GOP Establishment Was Right

Ironically, I suspect that Trump has unwittingly proved that the GOP establishment strategy of not being overly ambitious in its agenda, in marshaling political power instead of getting in big fight with Obama over budgets, was the correct one. 

Because I think what Trump has taught us is that there is no voter appetite for conservatism - thus if GOP had gone pellmell after Obama it would likely have gotten its clock cleaned. People are not in the mood for hard choices or balanced budgets, which is why Trump smartly never emphasizes that. 

The big lie is that support for Obamacare is soft.

The GOP establishment figured that Obamacare, as bad as it was, was going to be permanent and looks like they were correct because even GOP primary voters didn't care enough about Obamacare to nominate someone with a discernible replacement plan.

Age of Advertising

George Will on beer advertising  provides another explanation for why depth  is dead:

"Consumers are moved to covet a product less for its intrinsic qualities than its manufactured meaning.  Advertising does this by reducing its information content and increasing its emotional appeal."

The Big Sort

I'm reading a book called The Big Sort, about how politics is being altered by the trend of modern mobility forming like-minded communities, of birds of a feather flocking together, Republicans with Republicans and Dems with Dems.  The author asks a chicken or egg question on gerrymandering, a sort of both/and: we self-segregated by community while at the same time leaders became more aggressive in protecting districts. Polarization begets more polarization.

Part of it is due to our fractured media environment and how “mass media” has become more narrow-cast media.

A real eye-opener was a single line about the impact on religion:

“Mainline religious denominations gained parishioners through the first half of the twentieth century, the age of mass markets, but lost members beginning in the mid-1960s to independent churches designed for homogeneous communities. Media, advertising, city economies - they've all segmented, specialized and segregated.”

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It's worth pondering how many of the dire OT prophets have hopeful messages of restoration at the end. A prime example is Zephaniah, a book of unrelenting despair and vengeance until a sudden complete change of tone with the words from yesterday's first reading on the feast of the Visitation.

My study bible remarks that even if a later scribe added it, it's not untrue given that Israel did have a remnant and resulting hope after their return from Babylon and rebuilding of the Temple.

Perhaps it's a case of the ancient Jewish church attempting to always find that elusive balance between presumption and despair, and there was a perceived need, perhaps, to offer some hope.

It parallels the account of the Passion, given how dire and how much suffering would be experienced before Resurrection. Zephaniah feels like a written preview in words of what would happen in the body of Jesus: judgment, sentence, and then salvation.

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I think even on a secular level there's an implicit acknowledgement of how broken a godless world is, shown in the fascination with world-ending apocalyptic stories.

What does it say that there was such a sharp reversal in the '80s from the sexual excesses of the '70s and late '60s? Or in the '40s from the freewheelin' '20s? Society itself learns over time, just as the individual learns, and forgets, and re-learns, and forgets… The bewitching attraction of sin unfailingly does not satisfy, though we, at regular intervals, think it will.

Things I'm Confused By

One thing I don't get is how people say that U.S. credibility is damaged by Obama and Trump. For example, concerning how Obama said there was the infamous red line that Obama said Syria could not cross but did, and how that would tell our allies they couldn't trust us.

But if you've met one U.S. president you've met…one US president. Like it or not, foreign policy is a solely owned subsidiarity of our president and I don't know why any other country would be foolish enough to think that there is a standard U.S. response to anything. That our country could go from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan shows that we're not monolithic or have anything resembling a stable reputation.

Russia, for example, would be stupid to treat the United States as an entity apart from the US President, as far as how it affects them. The POTUS owns the military, the State department, and most of the organs of influence. If Russia has taken the measure of the man or woman in the White House, then they have taken the measure of the situation. Reputation of the country is a joke; individuals have reputations, the U.S. doesn't.

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All too often I tend to think that what is demanded of us is less than what was demanded of prior generations. I feel a false sense of security based on previous eras' sacrifices; there's a temptation to live off the capital.

