Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, Luminous...Hopeful?

For centuries, we had the standard fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary: Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious. I remember being taught these by an old nun in Catholic school. (Most of the religious education in that school was pop psychology and inspirational feature films, so this was a real exception.)

Then, in 2002, St. John Paul II introduced the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, and suggested they be prayed every Thursday. I follow this practice myself.

Today I learned about the Hopeful Mysteries of the Rosary, which were introduced by Bishop William Albert Wack of Pensacola–Tallahassee in 2024.

They are:

Creation
The Flood
Abraham's Sacrifice
Passover
The Immaculate Conception

I must say I'm impressed by Bishop Wack's audacity. Proposing a new set of rosary mysteries when you've been the Supreme Pontiff for over twenty years is one thing. Doing so as a relatively new and obscure bishop is another.

Still, I'm the sort of traditionalist who loves new traditions, so I'll definitely pray the Hopeful Mysteries at some stage!

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Two Anniversaries

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day I began working in the library of University College Dublin, where I still work today.

By a complete coincidence, it's also the fifteenth anniversary of this blog. 

Why Is Excellence Always Receding?

If you borrowed and read a hundred books at complete random from the library, I imagine you'd really enjoy a small proportion of them-- maybe ten per cent.

Now say you borrowed a hundred books by the most acclaimed authors (acclaimed by some group and criterion you more or less approve of), you'd still only enjoy a small percentage of those books.

Now if you borrowed a hundred books which had been voted the hundred best books of all time, by competent judges-- you'd probably still only enjoy a small percentage of them.

I'm fascinated by this phenomenon of constantly-receding excellence.

If you listened to an album of "greatest hits" by your favourite band, you'd still only probably really love a minority of them. At least, that's been my experience.

This principle often occurs to me when I read a book of quotations. These quotations are already a sort of digest of everything that's been written or said-- the most interesting and historical quotations in history. But I still find myself really interested in only a relatively small numbers of them.

Nearly every great author, musician, artist etc. mostly produced less-than-excellent works.

Or think about the latest blockbuster movie-- presumably, everybody working on that movie has already been "pre-selected" to be at the very top of their profession, out of the vast throngs that want to act, direct, do special effects etc. But the rate of success (lasting success) of blockbusters doesn't seem any higher than any other artistic endeavour.

I suspect it works the other way, as well. If you watched a hundred movies that were considered the worst, worst, worst of all time-- you might actually enjoy about ten of them, to some extent. But I'm less sure of that.

It's as though there's some principle that we can only really enjoy about ten per cent of anything.

Between Pollyanna and Eeyore

Have you heard the term "glurge"? It's used mostly for the sort of uplifting or inspirational stories that proliferate on social media, and become strangely depressing after a while-- perhaps because they seem so contrived or manipulative. God knows, I'm not taking a potshot at uplift, inspiration, or even sentimentality-- I think all those things are necessary and desirable features of human discourse. But too concentrated a dose of any of them provokes an irritable reaction in me, and-- I think-- in others. Humans of New York really got my goat, back when I was on social media.

On the opposite extreme to glurge is the sort of relentless negativity that is often perpetrated by conservatives like myself. When every social or cultural development is claimed to be a sign of decline, they rather cancel each other out. For instance, there seems to be a contradiction in complaining about shortening attention spans while also complaining about binge-watching of streamed content, and seeing them both as signs of cultural decline. Or in complaining about areas in Britain and Ireland where English is supposedly hardly spoken any more, while also deploring the destruction of languages and dialects left behind by the relentless spread of English. I could probably get a whole blog post out of other examples.

Yes, twin and opposing evils can both be evidence of one underlying problem-- but it seems unlikely that this would always be the case, or even generally.

So surely we should strive to avoid falling into either ditch. That is, we should try to affirm life without developing a fixed grin and glassy eyes; but we should also freely criticize those things that deserve to be criticized, without seeing the world through jaundiced glasses. I think the second ditch is the most likely danger for anyone even vaguely on the right.

Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, Indeed

As of 10:04 today, the lead story on the BBC website is the announcement that Pope Leo has lung cancer.

On the RTE website, it's the third story.

May God watch over our Holy Father and give him many years of life to come.

My Golden Rule for Conversation

My golden rule for conversation has become: don't volunteer conversation about anything I find interesting. It's a near-infallible rule that the other person will not be interested.

Instead, I just let the other person lead the conversation, and try to induce or feign interest in that. If I do volunteer conversation, it's always on a topic I don't find interesting. That seems the safest option.

There's a handful of people to whom this policy doesn't apply. But only a handful.

I wonder how many people are in the same boat?