New Song - Page 16 of 49 - Notes from a Catholic marriage

St. Martin of Tours and advent of Advent

If you pray the breviary regularly, you get a glimpse into liturgical history. Even today, if almost all the readings and prayers for a saints’ day are particular to the day rather than drawn from the “commons” in the back then it’s a safe bet this saint was a big deal in the Middle Ages.

Pretty much everything in the breviary is special for St. Martin. He was much loved across Christian Europe, and in the decades leading up to the year 600 dioceses all over the west adopted the practice of fasting from St. Martin’s day until Christmas on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, in imitation of the forty days before Easter. It was known as “St. Martin’s Lent,” and was later abbreviated to four weeks to become what we know as the Advent Season.

In keeping with the day before a fast, Martinmas was a day of feasting. Farmers slaughtered their meat animals and, incidentally, paid their taxes and tithes; children wandered from door to door begging for alms like trick-or-treaters today; bon fires blazed, goose was consumed, and a good time was had by all.

Even though Martinmas is no longer the liturgical beginning of Advent, it still works for me like a signpost: “Start thinking about Advent and Christmas!” Time to make those Christmas lists, think about Advent resolutions, and make sure you fixed that Advent decoration that broke last year. Here in the Holmes house, it is a doubly special day because our fourth child, Regina, was born on this day ten years ago. Wednesdays are too full for partying, but come Saturday we’ll have a delayed Martinmas celebration with a bon fire, hot dogs, music, entertainment, birthday cake and ice cream, and presents for the queen of the feast.

So read about St. Martin and find out why the people of the Middle Ages loved him so much. If nothing else, walk around today with a festive spring in your step! And remember that he was considered the patron saint of taverns. I have written about my own devotional approach to the day here.

How Noah brought home the bacon: the riddle of Genesis 5:29

I love senior thesis time at Wyoming Catholic College. Students jump in over their heads, take on bold ideas, thrash around, and eventually ask their teachers the most wonderful, fundamental, and challenging questions. This year one of the women is writing about how the Eucharist relates to the importance of food in general—how cool is that?—and found herself dealing with the passage in Genesis 9 where Noah receives permission to eat meat. Her thesis director sent her to me for help, and….

Well, it’s time to expose myself. For years now I have read that passage in a way I have never seen in any commentary and yet in a way which seems more obvious to me with time. Never having an occasion to talk about it, I have never bothered to submit my interpretation to scrutiny and possible refutation. Maybe I have been deluded all this time? Maybe I’m off the map? Or maybe, just maybe, I’m on to something? Judge for yourself. This write-up is for Alexis. Continue reading “How Noah brought home the bacon: the riddle of Genesis 5:29”

5 Steps from All Souls’ to All Saints’

November seems like the perfect place for All Souls’ Day. Although a time a harvest, it is also a time of dwindling life and light, a time that signifies the approach of death. Coming immediately after All Saints’ Day, when the Church Militant venerates the Church Triumphant and those in glory pray for us, All Souls’ Day has us attend to the remaining part of the Mystical Body.

The placement of All Souls’ Day right after All Saints’ Day also makes sense from a historical perspective. According to Dom Gregory Dix, our liturgical veneration of the saints is ultimately rooted in an early belief in purgatory. He traces the history this way:

The earliest Christians believed that the deceased faced the possibility of purgative fires. So when a Christian died, it was customary to offer prayers for that person on the anniversary of his or her death.
When a Christian was martyred, the community felt strange about praying for his soul, because it was confident the deceased had bypassed purgatory entirely. On the other hand, it was customary to do something on the anniversary of a Christian’s death. So instead of praying for the martyr’s soul, they would offer prayers in celebration of what the martyr had done. (This is captured in the Martyrdom of Polycarp.)
In a kind of Christianized civic spirit, Christian communities celebrated their local martyrs in a regular cycle.
In the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem began celebrating all the great biblical saints, because for someone living in Jerusalem all the biblical saints were local.
When the many pilgrims to Jerusalem brought this practice back to their various homes, suddenly a lot of communities were celebrating saints that were not local to them. Thus was born the universal calendar of saints.