For example, before Obama and now Trump, I felt way too complacent about the safeguards the Founding Fathers put around democracy, thinking that these safeguards were failsafe. And yet that ignores their own warnings that America's republic would depend on the virtues of the citizenry, not the system of checks and balances. And Obama has shown how relatively easy it is for the executive branch to become dictatorial, especially when you have an utterly divided and cowed legislative, and a judicial that is more concerned about reputation than anything (witness Justice Roberts tortured reasoning concerning Obamacare).

Similarly, there's no way to think that Christ was crucified in our place, or that we can rest on the spiritual capital of the saints. We see around us no substitute for sanctity.

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It seems like there's a huge tension implicit in the thinking of Pope Francis and others on the world as we now have it. Francis surely signs on to the principle of subsidiarity and local control as much as possible, but in a world that is utterly interconnected how do you even have local control? Superbugs, Zika virus, pollution, etc… don't respect national boundaries. A one-world government is politically unfeasible, but I have a hard time seeing how Francis can't not want it, given it's the only way to have success with his huge pet issues, like the environment and the economy.

A Eulogy for Policy Wonks

I wonder if part of the appeal of Pope Francis or Donald Trump is simply that they can be "read" without actually being read. That we don't need to really know the reasoning behind whatever position Trump has taken today, much as we don't need to know the reasoning behind sound bites the Holy Father offers. I would guesstimate a tiny percentage of Pope Francis fans have read anything more than a paragraph at a time of his thoughts.  In both cases there is an implicit trust.

It seems in an age of non-attention span, tweets and one-liners, symbolic gestures and photo ops are much more potent.  Just as Pope Benedict's abstruse theologisms mostly went over like a lead balloon, so too did any of the more detailed policy planks of other GOP candidates. Policy wonks are dead as door nails, fooling people but walking around and breathing.

The heart is in ascendancy, the head in arrears.  Not that the two can really be separated hence, "Love the Lord your God with all your mind, with all your soul, etc....  But Trump speaks to the heart (not always the good side of the heart, but) and Pope Francis spoke volumes just by the picture of him holding the face of that poor, deformed man.

In Defense of the Minor Leagues

All week rain and thunderstorms were predicted for Thursday midday but, as expected, the weather gods mocked mediocre-performing weathermen. It was sunny and mild and I was glad I brought my sunscreen for the impending Clippers day game.

I did notice a slight flagging of interest in myself for this opportunity, almost surely linked to the fact that I had to go back to work instead of going home like in previous years when the our workplace generously gave us the afternoon off after a lunchtime game. But no-go on that, so work hung like a slight cloud o'er the atmosphere.

The game was lopsided, with the Buffalo team jumping out to an 8-0 lead over an ancient Clippers toiler by name of Grube, a 34-year old who has seen 2/3rds of an inning of MLB ball.

The first Clippers' mop-up guy was Toru Murata, and I eagerly looked up his record and “story” on my iPhone. It's an amazing thing that you can find information on even the most obscure minor league players.

There was a time I was not interested in minor leaguers considering them “beneath me” (notwithstanding the players are god-like compared to my baseball "skills"). I come from near a big league town, Cincinnati, so I had a tendency to look down on Triple A. But if (as Goethe said) “Christianity gave us a reverence for what is below us,” then who am I to look down on these ball yard orchardists? They may be mediocre compared to the big leaguers but then I'm far more mediocre than they.

So I looked up Murata and came across this, from Baseball Prospectus 2016:

“Toru Murata pitched in such exotic locales as Japan, Panama, Venezuela and Akron before getting called up to make his big-league debut as the 26th man in a doubleheader… at the age of 30. He got hit hard and was DFA’ed immediately, but goddammit now the world knows he lived.”

Amen.

Et tu Local Level?

