Golden Age DreamsThe other day I re-read Mary Eberstadt’s essay from 2008, ‘The Vindication of Humanae Vitae‘. It gives much food for thought regarding baleful results of the sexual revolution. This afternoon, I found myself before The Golden Age by Lucas Cranach Read More
CorruptionIn a recent essay, Ian Cawood writes: ‘From the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Frédéric Monier, Mark Knights and Jens Engels, it has become clear that, historically, corruption is that conduct by officials and corporations that public opinion (expressed Read More
Golden Age DreamsThe other day I re-read Mary Eberstadt’s essay from 2008, ‘The Vindication of Humanae Vitae‘. It gives much food for thought regarding baleful results of the sexual revolution. This afternoon, I found myself before The Golden Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder in Oslo’s National Museum. The visitor is referred by a curator’s note to Hesiod’s account of mankind’s dawn when ‘In harmony they lived, with countless flocks of sheep, at ease with all the gods’. Cranach renders the ideal in terms of innocent frolicking, with eros tamed to become harmless play. The heady revolutionary years from the late 60s were marked by much arrogance. It seems to me, though, impossible to understand them without acknowledging the dream, on the part of many, of historical fulfilment of Cranach’s vision. That dream has long since evaporated. Intense is the pain of innocence lost, also when the fact is unacknowledged. How vital, then, to remind the world that innocence can be restored, not by our endeavour, but by a grace that recreates nature. Human attempts to engender a golden age tend to have infernal consequence. The Age to Come that is of God, meanwhile, heals and elevates. It comes to each of us, if we will but freely receive it.
CorruptionIn a recent essay, Ian Cawood writes: ‘From the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Frédéric Monier, Mark Knights and Jens Engels, it has become clear that, historically, corruption is that conduct by officials and corporations that public opinion (expressed through elections, petitions, complaints to watchdogs, polling and the media – both factual and satirical) will not tolerate. If the public does not know about the extent of corrupt behaviour (as in many countries around the world with limited press freedoms or plutocratic control of the media), then it is possible to maintain a corrupt regime […]. What is far more troubling is when information regarding the poor standards of governance is widely reported, yet the public chooses to ignore it […]. This is the great danger of identity politics. As long as the political leader or party embodies the dogma that a significant proportion of the electorate supports […], the integrity of politicians and those they appoint, or the societal impact of the policies they implement, are of negligible importance to their supporters.’ This is, as Cawood notes, a deeply troubling state of affairs.
Qui cantat bis oratEach year the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church in North America organises SingCon, at once a festival of sacred music, a liturgical retreat, and a seminar with workshops. I was privileged to be invited to this year’s event, held at St Elias the Prophet Church in Brampton, near Toronto, to give a key-note talk: ‘He Who Sings Prays Twice. How?’ The singing of birds has ceased, or very nearly. Throughout the Western world — and I expect in much of the East, though I’m untravelled there, so will keep from making assumptions — shrubs, trees, and bushes stand as if exanimate, bereft of the trilling jubilation that seemed until recently to voice the world’s soul. A century back, Thomas Hardy could naturally write in a poem: The thrushes sing as the sun is going, And the finches whistle in ones and pairs, And as it gets dark loud nightingales In bushes Pipe, as they can when April wears, As if all Time were theirs Anyone anywhere would at once have known what he meant, even those who lived in coal-mining towns far to the north of Hardy’s Dorset Downs. Even miners whose daily contact with birds was confined to carrying into the bowels of the earth fated canaries, heralds, not of life, but of possible asphyxiation, could have bicycled out into the country on a Sunday after church to listen with relish and reassurance to nature’s symphony. Today our experience finds readier expression in a line by Goethe Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Out in the wood the little birds keep quiet. In a conversation from 2010 with Vadim Jendreyko, in the wonderful documentary portrait entitled, The Woman with the Five Elephants, the great Ukrainian translator of Dostoyevsky, Svetlana Geier picks up on this line from Goethe’s Wanderers Nachtlied, ‘The Wanderer’s Night-Song’, and asks, ‘But how can we know that they’re there and keep quiet?’ We do know, now. For the little birds are dead, made extinct by exhaust, wasted habitats, or a changing climate, at any rate those that have not made it to some other wood elsewhere in the hope of a slightly longer lease of life and song. The silence that results is uncanny: the articulation in muteness of doleful absence. This muffling of the woods has its parallel in human affairs. I recently came across this observation by the medieval historian Chiara Frugoni, who draws a line of contrast between the urban reality of towns in St Francis’s day and ours: Today, as then, cities have their sounds and smells, but these are generated now in large part by traffic and general pollution. Yet the voices of men keep almost entirely quiet. Nobody sings any more except oddballs and eccentrics; even artisans who until recently accompanied their work by whistling or humming are dumbstruck now, preferring to listen to the voices and music of others, prerecorded; in so far as they speak, it is at most to voice impatience. This statement touches me. It is obviously true. You can listen to the whole talk here.
ExerciseHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. 1 Cor 9.16-27: That is how I run, intent on winning. Luke 6.39-42: Can the blind lead the blind? When I think of the Apostle Paul, I don’t spontaneously think of an athlete. I can’t see him running in Chariots of Fire. Paul comes across as a bookish, sedate man. He’d most happily have spent his free time in constructive argument. He would have walked a lot, like everyone in Antiquity did, unless they were filthy rich. But would he have run? This counter-intuitive note adds force to Paul’s choice of an image with which to describe Christian life: ‘All runners in the stadium try to win. I run intent on winning.’ It’s good to be reminded that the Christian life is akin to physical exercise. The metaphor speaks to a time in which anyone who doesn’t go regularly to the gym, or prepare to run marathons, is looked on as a bit of a freak. I find it interesting to see that a near-universal consensus has emerged regarding the desirability of the exercise and moulding of the body in pursuit of well-being and good looks. Imagine what might happen if people would invest similar energy in nurturing and forming their souls, aspiring to spiritual beauty. The world would be transformed. As any exercise App will tell you, the secret to lasting impact is regular effort. It’s better to do something modest every day than to go for a binge-workout every two weeks. This just leaves you exhausted — and might damage your body. On this last day of retreat we may ask ourselves: what’s the state of my regimen of spiritual exercise? A retreat is a golden opportunity to make healthy resolutions. Athletes in the stadium run, Paul stresses, in the hope of winning a prize. What great goods God has in store for our souls, if only we’d equip ourselves to receive them! We can start by noticing the cataracts that blur our interior vision. If a blind man leading another blind man runs risks, what might we say of a blind man who sets out to sprint on a race course? Let’s, then, work out where our blind spots are, and ask the Divine Physician to heal them. Restoring sight is what he does. If we let him act, freedom and confidence of inward movement will be restored to us. Then we shall stand a chance of being truly useful to others, unmarred by that false, blind judgement which the Gospel condemns as hypocrisy. From Chariots of Fire, image on Wikipedia.
Right QuestionsHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. 1 Cor 8.1-13: A man may imagine he understands something Luke 6.27-38: Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate. ‘A man’, writes Paul, ‘may imagine he understands something, but still not understand anything in the way he ought to’. That statement speaks to our time. For us, now, ‘understanding’ has to a large extent become a subset of the imagination. We fancy something, make some sort of projection, then fashion our ‘understanding’ accordingly, carefully sifting, selecting and deselecting material in order to underpin our chosen hypothesis. Artificial Intelligence, in which many place a confidence I can’t see is warranted, is a terrific ally in this endeavour. It humours us, ever ready to collate ‘evidence’, such as it is, that corroborates points of view on which we’re already fixed. This is seductive: we like to be affirmed and proved right. But if we are in any way committed to a search for truth, for the real, the tendency is deadly. Growth in understanding presupposes critical questioning. The ancient Greeks knew this. The Socratic method of probing enquiry was until not long ago the paradigm of education in the West. That is no longer so. As a result we’ve grown less resilient in response to opposition. Faced with people who do not agree with us, we increasingly sulk, threaten, or fly into a rage. Paul’s formation was Rabbinic, not Socratic. But the Rabbis were great questioners as well; indeed, part of the Rabbinic approach was to work out which questions were licit and helpful, which were not. Paul points towards this kind of enquiry when he says there is a way in which we ought to understand things. The believer asks questions already knowing the final answers. They are given him in Scripture, in the teaching of the Church. The believer’s concern is to discover how the answers may most helpfully be applied to his own time’s specific predicaments. That’s our task, yours and mine, right now. It is the Church’s task to formulate the right questions about the uncertain, menacing times in which God has placed us. By sticking to that task we may plausibly help our contemporaries see the direction in which they ought to be going. Our questions will at times provoke. So we must be prepared to face the reactions evoked above: the world’s bad temper, intimidation, even fury. That’s nothing to get too excited about. We must carry on regardless, careful to observe the terms prescribed in the Gospel for Christian engagement with the world: even as we speak the truth to it, we must love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who abuse us, asking the Lord to pour out his compassionate blessing on all. Can I see the wood for the trees?
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Today is the feast day of St. Januarius - bishop and martyr 🙏 Januarius was born in Italy in the late third century, and rushed through his holy studies - being ordained at 15 and named Bishop at 20. He helped hide Read More 1 Comments
Kanturk & Lismire Parish To mark the Jubilee Year of St Francis of Assisi and the Season of Creation, the Parishes of Kanturk & Lismire and Castlemagner are delighted to host well-known Gospel Singer James Kilbane on Sunday September 27th at Read More 5 Likes
September 15th - Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows: O God, who willed that, when your Son was lifted high on the Cross, his Mother should stand close by and share his suffering, Read More 2 Comments