So in a kind of order of discovery, All Souls’ Day is prior to All Saints’ Day: we discovered Masses in honor of the triumphant by realizing we weren’t comfortable counting them as suffering. But in another order, All Saints’ Day is first: we look to the goal first and then pray that our suffering brothers and sisters will reach it; all of us who can pray, which includes us on earth and our forerunners in heaven, first unite together and then, together, pray for the suffering deceased.

Saints of the Bible: A Complete List of Their Feasts in the Old and New Calendars

Before the amazing 4th century, Christians were parochial and even patriotic in their veneration of saints. Rome celebrated the martyrs who had died at Rome, Constantinople celebrated the martyrs who had died at Constantinople, Antioch celebrated the martyrs who had died at Antioch, and so on. It never occurred to the folks in Rome to celebrate the saints of Antioch, or vice versa: celebrating a saint involved walking out to see his tomb. But in the 4th century a unique group of saints broke this pattern and set us on the path to the celebration of all saints. Who were they?

The saints of the Bible.

The saints of the Bible were familiar names throughout the Church. Texts like Hebrews 11 and Sirach 44-50, read everywhere, held up the great men and women of Salvation History as examples to follow and heroes to venerate. For the church in Jerusalem, however, the saints of Scripture were also the local martyrs: just as Rome had a list of days for celebrating the martyrs of Rome, Jerusalem had a cycle of liturgical commemorations of the biblical saints. When 4th-century pilgrims brought Jerusalem’s liturgies back to their home dioceses, they brought with them the practice of liturgically commemorating the biblical saints—and implicitly, they created the practice of commemorating saints that were not local. Unwittingly, they had planted the seed of the universal sanctoral cycle. Continue reading “Saints of the Bible: A Complete List of Their Feasts in the Old and New Calendars”

The real secret to preventing atrocities

“Certainty is dangerous; it makes people do terrible things to each other.” I’ve heard this view in the learned discourse of scholars and in the rough-and-tumble commentary of day laborers; it comes up in academic journals, at the local book club, and in the social media. Everywhere it is brought forth as something obvious: People who doubt their convictions cannot go to war or kill people for disagreeing. We need to doubt even our sincerest convictions, for the sake of civilization.

The claim appeals in part because it contains a grain of truth: certainty in and of itself leads to action, while doubt in and of itself leads to inaction. As a result, certainty brings the advantages and disadvantages of action, while doubt brings the advantages and disadvantages of inaction. Consider:

Did slavery in America end because people came to doubt whether the black man was inferior? Or did it slavery in America end because people became certain that the black man was equal?
Did the push for women’s rights draw strength from uncertainty about whether women should have a different status from men, or did it draw strength from a growing conviction that they should have the same status as men?
Does an addict kick his habit because he has come to doubt whether he should keep it, or does he kick his habit because he has become convinced that he should drop it?

Continue reading “The real secret to preventing atrocities”

Official Mixed Drink of the Feast of St. Luke

Mix one for the man.

The place of theology in liberal education

A friend and former classmate from my grad-school days recently wrote to me about the role of theology in a liberal education. He explained that he has been turning over in his mind an old, familiar argument for why theology should be the heart of a liberal education, but he has begun to wonder whether this argument is after all the best one. The argument goes like this:

A genuinely liberal education will principally consist in the study of sacred theology. For liberal education aims at the knowledge proper to the free man. Now the free man, in contradistinction from the slave, is one who lives not for the sake of another, but for his own sake; hence his life consists in activities choice-worthy in themselves. The kind of knowledge that he will pursue, therefore, will be knowledge worth exercising for its own sake, and this will be theoretical knowledge rather than practical knowledge. But theoretical knowledge is desirable because it perfects the knower as a knower; to engage in it is to exercise one’s intellect in the most perfect way. But knowledge, considered in itself, is defined by its object; hence the most perfect knowledge will be knowledge of the most perfect object. And this is God. Hence liberal education will principally consist in the acquisition of the knowledge of God. But the science whose proper object is God is sacred theology. Hence liberal education will principally consist in the study of sacred theology.