Seeing national politics as hopeless, I've been increasingly interested in local.  And it's interesting if discouraging how citizens even at that level seem to lack power. Witness how developers end up calling the shots for most cities (this from Paul Lambert) on background for something called "Win-Win" agreement between Columbus and her suburbs:

This is a long sad story that begins with the well-intentioned but disastrous ruling by the Federal court in "Penick vs Columbus Board of Education" to force Columbus City Schools to implement a busing program to racially balance Columbus Schools. In his book "Getting Around Brown," Gregory Jacobs argues pretty convincingly that this ruling caused great harm to the fabric of the African-American community in Columbus, and cause the "White Flight" to the suburbs that left Columbus Schools more segregated and poorer than ever, and the suburbs with a bulging schools districts that lacked the economic foundation of the vast commercial development in the City of Columbus.

The Win-Win evolved from an effort ... to [realign] municipal and school district boundaries.

Except to the developers, who were making a fortune building all those thousands of houses desired by the folks trying to escape busing. The Win-Win was created to appease the developers - not homeowners who have little political power.

In that context, it's important to ask why the Win-Win is getting attention again. The answer, in my opinion, is that most of the open space left in desirable school districts like ours is outside of the areas which can be annexed by the suburbs, meaning they can be annexed only by Columbus, which by virtue of the Win-Win, causes such land to be shifted to Columbus Schools. And the developers don't want that.

I'd argue that from that perspective, the Win-Win protects Hilliard Schools from another onslaught of growth to the west of Alton-Darby Rd. But of course, that all depends on what happens with the Big Darby Accord...

... and what the developers want.

Diaristic Wanderings

I'm enjoying the friendly confines of the book room as Steph is entertaining two gals downstairs who are going to dog-sit while we're vacationing soon. I bowed out plan-fully, having squirreled some Columbus IPA upstairs an hour prior. Now I enjoy my cache in my niche (sale on French-derived words today).

I groaned earlier today at the thought of doing violence to my body in the form of a run/lift combo but I had taken the previous day off so it was time and, like prayer, it wasn't bad once I overcame Mount Inertia.

The morning was spent profitably if irritably on work that I wasn't awake for yet, as my compatriots toiled cube-side like Scrooge's apprentices. I plowed into it until the 1pm meeting - one where I couldn't quite enjoy perfect-solitude-amid-others because the leader insisted everyone introduce themselves and say how long we'd been with the company (I nixed that part) and then later she tried to bring me into a discussion about something I was unfamiliar with, which I said I was unfamiliar with. But I got 'er done and was released on my own recognizance.

Sunday I lit out at the tender hour of 8:40am for the Latin Mass. There's just something about that place that is awfully attractive, so much that I bought a pre-Vatican II Mass book to follow along somewhat. I like how there's a lot of Gregorian chant going on, a music that is growing on me. Relaxing and otherworldly, and improvement over the Psalm-singing we do at St. M's.

Of course I miss the Our Father in English, as well as the extra reading (only two readings instead of three, actually four if you count the Psalm.). So there are downsides. But overall a net win and the hour twenty minute service somehow seems shorter than an hour at St. M's.

It was kind of eerie to hear the bells at the Consecration, and watch the altar boy lift up the priest's “cape” at the same time the priest was lifting the chalice or bread. I miss the words of Consecration, not said aloud here, but there's an element of mystery added, almost as if only bells should accompany something that profound and miraculous.

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Raymond Arroyo's book on Mother Angelica's final years is unvarnished and completely unromantic from the world's point of view. She suffered much; it didn't look like one of those insurance commercials of a happy retirees on a beach. Not exactly her “golden years”. Instead it was a gritty, white martyrdom that leads one to see as prophetic her Rosary meditation on the fifth Sorrowful Mystery written during the 1970s: "Give me the grace to persevere to the end, and when the journey is over and I have fought the good fight, let the angels sing the last verse of my earthly song: 'It is finished' (John 19: 30)."

