A Clerihew

Christina Rossetti
Never showered in confetti.
Whenever a swain made her his target
She said: "Sorry, I'm writing Goblin Market."

The Feast of St. Finbarr

Two saints' day posts in a row!

Today is the feast of St. Finbarr (550-660), who is the patron saint of Cork. He's mentioned in the motto of University College Cork: "Where Finbarr taught, let Munster learn." Which I like because it's both religious and provincial-- literally provincial. (Don't people get tired of everything being about the world, the world, the world, global, global, global, international, international, international?)

Finbarr is also the name I chose for my confirmation name. I chose it entirely because I liked the sound. I didn't know anything about Finbarr. I'm not even confident I knew he was a saint.

 

I had my confirmation (with the rest of my class in school) in Our Lady of Victories church in Glasnevin (a very modern church with a lot of stained glass and which somewhat resembles some alien spaceship). I would have been eleven or twelve. I remember I wore a new cream safari suit, which I had for a considerable time afterwards. I also remember my sponsor (who was my uncle) saying: "A bit of an anti-climax, isn't it?". How edifying!

A confirmation name is a strange thing. You never really use it. I only use mine when I'm using my name and I want to sound pompous (like I have to try, right?), styling myself: "Maolsheachlann Tiernan Finbarr Ó Ceallaigh".

Every now and again I do remember to pray to St. Finbarr, at least in recent years. I'll do so again now. Watch over me, St. Finbarr!

St. Pacificus of San Severino

Today is the feast day of St. Pacificus of San Severino (1653-1721), who was canonised in 1839.

Have you ever heard of him? I haven't.

He went deaf and blind at a relatively young age but still held a position of authority in a monastery and worked miracles.

I suppose his reputation suffers from the fact that there are so many Italian saints.

Anyway, I really like that there are lots of days in the year when the saint of the day is pretty obscure, and there are no special feasts.

Anti-Political Correctness Vows

Today I found myself toying with the idea that there should be anti-political correctness vows in the same way there are baptism vows. I'm always impressed by the solemnity and poetry of the baptism vows, which are renewed at the Easter Vigil:

Do you reject Satan?

I do.

And all his works?

I do.

And all his empty promises?

I do.

Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth?

I do.

And so on. There are three more and they are considerably longer.

Vows concentrate the mind. I think anti-PC vows could go something like this:

Do you reject political correctness in all its forms?

I do.

Do you reject all identities based on grievance?

I do.

Do you reject the conflation of trivial and imaginary harms with serious harms?

I do.

Do you reject arbitrary changes in language in the name of sensitivity-- even if you have to go along with them in some circumstances?

I do.

Do you reject the concept that anybody has less right than anybody else to use a particular word or give an opinion on any subject whatsoever?

I do.

Do you reject the attribution of historical guilt to people for injustices that occurred before they were even born?

I do.

Do you reject weaponized false dichotomies, such as victim-oppressor and transformation-stasis?

I do.

Tell me if I missed anything obvious. (By "transformation-stasis", I mean the sort of rhetoric you're surely familiar with: the appeal to gradual and organic evolution in the past to justify complete transformation in the present.)

I Love This Quotation

"Everywhere, in the public squares, at crossroads, on the streets and lanes, people would stop you and discourse at random about the Trinity. If you asked something of a moneychanger, he would begin discussing the question of the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you questioned a baker about the price of bread, he would answer that the Father is greater and the Son is subordinate to Him. If you went to take a bath, the bath attendant would tell you that in his opinion the Son simply comes from nothing."

St. Gregory of Nyssa describing the theological excitement surrounding the First Council of Constantinople.

A Random Thought

I mentioned in a previous post that I was reading a biography of an Irish leftist, one who lived through most of the twentieth century. Reading it, I was struck once again with a thought that has often occurred to me; that all these radical leftists, most of whom had a deep disdain for the Catholic Church and the bourgeois middle classes, somehow managed to stay faithful to their wives and keep their households together. Many of them even raised large or relatively large families.

Actually, the leftist I was reading about did leave his wife for another woman-- but only in his old age, when Irish society had already liberalized around him.

My assumption is that, when lifelong marital fidelity was expected and taken as normal, it wasn't felt as irksome or onerous. Challenges which today are seen as unendurable were simply taken on the chin, par for the course. Nobody thought you were heroic for putting up with another human being for forty or fifty years.