My friend’s unease with this seemingly ironclad reasoning is that the motive for studying theology ends up being so that I can perfect myself—while the real motive for theology seems to come from the supernatural virtue of charity, of love for God. As it happens, in our efforts to define the role of theology at Wyoming Catholic College my friends and I have wrestled with the above argument for a long time. Continue reading “The place of theology in liberal education”

It’s all downhill from Damasus

While the Catholic blogosphere explodes with news of the Synod, I have tried not to think much about it. “It gets darker and darker,” a friend wrote on Facebook, “worse than the worst of the Dark Ages or the Renaissance.”

To keep my mind off the present, I read about the past. I have finally found a biography of St. Jerome that I like: Saint Jerome and His Times, by Jean Steinmann. The major critical biography by J.N.D. Kelly and the shorter but more recent work by Stefan Rebenich both suffer from the same problem: the authors despise St. Jerome. It’s like reading Ann Coulter’s biography of Hillary Clinton.

But Steinmann reveres the great doctor. He also does a marvelous job of setting the scene around Jerome, with all its drama and brilliant characters. Yesterday I chanced upon this manly bit about Jerome’s one-time employer, Pope Damasus:

The death of Pope Liberius in 366 saw the Christian community in Rome divided. The die-hards, who were in the minority, met in the basilica of St. Mary Trastevere, where seven priests and three deacons elected the deacon Ursinus Pope and consecrated him. Meantime, the majority of the clergy and the faithful were meeting in the basilica of St. Lawrence of Lucina, where they elected the deacon Damasus Bishop of Rome. When they heard of Ursinus’s election, the supporters of Damasus attacked the occupants of St. Mary’s. For three days Rome was torn by riots in which people were killed. Damasus won the day. He was consecrated, and the Prefect of Rome took his side, possibly as a result of Evagrios’s representations to the Emporer, and exiled Ursinus. When Ursinus’s supporters went on meeting and holding services in the Trastevere basilica, the Prefect had his priests arrested. Their congregation set them free. The followers of Damasus made up their minds to settle the question once and for all, and stormed the basilica of St. Mary again, and this time more than a hundred people were killed in the rioting.

A year later, Ursinus came back to Rome, and the trouble started all over again. The faithful of the two conflicting churches were involved in constant and sometimes bloody clashes, and the pagan Pretextatus, the new Prefect of Rome, disdainfully commented that this was a curious way of showing charity. The feud put the Church to shame.

Oh, for the good old days, when prelates killed each other with actual knives and clubs! In my imagination I see our wimpy modern cardinals at the Synod’s opening Mass, exchanging the sign of peace with fingers crossed behind their backs. Their backstabbing is so metaphorical! Silly redhats, proud of their “cutting” remarks. How have we fallen so far?

You can learn a lot about a man by locating his “downhill point”: where does he think the slide began? Everything in the Church started going downhill—at what point? Do you put it at Francis? Vatican II? Trent? One historian I know says everything has gone downhill since the Council of Florence in 1439.

Maybe the “downhill point” was the election of Pope Damasus in 366. Or maybe the Robber Council of Ephesus in 449, where bishops voted on doctrine with spears in their backs. Somehow, we’ve just never recovered that spirit.

There Are Ticks in the Woods

Today’s offering, a silly poem I wrote for my children and recited at one of those glorious Friday family poetry-fests. It is to be read (a) out loud, (b) briskly, and (c) with a straight face. See if you can manage all three:

There Are Ticks in the Woods

There are ticks in the woods!
There are ticks in the woods!
They are flying to get fixins
For to make their wicked tixins
For to bite the juicy children
Who would walk in the woods.

There are tocks in the woods!
There are tocks in the woods!
They have shoes and put their socks in
For to make their evil toxins
For to bite the juicy children
Who would walk in the woods.

Now the ticks with their tixin
Dug a pit and threw some sticks in,
While the tocks with their toxin
Made a trap and put some rocks in.
But a tick fell on the rocks
And a tock fell on the sticks,
So the tick was sick with toxin
And the tock was socked with tixin.