I do find it consoling that even nuns in a monastery have trouble getting along. It's certainly not as surprising or distressing as it might've been for me in, say, 2004, before the priest/bishop scandal or when I found the Catholic blogosphere more harder-edged than expected, but it's consoling in that God loves us even in our sins and that even the best of us have flaws. It's not that sin doesn't matter, but there's a freedom from it defining us. “Become what you are,” is how St. John Paul II put it. Paradoxical and yet true. The gospel says not to fear those who kill the body but those that kill the soul, which means the person we should most fear is not ISIS but, ironically, ourselves.

Even Mother Angelica had a difficult streak but her sufferings seemed less about changing her personality or making her less “pushy” or aggressive and more about it being a purification for herself and others. I tend to see suffering too often intended as punishment or reform, even though Christ suffered and needed neither punishment or reform. Suffering is profoundly puzzling, as Arroyo writes. I can't say, “I deserve this suffering,” because if true everyone would suffer a great deal and there are many varied levels. Instead the only thing is the maddening simple but notoriously wise, “offer it up”.

That the other sisters locked horns in part over something as seemingly innocuous as the “Divine Will” devotion shows just how easy it is to fracture a community. It's understandable why the hierarchy is nervous over the Medjugorje phenomenon - history shows that devotion can quickly devolve into division. But it's certainly plausible the nuns would've fought even without that devotion given that there was a dramatic mix of styles, the more buttoned-down obedience and the more free-wheeling, Spirit-led.

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At mass yesterday the Dominican preacher gave shortest homily I've ever heard in my life.  Six words: “Surrender is the way to holiness.”  He surrendered the rest of his homily it seems.

All the Trump That's Fit to Print

Read the obligatory Jonah Goldberg “G-file” contra Trump, and of course I felt all the dismalness that this election “inspires” in me. It's a bad dream, ongoing, slow motion. Better to disengage, like I did during the Bill Clinton era when I read a huge biography about Stonewall Jackson, the anti-Clinton (but see my blog title).

It's been said ad nauseum but I can't get over how surreal it is that we have two final candidates for president whom I wouldn't trust on Columbus city council let alone as president. For the first time it seems like we're going to get a president we really don't deserve. As much as I didn't like Clinton or Obama, both looked at semi-plausible on paper (or, in Obama's case, without paper trail) in their initial election.

Bill Clinton was a bit shady, but seemed to govern his state well enough. Obama was the flip image: squeaky clean, but without governing experience.

Now we get Hillary, both corrupt and no credible governing experience (the Senate is like college - a six-year vacation from the realities of life - and as Sec of State she had no successes and some notable failures), and Trump has no governing experience and makes ridiculous promises either out of invincible ignorance or conman cunning. He's either a clown, as my stepson refers to him, or despot, but the despot and the clown often look like a joke until they're not. Hitler was initially laughed at and not taken seriously.

I could easily have Trump Derangement Syndrome and certainly I hope do for the country's sake, meaning that I'm greatly exaggerating his potential for mischief, but I can't help but think of the Hilaire Belloc quote given how we love the inversion of the liberals' politically correct speech and yet…:

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

So out of a country of 300+ million we've ended up with two finalists whom we already know suck profoundly even going in. Now it's one thing to get someone as president who we didn't know would hoodwink us, but here we are knowing we're hoodwinked ahead of time.

Columnist Kathleen Parker writes "One might wish that Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) quip about a contest between her and Trump were correct. More or less, he said that corrupt beats crazy every time...For Clinton to prevail over Trump…support depends on the answer to a tricky question: Is she really as liberal as she’s promising to be, or is she faking? Trump-leaning voters face the same challenge: Is he really as awful as he seems, or has he just been bluffing?"

Un-imprimatured Thoughts

I'm reading Raymond Arroyo's fascinating follow-up book on Mother Angelica and came to a mention of her dust-up with Cardinal Mahoney and so I went and skimmed Mahoney's letter on the Eucharist, the trigger for her criticism. I didn't see anything all that offensive in it really. Seems an overreaction. There might be confusion and omissions and soft-pedaling in his statement but I didn't see any heretical smoking gun; he does refer to the Body of Christ and Blood of Christ.

