Matching Tracksuits

catholicism

Watch Me!

Friday 5 June 2015

The third day I was in Poland, I encountered my first Corpus Christi procession.

Suddenly the bells began ringing and eventually I caught sight of a procession coming around from behind the church. Choir boys were dinging small bells and behind them was a procession of relics. A little behind that was the priest, walking under a canopy supported by six men, preceded by a young priest waving an incense burner. The head priest was holding a staff with a gold sun in front of his face — he was led by the arms, for he certainly couldn’t see where he was going. Behind the priest was a group of loosely organized lay-persons, singing a capella. The woman beside me knelt as the group went by.

Not having had much exposure to Catholicism, I’d assumed that the doctrine of transubstantiation was a relic of the past. (I also didn’t know what a monstrance is, but that’s really not the point.) But it is a belief alive and well among more traditionally-minded Catholics, which used to be, I think, much more of a universal description of Poland than it is now. I was in Radom when I first encountered Corpus Christi, and while Radom is no Warsaw, it’s not some backwater village, virtually cut off from the urban realities of contemporary life. Still, when the Corpus Christi passed by, even those not participating knelt.

I used to wonder how many of those kneeling really believed in the doctrine of transubstantiation, that the host really is the body of Christ (hence Corpus Christi). It’s a strikingly literal interpretation of the Bible. When Jesus said, “This is my body,” he meant it.

52 Then the Jews began to argue with one another, saying, “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. 54 He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. 56 He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me. 58 This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.” (John 6:52-58)

The argument is simple: if Jesus was only being metaphorical here, he would have said so. This is why Catholics kneel so much: it’s a belief that we are in the physical presence of Christ, and if that’s the case, kneeling is the logical response.

And so in predominately Catholic countries, on Corpus Christi, when the procession passes by with the glorified body of Christ in the monstrance, the usual reaction is to kneel. Or it was.

bozecialo
Photo by Jakub Szymczuk, used most decidedly without permission

This shot comes from a Corpus Christi procession in Warsaw earlier this month. Two things are striking: the first is the rainbow in the background, a sign of growing tolerance toward homosexuality in Poland. The second is what really caught my eye, though: the folks in the front, enjoying an afternoon at the cafe, appear to be completely oblivious to what’s going on behind them. We can interpret this a couple of ways:

  1. No one at the cafe has noticed that there is a Corpus Christi procession passing by.
  2. No one at the cafe cares that there is a Corpus Christi procession passing by.

The first reason seems unlikely, but we can construct an argument: It happens so often, throughout the country on Boze Cialo (“Corpus Christi” in Polish) that perhaps it’s just common place to them, and they just really don’t think about it. Still, enough people are facing the procession to make this unlikely.

The second reason, to me, is quite sad. It’s not that I’m worried about the de-Catholic-sizing of Poland. I am, and I think it’s a great but inevitable tragedy. The Catholic faith has been the social glue that held Poland together for centuries, and it’s gradually weakening effect suggests a gradually weakening sense of cultural identity. Certainly there’s a lot about the Polish Catholic church that is, quite honestly, horrendous, but babies and bathwater come to mind in such a case.

What’s really depressing about the picture is the fact that this group of young people doesn’t even see it as important to show respect to those participating in the procession. Sure, they clearly don’t believe in the faith once delivered, but showing respect to others beliefs just seems like a sign of maturity that I see as lacking in contemporary society, and clearly it’s spread to the east as well.

Then there’s the irony of the caption: Wszystko jest inne niz 10 lat temu. Boze Cialo jest tutaj inne. Fotografia jest inna – zdjecie zostalo zrobione telefonem komórkowym. “Everything is different than it was ten years ago. Corpus Christi is different. Photography is different: the picture was taken with a cell phone.” So Szymczuk himself was at the cafe, but ironically he stood, perhaps out of respect but more likely to better frame the image.