This seems to me typical of the whole movement of Irish society in my lifetime. I watched Irish society secularize all through my lifetime-- the process had already begun before I was born. And it seems to me that the ebbing of Catholicism from Irish life has had all kinds of bad consequences, on a deep level-- that even people who weren't at all religious benefitted from the elevating effect Catholicism had on society.

It comes out in so many things. A sense of the sacred and of awe. A sense of the dignity of the human person. A respect for manhood and womanhood, and indeed childhood. That's just a few off the top of my head.

I've often thought of trying to write a blog post about the ideal of marriage that, it seems to me now, was unspoken but all-pervasive in the Ireland my childhood. It was really quite beautiful. It was anti-romantic and romantic at the same time-- a combination that is, strangely, far from uncommon. The stereotype of the mother and father were both comical, but with an undercurrent of respect and affection. Or so it seems to me.

Shades of Meaning

Here are a list of words. Tell me what associations or nuances they have for you. Perceptive readers will notice a pattern to them.

Guy.

Fellah. (It was hearing someone use this word on a bus that started this train of thought.)

Bloke.

Dude.

Chap.

Lad.

Gent.

Geezer.

The Brahma by Ralph Waldo Emerson and All-Embracing Conspiracy Theories

Here are the first three verses of "The Brahma", by Ralph Waldo Emerson. There's a fourth verse but it's not relevant here.

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

This is the poem I always think of when I encounter the people who see everything as a vast conspiracy, all opposition as controlled opposition, every apparent coincidence as news management, all politics as a puppet show, psy-ops are as common as cabbages, and so on.

It's like all those dystopian novels where the hero realizes at the climax that the underground resistance to the dystopian government was actually planted by the dystopian government and he's been a pawn all along. There's a certain pleasurable frisson in this moment of despair, that can't be denied.

What is there to say about such theories, except that they seem unlikely on the face of it? History has no example of such a thing. Yes, the KGB had spies and informers and double agents everywhere. Yes, there was omnipresent propaganda. But there was also a genuine resistance and ordinary people had a pretty good fix on what was actually going on. We also know from the history of totalitarian regimes that, far from resistance being futile or fabricated, resistance is greatly feared and obsessively monitored.

Also the theory is unfalsifiable because any evidence presented against it can be discounted by the same theory. Chesterton famously wrote about this in the first chapters of Orthodoxy, although he was using the principle of criticize philosophical materialism instead of conspiracy theories.

I think the kind of fatalism that is spread by such theories is lamentable. Indeed, if there was such a panoptic, omnipresent regime in power, spreading such fatalism might be exactly what they would do. What if the controlled opposition is inside your head?

Hypnotic Moments

I don't know what better title to give to this post, which is going to be a quick one, even though I've been thinking about it a long time.

It's one of those very personal and idiosyncratic posts. I really wanted to talk about the enormous fascination particular moments have for me-- moments I hear about, read about, and so forth.

One that has recurred to me a lot recently is the scene at the beginning of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, which another blogger has kindly transcribed:

The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. One of them, a spare fellow in blue overalls, taller than the rest, with a jocular demeanour and long, pointed nose like that of a Shakespearian clown, suddenly stepped forward, and as if performing a rite, cast some substance—apparently the remains of two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper—on the bright coals of the fire, causing flames to leap fiercely upward, smoke curling about in eddies of the north-east wind. As the dark fumes floated above the houses, snow began to fall gently from a dull sky, each flake giving a small hiss as it reached the bucket. The flames died down again; and the men, as if required observances were for the moment at an end, all turned away from the fire, lowering themselves laboriously into the pit, or withdrawing to the shadows of their tarpaulin shelter. The grey, undecided flakes continued to come down, though not heavily, while a harsh odour, bitter and gaseous, penetrated the air. The day was drawing in.

For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world—legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea—scattered, uncoordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

I never finished the whole series of novels-- I think I got about half of the way in--  but this particular image delights me. I might say "this particular passage", except-- to be honest-- I didn't remember the passage itself.

In recent weeks, whenever I've found myself looking at steam or smoke-- for instance, when I'm heating up food in a saucepan-- I find myself thinking about this passage. Perhaps because it seems to me as though these moments of sudden contemplation are the very best thing life has to offer.