She could be almost Trump-like as far as being unpredictable and blunt although she was defending her Spouse Jesus, and Trump is about defending himself. You could say that in her unpredictable aggressiveness she put the fear of God in bishops tempted to stray into what she saw as heresy, much like I think Trump thinks his unpredictable aggressiveness will give other nations like China pause. Nixon, too, thought it could be good to have foreign leaders think him a little crazy. And of course great fastball pitchers think it's a good thing if the batter thinks he's wild.

There does seem to be a commonality to Pope Francis, Trump and Mother Angelica - an authenticity combined with an autocratic temperament. Perhaps that's true of most good leaders; Douglas MacArthur and General Patton were certainly blunt and autocratic. A circumspect, humble leader is a rare enough bird. We haven't really had a US president like that since Calvin Coolidge I would guess.

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Upon Hearing Leaf Blower on a Fine Spring Eve

It's the Divine Right of Neighbors
To run their motors loud
At the sitting hour, proud
I'm like Sitting Bull, Red Cloud
Aghast what Pale Face has allowed.

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Went to Mass and the homily was extremely short, as is paradoxically often the case with Dominican preachers on weekdays, but I was impressed by how spiritually medicinal this small sermon was.

The priest said simply that many are fearful of the future, of demands that will might be made spiritually, emotionally, physically and how we'll survive.

He made the point of how we can worry all our life about something that won't happen, but the real insight was that God doesn't tell us the future for a reason - the reason being that if we know the future we will be tempted to rely on ourselves to prepare for it rather than to rely on God's help in the moment. That rings awfully true - I think most of the future negativity I want to anticipate is towards the goal of avoiding it using my own stratagems. And yet God's plan is not that I become super adept at trusting myself or devising strategies but to become more reliant on Him, more trusting, more loving and faithful. Cross, meet purposes. Purposes, meet cross.

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Ridiculously chill Saturday for May but a good one to read some William Least Heat Moon, the perfect accompaniment to an enclosed Saturday.

A couple of tasty snippets, the first on elderly black waiters in the South:

“Movement so lentissimo, a perfection of age, is a lovely thing (if it's not in the left lane, in front of you.)”

And, quoting a friend on the “froufrou flourishes” of overwrought culinary cultists who emphasize presentation:

“If the evolutionary process wanted me to like this, my eyeballs would have taste buds.”

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So what to make of the "make up sex", also known as "the interview", that happened between Trump & Megyn?

It reminded me of the '80s movie Broadcast News, in that camera lingering on Kelly during reaction shots.

Plus that plug for the book at the end was lame.  I expect O'Reilly to self-shill, but it's far less becoming for a serious journalist like Kelly.

Jim Geraghy on the Devilish Choice

He writes:

I’m #NeverTrump for life, but I hope my brethren recognize that if we think Trump is terrible choice for president (and he is) and Hillary is a terrible choice for president (and she is), then someone who concludes Trump is slightly less terrible than Hillary . . . is not that far from our own assessment.

I find the incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue as bad as the corrupt oligarchic progressive pathological liar. (Cue jokes: “Wait, which one is which?”) But if you find the incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue slightly less bad than the corrupt oligarchic progressive pathological liar . . . eh, it’s not like we’re miles apart. The bet of pro-Trump conservatives is that the ideologically unmoored, detail-averse mogul will get more right (and Right) by accident than Hillary, who will get everything wrong (and Left) deliberately. Those aren’t particularly good odds, and the potential for Trump going wrong seems pretty catastrophic, but I can see that calculation.

The real problem is when a self-described Constitutional conservative starts arguing that the incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue is a good choice.

Similarly, if a conservative barely prefers the corrupt oligarchic progressive pathological liar devil that he knows over the incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue devil that he doesn’t, that’s not an outlandish perspective either. But once a conservative starts chanting, “Hooray for the corrupt oligarchic progressive pathological liar!”. . . the distance between us starts to feel interstellar.