So beware of the woods!
Beware of the woods!
Clever traps could draw a fox in
To the ticks that now have toxin,
So beware, all juicy children
Who would walk in the woods.

The Painted World

Today, my freshmen and I will discuss the end of the book of Deuteronomy, where Moses ascends the mountain to look out over the Promised Land–and die. That scene moves me mysteriously.

At one point, in a particular situation, I wrote a story based on that scene. It is a strange story, a difficult story, and I am not even sure it is a good story, but every time I go back to it I am moved again and I can’t quite bring myself to chuck it. With some trepidation, I now post it where anyone can see what flights of fancy erupt where a man with too little learning to match his love seizes access to a keyboard.

The Painted World

Thomae Aquinatis Super I Tim., cap. 6 l. 3: Res ergo, quae sunt actus quidam, sed non purus, lucentia sunt, sed non lux. Sed divina essentia, quae est actus purus, est ipsa lux.

Deuteronomy 34:10, “And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face.”

Colossians 2:17, “These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.”

James 1:17, “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

Chapter 1

Before you take up and read, look at the picture above this story. There you see me, the author of this story: my hands point to a well-watered land, dark woods and verdant pastures, and to the city on a hill overlooking all; my eyes look back to invite all those behind to enter and take this land. Look closely at my eyes: see how they plead, see how earnest and how sad they are. You behold me.

I do not say that you see me depicted, or that you see a depiction of me. I am not the man depicted in the picture above this story, who was a great man of your world; rather, I am his depiction. The drawing above this story is not a representation of me, but it is I myself: I am the drawing. You hold me in your hands.

Forever do I stretch out my hands, and never will I cease. Although my bent knees and backward glance suggest action, I never straighten my legs or turn my head. In fact, for me there is neither moment before nor moment after, and so no memory of the sort that you enjoy: I am fixed in a single moment, in a single feeling, which is yet not like your feelings colored by consciousness of yourself feeling, which depends on awareness of time passing. I am a drawing, and so there is only one moment in my world, one now. I have only a glint of the rich being of your world.

If all this is so, you may ask, who is the author of this story? Surely writing word after word implies an unfolding of thought, and a succession of action. A frozen figure cannot move from line to line and from word to word, still as he is in the immobility of one gaze and one thought.

You are right, and yet I am the author of this story. How that came to pass is my story.

Chapter 2

A moment passed, the first moment of my life. I stood in a stupor, like one who wakes from a dark and dreamless sleep to find himself standing erect under the noonday sun. Infants and children live as in a dream, but the passage from infancy to animal cunning to reason unfolds gradually, as the light before the dawn leads to sunrise; I leapt from sleep to full awakening in an instant, and the terror of that moment cannot be expressed. To the very young, a single day may seem a year, while to the very old even a year may pass as a day; entirely without age or past, I experienced that first moment as though it were eighty years.

I stood in a broad and spacious room, the walls decorated with paintings and pen drawings and pencil drawings of every manner of thing: there were landscapes of sea and sky, mountain and plain, forest and flower; fish and birds and land animals of every description peered out of the decorated frames; and portraits of famous heroes joined the rest. Here and there throughout the room moved onlookers in a variety of garb, staring first at one painting and then the next with astonishment.

A corpulent man beside me touched my arm. White and black robes flowed over his massive figure, and his eyes, dark brown, were so intense as almost to be black. His voice when he spoke was deep: “Look there.” The massiveness of his hand was absorbing, as though he were thicker and more real than everything else in the room.

Reluctantly, my eyes turned to a drawing the wall. Dimly familiar, it showed a valley, and several waters, and many trees—recognition came with a shock, doubly so because this was my first experience of recognition. “I belong there,” I stammered at last, “That is my world.” The big man waited. “But look at how flat it is!” I went on. “There are trees and rivers and buildings, but the trees only differ from the buildings by a bit of coloring! And this tree here is just like that tree there, except that it is of painted on this bit of canvas instead of that. My world is not—I am entirely unreal!” Here words failed me.