Another "hypnotic moment" that constantly comes to my mind is the story of Blessed Solanus Casey's first night in a Capuchin monastery, on Christmas Eve, as he was discerning his vocation. Here's an account from Catherine Odell, one of his biographers:

In the midst of a blinding snowstorm, he left Superior on December 20 and headed southwest for St. Paul on the 11:00 p.m. train. From St. Paul, his train then headed east, pulling along slowly through drifting snow to Milwaukee. After a brief stayover there, during which Barney [his birth name] stayed with Capuchins for the first time, he boarded a train again. Down through Chicago and over through Michigan, his train headed for his goal-- Detroit.

On Christmas Eve, the train pulled into the station in Detroit at last. Barney located a streetcar and headed for Mt. Elliott Avenue. There, at 1740 Mt. Eillott, the young man finally arrived, well after dusk. Exhausted, he refused the offer of dinner. He was too tired. Upstairs, on the second floor, he was shown to his room; a simple, stark little space with a wooden door latch. The sight of it immediately renewed his fears of this Capuchin austerity. But, spent with the strain of travel, he pulled off his shoes and heavy coat, still wet with snow, pulled a blanket up over himself, and soon fell into a heavy sleep.

Just before midnight, he awoke to the sound of hand chimes and the voices of men singing. They were singing Christmas carols in German. It was Christmas Eve! As the voices grew louder, Barney could hear other men getting out of bed and coming down the corridor to join their voices with the little group of carolers. Barney joined them, and his heart was lifted. The gloom over his decision to follow Our Lady's orders and "go to Detroit" left him.

Down and around, through the darkened corridors, the carollers moved. Carrying candles, they roused the other Capuchins who then followed down into the chapel for Christmas Midnight Mass. It was a moving, joy-filled occasion and initiated a week or more of festivities.

I really can't put my love of that story into words-- even though nothing really happens. It's barely a story, actually.

Here's a third story, that I'll mention briefly. I was listening to an interview with an Irish politician of recent decades. He was talking about some parliamentary drama in which he had been taken a major role, but that he was absent from on the particular day under discussion-- because was "in bed with a dicky tummy" (upset stomach). Somehow I found this idea deliciously cosy and pleasing.

So what's the big deal, you ask? There are moments that catch our fancy. Everyone has that. I suppose it's just the sheer importance of such moments, in my own mind, that makes me ponder. I come back to them again and again. I wonder if other people are like this at all.

Poems I Like: A Ballade of Ephemeral Controversy by G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton wrote a lot of mediocre poetry, as well as a good few absolutely first class poems. But here's a poem I wouldn't place in either category. It's completely obscure, but it expresses thoughts and aspirations which are very familiar to me. I don't understand the "Hists" reference.

I don't think it is a great poem, but I do think it has one truly great line. Can you guess which one I mean?

A Ballade of Ephemeral Controversy by GK Chesterton

I am not as that Poet that arrives,
Nor shall I pluck the laurel that persists
Through all perverted ages and revives:
Enough for me, that if with feet and fists
I fought these pharisaic atheists,
I need not crawl and seek when all is done
My motley pennon trampled in the lists
It will not matter when the fight is won.

If scratch of mine amid a war of knives
Has caused one moment's pain to pessimists,
Poisoned one hour in Social Workers' lives,
I count such comfort more than amethysts
But less than claret, and at after trysts
We'll meet and drink such claret by the tun
Till you and I and all of us (What? Hists!).
It will not matter when the fight is won.

When men again want women for their wives,
And even woman owns that she exists,
When people ask for houses and not hives
When we have climbed the tortured ivy's twists
To where like statues stand above the mists
The strong incredible sanities of the sun,
This dazed and overdriven bard desists.
It will not matter when the fight is won.

Envoi

Prince, let me place these handcuffs on your wrists
While common Christian people get some fun,
Then go and join your damned Theosophists.
It will not matter when the fight is won.

Why Does the Left Oppose "Imperialism"?

I'm reading a book about a left-wing activist (A long-dead, pre-woke left-wing activist.)

The book, however, has been written recently so it uses contemporary leftist rhetoric. It repeatedly uses the word "imperialist".

I always find myself wondering why the (contemporary) left would oppose imperialism.

Is it because they think power should be devolved, that everyone should be governed by rulers who live close to them rather than rulers who live far away? Is it a sort of localism?