Percent of Compromise

I tried to put numbers around how much I had to bend in order to vote for the last few Republican presidential candidates:

Bush '00 =   5% (Humble foreign policy, pro-life, good job in TX)
Bush '04 = 50% (Hubristic foreign policy, huge domestic spender, etc...)
McCain =  35%
Romney = 20%
Trump   =  n/a (since won't be voting for him)

Sirach, Knox Version

The Knox translation always win the poetry slam (Sir 43):

Like a jewel the vault of heaven is set above us; the sight of it is glory made visible. Plain to our view is the sun’s passage as it shines out, a very masterpiece of his workmanship, who is the most High...The moon, too, that keeps tryst so faithfully, ever marking how the seasons change, and giving the signal when feast days come round! The moon, whose light must decrease till it vanishes, and then increase to the full circle, the month its name-child; cresset of a watch-fire that lights up the high vault of heaven with its radiant glow. And the stars that deck the sky with their splendour, a beacon-light the Lord kindles high above us; the summons of his holy word answering so loyally, watching so patiently at their post!

Look up at the rainbow, and bless the maker of it; how fair are those bright colours that span heaven with a ring of splendour, traced by an almighty hand.

Liberty, We Hardly Knew Ye

From National Reviews's Jim Geraghty:

Even if a President Trump moved American policy generally rightward -- far from a sure bet -- it would probably come at great cost in liberty. Brad Thor, bestselling author and friend of the Morning Jolt, offers his thoughts on the choice before us:

My greatest concern about Donald Trump, though, isn’t a trait he lacks, but a dangerous one he poses -- in spades. Authoritarianism.

Confident people do not bully and demean others. That is the realm of the weak and insecure. Confident people also do not threaten others, especially not their fellow citizens.

Donald Trump has told us to just wait and see what he does to Jeff Bezos once he gets into the White House. He has told us the American military will do whatever he tells them to do no matter what their reservations. He has promised to prevent American companies from moving outside the United States, regardless of what they believe is best for their businesses.

In other words, Donald Trump has clearly told all of us that he will use the power of the presidency to force people to bend to his will. This is not liberty.

In fact, Donald Trump has never even spoken about liberty. Neither has he spoken about the Constitution and the Founding documents. This is an absolute first in the history of the United States.

Instead, Donald Trump talks about hiring the “best people” and making the “best deals.” This, though, isn’t what made America great, and it certainly isn’t what will return America to its prominence.

The blueprint for America’s success is the ideas of the Framers -- limited, Constitutional governance -- an area in which Donald Trump is criminally ignorant.

Let me be clear that I don’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton. I also don’t want to vote for Donald Trump. My preference is to write-in or vote third party. I think they are both terrible for our future.

But between a big government progressive and a potential despot -- every American must ask themselves where liberty has the greatest chance to survive over the next four years.

By the way, Trump fans, once you start posting people’s home addresses and home phone numbers on Twitter, you’re no longer fighting for liberty. You’re using implied threats and the force of the mob to bend somebody else to your will. You’re replacing forced obedience to the state with forced obedience to you.

To the reader telling me to get onboard with Trump . . . What am I supposed to do, outsource my sense of right and wrong to the crowd? Because Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal jump on the bandwagon, I’ve got to follow?

I’m not wrong. Trump is untrustworthy, flip-flopping slime of awful character, obnoxious, crass, authoritarian in instinct; a bully, ignorant of policy and unwilling to learn, stirring up people’s worst impulses, disrespectful to anyone who doesn’t kiss his ass, likely to enact a plethora of policies I oppose, and likely to affirm Obama’s imperial approach to the presidency. And you want me - as you’re apparently willing to do -- to shrug and hand-wave all of that, just because he’s not Hillary Clinton? Could we set the bar any lower?

Hasn’t history taught us that a Democratic loss isn’t automatically a victory for the conservative cause?

From Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol:

"I just don't think he has the character to be President of the United States. It's beyond any particular issue I disagree with him on, or who he picks as VP or something. The man in the last five days has embraced Mike Tyson, the endorsement of a convicted rapist in Indiana. When it was pointed out to him that he had been convicted of raping a 17 year old girl, he didn't back away, at all. He likes toughness, Donald Trump, that's great, he likes rapists. And then what -- the thing with Ted Cruz's father, he just recycles a National Enquirer story accusing his rival's father being involved in the assassination of John Kennedy."

Ben Stein's view:

Last week and somewhat before that, Mr. Trump raised the possibility that in some future economic crisis, he might respond by lowering government expenses by not paying back all U.S. Treasury debt at 100 cents on the dollar. That is, he would try to walk away from the “full faith and credit” trust that undergirds our national economy.

The trustworthiness of the U.S. debt is also the foundation for all economic activity the world over. If investors in China and Japan are told in advance that they will not be paid back what they invested, that puts all economic transfers on shaky ground. The dollar — and its utter trustiness — is what lies behind every kind of financial matter in the world.

To tamper with it is breathtakingly irresponsible. If the whole worldwide system of trade is put in jeopardy by Mr. Trump, he will be the most dangerous U.S. President there ever has been. Without international trade, without the ability of the U.S. Treasury to finance government operations, just about everything grinds to a halt.

A Trad Mass

Timing-wise, on Mother's Day, I needed to go to an earlier Mass and ended up going to a Latin Mass, the first I'd been to in maybe a dozen years, and third time ever.

It was far more entrancing and otherworldly than I remembered from last time. For one thing, the church interior positively glowed - they'd replaced the some of the dark stained glass windows near the altar with clear glass and it allowed tons of natural light in.

The liturgy itself felt different. There was almost continuous Latin chant which contributed to a reverent and calmed mood. And I love the smell of incense in the morning.

There was a feeling that we were going back in time, and it felt a bit like we were Civil War re-enactors. There were fifteen servers, two deacons and one priest, and the priest and deacons had funny black hats that bobbed up and defied gravity and contributed to the re-enactor feel. The hats were just so self-consciously retro.

At the beginning of the Mass there was a May Crowning, with little children walking up with white and red roses followed by one lad holding with great reverence a gold crown.

The kids walked achingly slowly, which was both impressive and alarming. Obviously they'd been coached to walk slowly but an obedient, reverent child is like a dog walking on hind legs or wearing clothes. My grandma at age 90 could've beat them up to the altar, walker or not.

The readings were in Latin and English and I was confused not to find them anywhere in my Mass Readings book - they weren't the Ascension, celebrated today in the diocese, nor Seventh Sunday of Easter nor Sixth. Later I found out they appear to be exclusive to Pre-Vatican II Missal, called “Sunday after Ascension”. So I missed the Ascension this year for first time ever, but it was worth it if only because there was no Sign of Peace (just a joke!).

The gold crown was taken up and placed on a statue of Mary, and I thought about how the gold that is used in churches could be seen as a way to Christianize the secular, like Christmas. Just as Christmas was a feast that perhaps replaced the pagan winter solstice, the gold the world so craves was used here as an instrument for worshiping God.

I had lots of time to think and be grateful since so much of this Mass was in a language incomprehensible, and my thoughts when to gratitude for the things I can't remember. Specifically, on this Mother's Day, I thought about the connection between Baptism and Motherhood, how Mom fed, clothed, cleaned me and put up with my squalling before the age I could remember her doing so. I thought about how I was the recipient of blessings before I was even conscious of them, just like with infant Baptism we are recipients of a great blessing without even being conscious of it.

The old language and rituals felt like some sort of ancient tongue of mine and surely I had heard it in church when I was under 4 years old, before the Latin Mass was widely discontinued. It reminded me of these lines from Moby Dick:

“I have heard,” murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, “that in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty scholars…Poor Pip brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes.