspicion? Can you say "French Revolution"? Or Communism? Experience has shown that throwing out the old verities is often the recipe for more pain and suffering.

What liberalism has but conservatism lacks is a moving, emotional story. With liberalism you can write wonderful stories about how this injustice was righted or that person was saved from poverty by a welfare check. But with conservatism, it's harder to write an emotional story about the person who wouldn't have been able to feed his family but for, say, the economic climate fostered by a government not screwing things up. Suffering avoided by conservative governance is not a story; suffering ameliorated by government is a story.

Concerning the conservation of human life, it's becoming more difficult for liberals to play the emotion card, that being strictly of the pain of the mother. Whereas before the child in the womb was mute and invisible, we can now see the child via ultrasounds and improved technology. Suddenly the reluctant mother's pain and inconvenience at bearing a child is not the only reality. We still can't write a moving account of what would've been for a child who was killed in the womb, but we can at least show a picture of what they looked like at the time of their death.

From The Corner:

A doctor, an architect and a lawyer debate whose is the oldest profession.

"Medicine," said the doctor, "is the oldest profession. After all did not God cause a sleep to fall upon Adam at which point he removed a rib and fashioned it into Eve? Was this not the first operation with anesthetic. Therefore, medicine is the oldest profession."

"Not so fast," replied the architect, "What about a week earlier? God created the heavens and earth from primordial choas. This was clearly a giangantic act of design, therefore architecture is the oldest profession."

"Wait," said the lawyer, "Who do you think made primordial choas?"

Today's Parody...
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Leftist Actor Threatens to Leave Earth for Mars

HOLLYWOOD,CA -- Actor Alec Baldwon said Tuesday that if Earth doesn't get its act together soon then he might move to Mars.

"I'm extremely disappointed with the Earth. Humanity, hurricanes and global warming to name three. If things don't improve with the '08 election I'm moving to Mars."

When told that Mars was uninhabitable, Baldwon said that he hadn't focused so much on the alternatives to Earth but was merely saying that Earth had to improve - or else.

"I'm not into the whole lesser of two evil calculation. That's just not me. But having said that, I think the proven incompetency of Earth is a worse evil than the unproven incompetency of Mars."

Dr. Stephen J. Phillips of the Brookings Institute says that Baldwon's threatened flight will become commonplace as globalization proceeds.

"As we globalize, people will no longer be able to scapegoat the U.S. as much. For many on the Left the Earth itself will become 'the new America', and death preferable to life."
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Russia's Collapse

Stanley Kurtz asks: has atheism killed Russia? A round-up of thoughts on the subject:

Link:

In the “Life of the Moscow Starets Fr. Aleksei Mechev”, now a saint, the Nun Juliania wrote about the “collapse and the demise of Church life”, about the “religious coolness, indifference, the absence of Christian love, an overall detachment and a burrowing into the narrow circle of personal or family interests” which was taking place in Russia at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. “The life of the Church, with all the wealth of its spiritual treasures, with all its beauty and faithfulness to the proper Divine services, flowed like a weak, hardly noticeable little stream, of little interest not only to the lay folk but to the pastors of the Church as well,” observed Mother Juliania, making exceptions only for the monasteries. The contemporary theologian Hegumen [now Bishop] Hilarion Alfeyev likewise bears witness to this: the majority of believers came to Church and made their confession once a year – during Great Lent. Such was the crisis of Church life.

Link:

According to Lev Gudkov, a sociologist who heads the department of social and political studies at the Yuri Levada Center, creationism signals a desire to reject anything associated with Soviet times: "It is definitely a post-Soviet, exaggerated, insistence on pre-Soviet traditional views. This is observed mostly among young people and among the elderly. We discern an overall tendency towards imitational traditionalism that emerged as a reaction to the vacuum of ideas and beliefs that followed the disintegration of Soviet ideology."

Link:

....the most difficult thing to understand about the present situation in Russia is what he calls the mentality of the people. Only this, he insists, will explain where the country will go. Naumov is convinced that the mentality of the people is conditioned by their exhaustion, not their frustrations or expectations. It is shaped by a past, which, as much as they try to escape it, has taught them patience and providential self-protection. Despite the flood of foreign goods, democratic vistas urged on by advertising, and dreams of quick money, it is a psychology of scarcity, frugality, making do, and self-effacement.