I showed the picture to K, who was not surprised — nor was I, to be honest. “Things are changing in Poland,” she said (translating — no need to put the original Polish). “Everyone in Poland is Catholic by birth, but fewer and fewer actually believe.”

Again, it’s not the lack of belief that’s troublesome: it’s the lack of respect.

That seems to be the defining characteristic of this new millennium. It’s slowly becoming the case that I’m more surprised when a student is consistently respectful — to me and to peers — throughout the year than I am when someone is consistently disrespectful. And where does this come from? I think a song the DJ played today during the eighth-grade day celebration

I was mercifully unfamiliar with the number, but plugging “watch me song” revealed that it’s someone who goes by the name Silento. The lyrics are fairly typical of today’s music:

Now watch me whip (kill it!)
Now watch me nae nae (okay!)
Now watch me whip whip
Watch me nae nae (want me do it?)

Now watch me whip (kill it!)
Watch me nae nae (okay!)
Now watch me whip whip
Watch me nae nae (can you do it?)

Now watch me

Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh ooh ooh ooh

Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh ooh ooh ooh

Do the stanky leg, do the stanky leg
Do the stanky leg, do the stanky leg
Do the stanky leg, do the stanky leg
Do the stanky leg, do the stanky leg

Now break your legs
Break your legs
Tell ’em “break your legs”
Break your legs

Now break your legs
Break your legs
Now break your legs
Break your legs

Now watch me (bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop)
Now watch me (bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop)

Now watch me whip (kill it!)
Now watch me nae nae (okay!)
Now watch me whip whip
Watch me nae nae (want me do it?)

Now watch me whip (kill it!)
Watch me nae nae (okay!)
Now watch me whip whip
Watch me nae nae (can you do it?)

Now watch me

Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh ooh ooh ooh

Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh ooh ooh ooh

Now watch me you
Now watch superman
Now watch me you
Now watch superman
Now watch me you
Now watch superman
Now watch me you
Now watch superman

Now watch me duff, duff, duff, duff, duff, duff, duff, duff (Hold on)
Now watch me duff, duff, duff, duff, duff, duff, duff, duff, duff

Now watch me (bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop)
Now watch me (bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop)

Now watch me whip (kill it!)
Now watch me nae nae (okay!)
Now watch me whip whip
Watch me nae nae (want me do it?)

Now watch me whip (kill it!)
Watch me nae nae (okay!)
Now watch me whip whip
Watch me nae nae (Can you do it?)

Now watch me

Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh ooh ooh ooh

Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh watch me, watch me
Ooh ooh ooh ooh

This is the “watch me” generation, to the point that a current hit is literally just the words “Watch me!” And this is why I see this as an issue of maturity: who typically runs around saying, “Watch me!”? Now, of course, we have seemingly countless ways to get people to watch us in the form of the endless stream of social media we’re surrounded with. The point is simple: while we’ve always been a narcissistic species, technology has made it easier never to grow out of that.

He says on his blog.

No, watch me!

Baskets 2015

Saturday 4 April 2015

It’s been steadily growing each year, and not just because more and more Poles attach themselves to our ever-growing church community. This year, for instance, there was a story in the parish bulletin about the Polish tradition of the Holy Saturday blessing of the baskets, and as a result, attendance was at an all-time high.

First Confession

Wednesday 11 February 2015

Congratulations to our Girl, the big girl, and for at least fifteen minutes this evening after her first confession in preparation for her first communion, a saint.

The Sign of the Cross

Saturday 13 September 2014

We’re starting simple, with the most basic prayer there is: the Sign of the Cross.

The Boy’s getting it. Sort of.

Temptation

Sunday 24 August 2014

In Mass, there are a lot of temptations every Sunday morning. It really begins well before Mass, when as is always the case, we’re running late. My temper flares, and I have to consciously tell myself that barking out orders won’t make L put her shoes on any faster. But once we’re there, the temptations only increase.