“You are right, and you are wrong,” the deep voice resounded. “In your world, a things are what they are by the arrangement of colors: a tree is a tree because its colors are arranged this way, while a river is a river because its colors are arranged that way. What it is to be a tree, in your world, is to have this arrangement of color. And you are right again: this tree is this tree because its color is on this part of the canvas, and that tree is that tree because it is on that part of the canvas. Individuals in your world are apart from other individuals by the part of canvas their color is on.”

Here his voice lowered, if that were possible, as though about to share a secret. “But you are wrong when you say that your world is entirely unreal. A painted world has a certain kind of reality, inasmuch as it can be seen by others. In fact, for a painted world, to be is to be visible.” His eyes threatened to bore through me: “I say it again: in your world, to be is to be visible.” And I saw that he was right: if there were no light in the world to brighten the painting, it would not be even a painting; but when the light fell on it, it sprang before the eye as at least a real reflection.

This comforted me momentarily, but, as my gaze turned from my painted world to my new teacher, I saw again men and women of every description staring in fascination at one painting and then another. “How real they are!” I observed, “How thick and substantial! They move about, they remember and compare.” But the scene began to look strange: “If I were real as they are, I would delight in nothing more than contemplating the real around me. Why do they look only at the paintings and never at one another?”

My guide took me by the arm as he dismissed the room with a wave. “They think that the law of your world is the law of their world: they think that, even for them, to be is to be visible to eyes.”

Chapter 3

What followed then was such as death must feel within your world. For I was rent, I was changed; I could not see as you see round you, nor could any eye as yours see me. It was as though I had awoken. No grammar captures what I knew, because there was no silence flowing on which by our speech was broken; there was not ever he-was-speaking, only he-had-spoken; no time within our repartee, but now—then now—then now—then now, like points in separate planes.

Put into words, what my companion said would be, “Look back.” My obedience was not a turning of the head but sight, a view; and I knew the room which we had left. But from outside that world and looking back, I now could see behind and in front of it, and I saw that your world is like to mine. As a man is a man in my world because of an arrangement of colors, so a man is a man in your world because of something like shape, which is yet not shape but more real than shape, although like it. And as this tree is this tree rather than that tree in my world because it is painted on this part of the canvass rather than on that part, so in your world this man is this man rather than that man because his shape is the shape of this stuff rather than of that; he is not on a canvass, but his shape—which is more real than shape—binds this together rather than binding that together.

In the same glance, I noticed that I saw all this of myself and not because my teacher explained it, because my vision was not of colors but of the very being of things. Just as the color in a painted man is lit up and so is visible, the shape and stuff of your world is “lit,” is held forth into being. My view was of the “lit” things, and just as canvass is colored and color is lit, so in your world stuff is shaped and shape is held forth.

All this and more I shared with my teacher, in the same act by which I saw it, together with my question: “They do not see this?”

“They do not.”

“What do they see?”

“Shadows and reflections, with the eyes.”

“How are they lit?”

And turning, again I died: I saw him. I saw him. I saw him.

Chapter 4

Words will not that life with form endow;
Sequential speech, all time entangled, is unfit.
There was no now, and now, and now, and now,
But my gaze, and his, to which my depths submit,
A changeless being-grasped, a steady sight.
Ev’ry nook and nature of your world is “lit”;
This “Thou” above all being is the light.
As my world’s static pose to vibrant motion stands,
So your world’s flux to stable, changeless being bright;
While motion shade of color, varied hue demands,
In him there is no darkness; shadows from him flee.
No partial shadow life his brightness understands.
Light withdrawn, all paintings, just as paintings cease to be;
Him withdrawn, your world must perish, utterly.

Chapter 5

On my descent back through your world and on to my own I will not dwell. Suffice to say that you see before you the result, this small story written in witness. One of your world would have been a more worthy messenger, it seems to me, and one from the world above worthier still, but my guide stated firmly that I was chosen precisely because my world is below yours. Perhaps my reader will understand?

For my part, I can only urge: You who have substance, look around you and see! How noble your world, how thick, how real—and yet how much more real is that which is real of itself. There is rest, there is warmth, there is light! He gave me to see what yours can be, but I shall not pass over.