Link:

In nearly all of his major writings, Solzhenitsyn appeals to the indispensability of the spiritual qualities of “repentance” and “self-limitation” for a truly balanced individual and collective life...He is not, however, unduly sanguine about the prospects for these virtues in the contemporary scene. As he writes in November 1916, “In the life of nations, even more than in private life, the rule is that concessions and self-limitation are ridiculed as naïve and stupid.” Solzhenitsyn thus has no illusions about repentance and self-limitation becoming the explicit and unchallenged foundation of free political life.

Link:

Pearce: Do you believe that the West is in the same blind alley and also has nowhere to go?

Solzhenitsyn: Over the last twelve years I have stopped viewing Russia as something very distinct from the West. Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word "modernity" if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China. With the exception of those areas we should not use the words "the West" but the word "modernity". The modern world. And yes, then I would say that there are ills that are characteristic, that have plagued the West for a long time and now Russia has quickly adopted them also.

Pearce: What is the present position of Christianity in Russia?

Solzhenitsyn: After the permission was freely given for people to practise their faith the number of Christianity's adherents has grown. Many under an atheistic press, a vice grip, had forgotten their faith so there is now something of a return to Christianity yet simultaneously there is a decay of values which accompanies the rise of consumer society. It is a simultaneous process.

Ham Gets Some Backup

I was talking to Hambone of Soc Engineer recently and he was underwhelmed by the latest Bond, saying that this Bond was unrecognizable from past Bonds. He also said there's an obvious homoerotic component. I hadn't thought of that when I was watching it, but in hindsight the naked torture scene did seem a bit much. Still, I was perhaps a little skeptical. But not so after this Church of the Masses review:

When I was in film school, my radical feminist lesbian professors were quite adament that we all leave Northwestern with a keen sense of what they called "the male gaze" in cinema. The "Male Gaze" is a fundamentally skewed-with-patriarchy way of seeing the world and especially women that, my professors contended, was predicable of pretty much all of classic Hollywood cinema. They used to endlessly dissect camera angles and lighting in shots to reveal cues of the male desire to dominate and dehumanize women. A lot of times I thought my professors were nuts and paranoid. But every now and then they had a point.

Well, I gotta say, there is something icky in Casino Royale that feels very much like what we could call "the homosexual gaze." The women in the film, first of all, spend much of the film very ioconically made up - shall we say, like Liza Minelli or a Marilyn impersonator?

'Dear Joseph'

The Anglican blogger at "Stand Firm" imagines a Schori letter to Pope Benedict. The "Thanksgiving Day" was a nice touch, making the point of Schori's American provincialism. Elsewhere, this too is telling:



Dwight Longenecker writes:

It would be wonderful if a good number of disenchanted Anglicans would consider seriously the pastoral provision and the opportunities made available by the Anglican Usage as being pioneered by Eric Bergman in Scranton. There really are fresh ways forward that would allow them to bring the riches of the Anglican tradition into full communion with the Catholic Church.

Best Movie I've Seen in Awhile

I very much concur with this positive review of Stranger than Fiction. The film does perpetuate the lie that premarital sex is a positive good, but sadly that's not unusual. I don't want to give away the ending, so I'll type the rest of this review in invisible ink (which won't be invisible if you're reading an XML feed).

*** SPOILER ALERT *** (highlight the white text below to view):

Hollywood sees redemption as passé. Corny and syrupy. Just as the Resurrection is embarrassing for Jesus Seminar scholars, happy endings are for Hollywood screenwriters. Nihilism and tragedies are hot, happy endings and resurrections not. So how to deal? To admit mediocrity up front? Dustin Hoffman's character, the lit crit in the movie, says the writer's new, happy ending made the book only "average". He saw the author's re-writing as resulting in the loss of a poetic, lasting, tragic work of art.

But in the end the author determined it was more important to bring joy. She argued that she never intended the character have foreknowledge of his death and the joy he brought to others made her keep the character around.

Not surprisingly, real-life screenwriter Nicolosi hated it. This might be one of the cases where if you're too familiar with film-making, many films are ruined for you. Reminds me how many Scriptural scholars find no joy in Scripture, getting hung-up on technical details while missing the whole point.

I liked the Christ parallels. Ferrel knowingly gives his life for a child. Beforehand he goes to Hoffman and says, basically, "is there any way this cup can pass?". Hoffman replies in the negative and explains the poetry of it, the rightness of it and how the book will last forever. Ferrel's character acccepts this and sacrifices himself for the child and the art - and yet he does not die but lives. Sound familiar?