Inordinate pride is a big sticking point. I like to say that my children will be well-behaved in Mass because

  1. they understand the ontological reality of what’s going on there and respect and believe in it;
  2. I am such an awesome parent that I have trained them like good little monkeys; and
  3. I don’t want to disrupt anyone else’s experiences in Mass.

In reality, it’s that second one that gets top billing: I’m just embarrassed because my kid isn’t as saintly as that kid, two pews up, just to the right.

Clothing is another area of temptation. Women come to Mass dressed like they’re going out for a night on the town, and men come dressed like they’re going to the beach or for a hike in the mountains. “Can you believe he/she wore that to Mass?” is on the tip of my tongue, and sometimes the temptation is just too great, and I point out to K the fashion offender. “Don’t they know why we come to Mass?” I always finish, then regret that I even brought it up, that I gave into the temptation.

Then of course there are the temptations of distraction:

  • “Boy, that lector is really stumbling over that reading. Perhaps he should have reviewed more.”
  • “Oh no! She’s singing the responsorial psalm?!”
  • “Dear God in heaven, could he distribute communion any slower?”
  • “Really? Checking Facebook just after receiving the Eucharist?”
  • “Well, if I’d known he was giving the homily, I might have just stayed home.”
  • “Why in the world would anyone select that hymn?”
  • “Doesn’t he know any better than to wipe his nose with his right hand just before we do the sign of peace?”
  • “Cheapskates: they never put anything in the offering basket.”
  • “I’m still kneeling here: you should be too so I don’t have your nasty hair in my face.”
  • “There is nothing in the missal to indicate that we should all be holding hands during the Our Father! Uggh!”
  • “If that kid doesn’t stop putting that kneeler up and down and up and down and up and down, I’m going to…”
  • “Dang, if that guy behind me sang any more off key, he’d be singing in a whole different mode.”
  • “Wow, that’s a big hat.”
  • “Really, only the priest should be praying in the orans position!”
  • “That is just the nastiest perfume on the planet. What is it? Eau de Dead Fish?”
  • “That’s right — do the Judas Shuffle: receive and leave. There’s piety for you.”
  • “You snotty little teenagers: this is the crying room, not the ‘don’t want to sit through Mass and would rather chat it up with my friends’ room.”

Of course in the summer, there’s a whole new batch of temptations, most commonly about clothing selections. It usually goes like this: “He is a grown man, with graying hair and kids who appear college age, and he’s still wearing shorts to Mass? Does he not realize that there comes a time in one’s life when one understands that comfort is not always the be-all, end-all goal in life?” That thought is more often than not amended with, “And he’s wearing flip-flops for heaven’s sake! There’s not a beach within three hours’ drive of here, and even if there were and even if you were going to the beach immediately after Mass, you should be dressed like you’re going to the beach while at Mass especially when you’re a grown man!” Occasionally I can match it with another gripe: “She’s wearing that top to Mass?! Really?” And every now and then, I can tack on one more: “And their teenage daughter is wearing tight short shorts?”

Pride is truly at the heart of all sin.

Will and Temptation

Wednesday 6 August 2014

prayerIt’s far too late for this little girl to be heading to bed, but in these last few days of summer vacation, we’ve grown lax.

We kneel for evening prayers, and I think of something Father L said to me today during confession, and it gives me an idea.

“In the name of the Father and of the Son,” we begin, already falling into that rhythm that shows we aren’t really thinking about what we’re saying. We begin, and as we pray “Thy will be done,” I stop L.

“What’s something you can do to help make this come about, to help bring about God’s will on Earth?” L shrugs, so I clarify: “What is God? He’s love, right? So to fulfill God’s will, we must love. So what’s something you could do to help fulfill that?”

She thinks for a moment. “Not yell at E,” she replies confidently. We all do it: we get frustrated or worried with what the little two-year-old bundle of fascination and excitement is about to do, see potential disaster (or sometimes actual disaster), and call out, “E!” He heads for furniture with a drill: “E!” He snaps the head off a doll: “E!” So L and I talk about how we should all take that to heart.

Returning to the prayer: “and lead us not into temptation.” Time for reteaching: “What are we sometimes tempted to do, something that really goes against God’s will of love?”

“Yell at E.”

That seems to be the key to meaningful prayer for a seven-year-old: connect it to real life, make it simple, and reinforce. Sort of like teaching in the classroom…

Regret and Repetition

Saturday 14 June 2014

It’s early June: my thoughts always turn to an arrival in Polska. I wrote this last summer, after our return, and discovered only now that I had never posted it.

1

“Never regret anything, because at the time, it was exactly what you wanted.”

When I went to vist the school in Lipnica in which I taught for seven years, the English teacher, a former student of mine, invited me to her English lesson. As she was taking roll, I wandered about the room, looking at how the relatively new Foreign Language Workshop had been decorated. I found a poster with English sayings, including one about regret that I couldn’t recall ever having heard.

“Never regret anything, because at the time, it was exactly what you wanted.”

“So true,” I thought initially. Further thought made me wonder, though: perhaps this quote takes a simplistic view of both desire and regret.

Desires don’t come from nowhere. They aren’t frivolous imps that leap into our head, unbidden, unwanted. They arise, consciously or unconsciously, from our values, habits, and worldview. As a Catholic, I have to view some of these desires as sinful, as inherently evil. They are temptations, and I am called to overcome those temptations. If I choose not to, I’ve betrayed God, myself, and to some degree or another, my fellow humans. (After all, the Confiteor we Catholics all recite at the beginning of Mass includes this notion: “I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.” Emphasis added.) So if these desires are temptations to sin, and I give in to these temptations, and later I want to repent, how can I possibly not regret them? True, these actions were exactly what I wanted at the time, but that was because I don’t yet have a perfectly formed conscience. Further, if I don’t truly regret the sin, how can I confess the sin?

Yet not all desires are sinful desires, and yet we still end up wishing we had made different choices. Is this regret? I suppose. Is it the same kind of regret discussed above? Somehow, it seems different. Perhaps, then, we need to differentiate, look at some synonyms:

apologize, be disturbed, be sorry for, bemoan, bewail, cry over, cry over spilled milk, deplore, deprecate, disapprove, feel remorse, feel sorry, feel uneasy, grieve, have compunctions, have qualms, kick oneself, lament, look back, miss, moan, mourn, repent, repine, rue, weep, weep over

“Regret” seems the correct term for the theological notion associated with sin and forgiveness, as do deplore, lament, and grieve. For the second, less theological (and in some senses, then, less important or significant emotion), miss, feel sorry, or even rue seem appropriate. Working with those differentiations, I regret some of the sinful choices I’ve made in the past, which means I wish not to repeat them; I rue some of the poor decisions I made in the past, which means to me not so much that I wouldn’t make the same choice but that I dislike some of the consequences that came with that choice. I rued having left Poland, so I went back.

I think early in my life, I confused those two forms of regret, as do many people, I think, and that confusion as the source of the quote got me thinking of all this. In my case, I disavowed the existence of theological regret, and I overemphasized the things I rued.

2

Every time we come to Poland, we repeat: Krakow, Zakopane, even the outdoor museum in Zubrzyca (though this year, it was part of a class trip with L). This repetition is understandable in large measure because much of the repetition comes from meeting with friends and family. Yet it doesn’t change the fact that very little changes in our visits to Poland.

Lipnica Wielka Centrum
Lipnica Wielka Centrum

It occurred to me, though, the other night that part of it might be an unconscious unwillingness to move outside of a certain comfort zone in Poland. Yet that seems simplistic: it’s not as if I don’t know my way around the country and culture; it’s not as if I’m fearful of new situations here. I speak the language with passable proficiency: there are few times that I feel unable to express myself, and I even managed to talk myself out of trouble a time or two.

Yet as I wandered about the fields of Lipnica, with views I know almost better than the area in which I grew up, I wondered if it might be something else, something that I hadn’t experienced in literally years but which I knew all too well earlier in life, and multiple times at that. It struck most forcefully in 1999, when I left Poland for the first time and soon found I was desperate to return to Poland. It wasn’t that I wanted to return to the place as much as I wanted to return to that part of my life, to relive it in a sense. Returning for a short visit in the summer of 2000, I found a line from a song running through my head constantly, for I wanted to “hold on to these moments as they pass.” And so it occurred to me one evening this summer in Poland that I do the same thing every visit, revisiting places in order to relive the past, if only for a brief moment. Then that moment passes, we all move on, temporally and physically, and I find myself later reliving the relived moment again, only in my mind.

DSC_5885
Dom Nauczyciela

And so I find comfort in the places that haven’t changed much over the years. The exterior of the teachers’ housing block in Lipnica, for example, hasn’t really changed a bit since I first arrived in 1996. There are new windows; there is a new flue for the oil furnace in the basement; there are a few more cables strung across the facade. Other than that, though, it looks identical. It gives the illusion that, while the rest of the world has moved on, I’ve stayed the same, which is a ridiculous notion. But for a brief moment, it’s comforting.

Why?

Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man can’t be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

Milan Kundera

The easy answer is that it’s a vain attempt to deny my own mortality to myself, the stuff ironically both of melodrama and of great literature. And while there might be some element of unconscious truth to that, I don’t feel I really fear death or even give it much of a thought at all. Occasionally in the last few months I’ve surprised myself with the realization that I’m now in my forties, but this is not a mid-life crisis but a how-time-has-slipped-by-so-quickly crisis. And besides, this doesn’t explain the same longing I felt — only much, much more intensely — in 1999 and 2000 that led to my return to Poland. Surely I wasn’t fretting about my mortality in my mid- to late-twenties. Only nineteenth-century poets do that.

The longing, in fact, was much simpler (and significantly more naive) than that. It arose from the fear that the past was better than the present, and worse still, that the past was likely better than the future. A bit melodramatic, I’m sure, but those were the worries and concerns I had at times. It explains a lot of the angst I experienced when younger.

I no longer feel that way at all, though. Children make it impossible to look backward with the same longing. Children make it impossible to think the past was better than the future. Children make it impossible to regret the passing of time. Hence, as I wandered the fields of Lipnica, that strange longing to return to the past, while present, was only so strong as for me to notice its relative absence in recent years.

Re-reading Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, though, I discovered a forgotten quote that had so struck me the first time I read it that I made not of it on the slip of paper I’d slid into the back of the book and discovered as I opened it anew a few days ago. “Happiness is the longing for repetition.” Perhaps I’ve had it wrong: perhaps this repetition is simple happiness?

Children understand this simple truth: it’s why they can say or do the same thing over and over and over and over and still find it just as funny and enjoyable the tenth time as it was the first. It’s why they can swing — the ultimate in repetitive activities — for hours on end and still do the same tomorrow.

Religions understand this simple truth: it’s why all religions have ritual calendars, calling for the repetition of rituals throughout the year for all eternity.

Holy Saturday 2014

Saturday 19 April 2014

Jesus is in the grave. Crucified yesterday, he lies wrapped in ribbons of burial cloth, awaiting tomorrow’s resurrection. Such is the teaching of the Church, which we recite every Sunday:

For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

And so he is buried.

The Polish tradition — and the tradition of other cultures, I’m sure — is to create a tomb for Jesus’s body in the church. One of the figures is taken from the cross and laid in the tomb, and parishioners — usually firemen — stand watch until Sunday morning.

One of the vicars in our parish is Polish — this year, he decided, with the pastor’s blessing, to bring the tradition of Jesus’s tomb to the parish of St. Mary Magdalene. And so the Paschal Triduum feels a little more like we’re in Poland every year.

Past years involved the pastor, who had never performed the traditional Holy Saturday basket blessing, coming for a quick prayer of the baskets of perhaps fifteen Polish families. Our pastor, however, has fallen in love with the tradition, has it announced several times before Holy Saturday, and has put it on the altar servers’ schedule so that we have a full procession.

The number attending has grown as well. After an opening prayer in Polish, Father W asked, “How many of you don’t speak Polish?” At least a third of the assembled raised their hands. Seeing so many, Father W, like last year, turned it into a primarily-Polish-but-quite-bilingual-blessing-nonetheless.

There are some things still missing, though. No crucifix lay at the front of the grave, with parishioners standing in a line, dropping to their knees at the fourth or fifth pew and continuing the rest of the way on their knees, all bending to kiss various parts of the crucifix. Blocks of wood have not replaced bells during the Lenten Mass. The day was not preceded with a Good Friday of manic baking and cleaning, just baking and cleaning. More reminders that the Polish community here is a distinct minority, a group that has largely assimilated into mainstream culture but still managed to keep the most important of traditions. In other words, it didn’t feel Polish; it felt American-Polish.

And then there are the things that would never occur in Poland: the fascination with the custom (after all, custom often becomes merely customary), the eagerness for photos of the regionally dressed (after all, if you see it almost every day in one form or another — especially when you live near a tourist region — it’s nothing special, merely every day)

But when it’s something you see once a year? Well, who can blame us all?

 

Leaving

Sunday 4 August 2013

One thing I dislike about the Catholic church: you get a really good priest in your parish, one who gives thought-provoking homilies and is a fantastic confessor, and then the diocese transfers him…

After the Rain

Saturday 13 July 2013

DSC_5955
Church of the Transfiguration, Jabłonka

Odpust

Sunday 23 June 2013

It’s a hard word to translate: odpust most strictly means “indulgence” or “pardon.” But there are other, wider meanings. In Pyzówka today, it would best be translated as “church fair” or “church fete.” In short, today was the Solemnity of John the Baptist, the patron saint of Pyzówka’s small parish. (Technically, the Solemnity is tomorrow, but who wants to have a church fair on a Monday?)

VIV_3994

That means a festive Mass, with the majority of parishoners dressed in traditional highlander clothing and a string band playing during the offering and communion. And because G is a member of the group, I was able to join them before Mass as the got in tune and rehearsed for a moment.

VIV_3997

Mass began and I stayed with the band as they took their place in the choir loft. And suddenly, there was the reminder of what Catholicism in America used to look like: no Extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers; the priests alone distributed Communion. Additionally, while there was no actual rail, so to speak, parishoners behaved like there was an altar rail.

VIV_3999

After Mass, there was Adoration complete with a procession around the church.

VIV_4008

VIV_4020

But for the children, all that was, in a sense, only a prelude to the real highlight of the day: stall after stall of venders selling one (or more) of four things: cheap plastic toys, cheap plastic jewelry, bags of candy, and/or fireworks.

VIV_4026

Dolls, gummies, tractors, bracelets ping pong sets, rings, lawn mowers, hard candy.

VIV_4027

A jarmark for kids. We returned with mountains of silliness and sweet gesture. The Girl decided we needed to buy something for the Boy. She chose a toy, asked how much it was, and paid for it with her own money. And she even haggled (with some encouragement from me) the price down five zloty.

VIV_4028

She becomes more Polish every moment.

VIV_4042

VIV_4045

With her godmother

First

Sunday 5 May 2013

F must have heard it a dozen times today. “You won’t remember your baptism,” all the “aunts” and “uncles” would have begun, “but you’ll always remember your first communion.”

The rainy weather will also stick in your memories — the huddling under umbrellas as you make your way from the parish center to the church, some more others less worried about getting soaked. With so much white on parade, there must have been worries about soiling the all-white outfits so many wore.

But everyone made it inside relatively safely, with F standing toward the rear of his line stiff as a soldier.

“You won’t remember your baptism,” he would soon hear, but those are words from people baptized in Poland in infancy, like the vast majority of Poles. “You won’t remember your baptism” is much like saying “you won’t remember your birth,” but it’s not always quite the case.

Some of us have such a memory. The same priest who baptized me two years ago gave the homily today, the same kind of warm, welcoming homily he always gives. Our dear Father Theo from Columbia, a man from whom his love of God almost glows.

“Welcome, my brothers and sisters, to this holy place,” he begins every Mass, and though he says it consistently, it always sounds fresh and inviting.

But today wasn’t about the homily, or the hymns, or the responsorial psalm. Today, it was about a group of kids taking their first communion — as big an event in most Catholic families as a wedding, I’d wager.

Indeed, in a Polish family, the similarities are striking. Both are highly social events, always including a large party afterward with food and drink, conversation into the evening.

#39 — Destroying Frescoes of Happiness

Friday 29 March 2013

The tendency to spread evil beyond oneself

In 1715, officials transferred Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Night Watch from its location at the Kloveniersdoelen, which served as rehearsal grounds for local militia, to the Amsterdam Town Hall. These officials wanted to place the painting between two columns.

The problem was, it wouldn’t fit. So they did the obvious. They trimmed it.

17th century copy with indication of the areas cut down in 1715. || Image from Wikimedia

Such a cavalier attitude toward art is completely unthinkable today. Modern cultures value historical works of art and go to great lengths to protect and preserve them.

Taliban destruction of Buddhas of Bamiyan || Image from Wikimedia

When the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001, the world decried the destruction of art of such historic value — an artifact of the world cultural heritage. Prior to the destruction, a delegation offered something of a ransom for the statues, offering to pay the Taliban not to destroy them.

I am horrified at these acts of destruction, but how often do I commit worse acts with my words? Weil writes,

The tendency to spread evil beyond oneself: I still have it! Beings and things are not sacred enough to me. May I never suely anything even though I be utterly transformed into mud. To sully nothing, even in thought. Even in my worse moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could have been happy for that moment? (49)

Cutting someone down with a comment or a gesture is infinitely easier and quicker dynamiting statues or trimming canvases, and what I’m cutting when I do that — a soul — is vastly more precious than even the most beautiful creation of humanity. Why am I so willing to do this while I’d never think of destroying this or that painting, this or that sculpture? Perhaps it has to do with the ease and the lack of immediately visible consequence. An injured soul reveals itself only in the eyes, in the tone of voice, in a slumped posture, and it can skillfully hide the injuries behind a mask.

#38 — Imagination and Void

Thursday 28 March 2013

Parched
Parched by BenedictFrancis

The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass (62).

Augustine famously said of God in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are rest-less till they find their rest in you.” Others have simply reformulated this as the “God-shaped hole,” the “terrifying bottomless abyss opening up inside us which we would do anything to fill” (Source). Yet perhaps Weil’s vision is a little more apt: it’s not a single hole, but a series of fissures that permeate our whole existence. That goes a long way in explaining why we’re so apt at blocking the various graces that we experience on a daily basis. We’re like kids with buckets of mud after an earthquake, trying to seal this crack, that fissure with something completely inadequate.

As alluded to earlier, Father Robert Barron rightly compares the substitutes with which we fill these holes to addictions. The analogy couldn’t be more apt. Addictions control us; we react without thinking through our conditioned addictions, and that false consistency — always “knowing” how to respond — gives us some sort of emotional comfort that accompanies the physical or psychological “comfort” that most addictions provide. And yet it is our addictions that close us off from so many positives in the world. Indeed, addiction in its severest form can become our world, at which point I suppose we’re living our whole life in a small little crack through which grace could enter.

#37 — Void and Evil

Wednesday 27 March 2013

The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposes evil (56).

The problem of evil for many is the single most convincing argument for an atheistic stance. Dr. Peter Kreeft, of Boston College, writes, “The problem of evil is the most serious problem in the world. It is also the one serious objection to the existence of God.” He continues,

More people have abandoned their faith because of the problem of evil than for any other reason. It is certainly the greatest test of faith, the greatest temptation to unbelief. And it’s not just an intellectual objection. We feel it. We live it.

Standford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes it thus:

  1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
  2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
  3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
  4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
  5. Evil exists.
  6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
  7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

The problem of evil has a mirror image, though I didn’t see it for many years. For many years, I encountered only the standard responses about the limits of human knowledge and “the best of all possible worlds” argument. Then there are the theodicies, which all reduce down to the proposition that freedom of will necessitates the option to do evil. But the flip side of the problem of evil is the problem of good: if things are the result of atheistic chance, why is there beauty, and relatively speaking, so much of it? Indeed, humans seem obsessed with the creation of beauty, though we don’t always agree with the definition of “beauty” — especially in the case of modern art.

Thus, in a sense, Weil’s words constitute a kind of theodicy in miniature. Evil has often been described as a void, as a privation of good — and thus, having no real existence. It’s the absence of good. That does little to explain why a loving God wouldn’t do something about the evil that seems to suffuse the world, but it does reframe the issue in a way that puts evil in the proper relation to good: a void.

#36 — Elevation and Abasement

Tuesday 26 March 2013

It’s a great paradox of Christianity, and though it has its roots in Heraclitus, it echoes throughout the history of Christianity (and other religions).

Elevation and abasement. A woman looking at herself in a mirror and adorning herself does not feel the shame of reducing the self, that infinite being which surveys all things, to a small space. In the same way every time we raise the ego (the social ego, the psychological ego, etc.) as high as we raise it, we degrade ourselves to an infinite degree by confining ourselves to being more than that. When the ego is abased (unless energy tends to raise it by desire), we know we are not that.

A beautiful woman who looks at her reflection in the mirror can very well believe that she is that. An ugly woman knows that she is not that (79).

T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, phrases it, “The way up is the way down.”

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant-
Among other things – or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

He similarly begins one poem in the quartet with the line “In my beginning is my end” only to end the poem with its reversal, “In my end is my beginning.”

Arthur Bennet phrases it still differently:

Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up, that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown, that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision.

Of course, it all has its roots in the Gospels. John 3:30 sums up the proper relationship succinctly: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Yet it’s not just in this one short passage that we see this paradox that the way down is the way up.

Amen, I say to you, that you, who have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit on the seat of his majesty, you also shall sit on twelve seats judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every one that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting. And many that are first, shall be last: and the last shall be first. (Matthew 19:28-30)

In case we didn’t quite get it, there’s a repetition a few verses later: “So shall the last be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16). And in Mark, we read a negative re-statement: “Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all” (10:43, 44).

Yet what is appealing about this? Why do almost all religions include a sense that the way to true greatness for humanity is abasement? Perhaps it’s because it’s one of the hardest things to do as a human.

#35 — Beauty and the Soul

Monday 25 March 2013

Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul.

At the very core, all forms of beauty are the same. A lovely painting, the smile of a child, a moving piece of music, an animal in motion, gripping poetry, a bright orange sunset, fluid dance, and all other forms of beauty act upon the human heart similarly. Even in the most fleeting beauty, there’s a sense of timelessness and eternity. That paradox explains why we simultaneously assume the beauty is eternal and feel a pang of remorse from the nagging sense that it can’t possibly last.

My daily experiences with the beauty of my children are an incarnation of that paradox. They seem always to be changing, and the beauty of that moment is always so short as they learn more, master more, question more.