That sounds plausible...except the left is overwhelmingly in favour of supranational institutions like the EU, the WHO, the UN, etc. etc. Just look at the meltdown they had about Brexit.

So do the left oppose imperialism because they think people should be self-governing and not ruled by an alien government?

But what could this possibly mean according to the leftist worldview? The whole idea of an allegiance that is based on anything particularistic-- religion, language, ethnicity, folkways-- is anathema to the left. According to the left, the only permissible bond, on a societal level, is common humanity. (Even while they push identity-based grievances, this remains true.)

So how can the left possibly oppose imperialism? On what grounds? I don't get it.

Two Definitions

A Marxist: Someone who is infinitely cynical about existing institutions and infinitely credulous about future institutions.

Nationality: Something that you can't find when you go looking for it, but that rugby-tackles you when you're not looking for it.

Painted Rocks and Re-Enchantment

A few years ago, when I still lived in a house with a garden, I discovered a rock painted as a ladybird hidden under the grass. It was one of several painted rocks hidden there.

I didn't realize at the time (although I was quickly told) that this is part of a trend.

My own belief is that the path to societal re-enchantment lies in Christianity.

But I think delightful little actions like this are re-enchanting in themselves-- guerilla warfare of re-enchantment, so to speak. (Painted electricity boxes are another example.)

Why Isn't the Universe Boring?

I mentioned YouTuber Joe Schmid recent conversion (or reversion) to Catholicism, and the epic seven-hour video he made on the cumulative case for God. (One of only three videos explaining his conversion, which total twenty-five hours.)

I'm working my way through it bit by bit, but I was particularly struck by this section, in which he asks why the universe, if it's "just there", isn't a lot more boring. I've often wondered this myself.

Whenever I've found myself pondering this, I've imagined the universe as an endless block of steel extending in every directions

Here are some of Schmid's suggestions of how the universe might have been (I've modified things I don't understand):

No concrete objects exist.

Only one particle exists.

One particle moves in a straight line forever (or a circle, etc.)

One particle periodically enters into an excited state.

Exactly two particles exist and orbit their common centre.

And he then says: "I could do this forever". Indeed.

Atheists put so much weight on evolution that it doesn't seem to occur to them that even for evolution to occur, the universe had to be a dynamic, rule-governed, complex reality.

To which the atheist might reply: "Well, it just is."

Which reminds me of Fr. Frederick Copleston's reply to Bertrand Russell, in a radio debate on the existence of God, when Russell was sticking to the "arms folded and sitting back" position: "If one refuses to even sit down at the chessboard and make a move, one cannot be checkmated."

My Hipster Cartoon

 

Yes

 I completely agree with this Daily Wire article. The death of the monoculture is a good thing.

I can vividly remember how monolithic pop culture was in my childhood. It was a bad thing. It was a homogenizing, standardizing, deadening force.

Folk culture was dissipating, high culture was almost a memory, but everybody talked about the same TV shows and films and music and toys.

In a small country like Ireland, this could be quite cosy, insofar as it was Irish pop culture that was uniting people. But it mostly wasn't.

Also, people were generally led into same sociopolitical talking points. 

There's lots to decry about the internet, but the shattering of the pop culture straitjacket is not one of them.

A Theory of Nostalgia

The sort of nostalgia to which I am most inclined is a nostalgia for particular moments. They might be forty years ago or they might be four months ago. (It usually takes a few months for them to settle into my memory.)

The strange thing is that these moments of nostalgia often have no obvious explanation. I may have been doing something completely mundane when they occur. They might even come at a very stressful time or in the midst of dejection.

Here is my theory: at every moment, we are experiencing and assessing the world according to a multitude of criteria, most of which are dark to our own vision-- that is, we don't even realize we are applying them.

For instance, if we walk into a room, and the colour combination is pleasing to us, we might not even register this consciously. Or perhaps the sound of traffic outside the building is calming at that moment.

Those are only the intrinsic factors, the ones you could list off from examining the particular setting you're in. But there are any number of others. There are psychological factors-- something triggers a memory, an association, a comparison that is somehow pleasing. Or perhaps you were anxious about something which has recently been settled. Or perhaps something in the news that day has pleased you somehow-- it might not even be a good news story, but perhaps a bad news story that you find somehow bracing.

In any case, my theory is that all these factors come together in a given moment, or at least enough of them to cause a flood of wellbeing or excitement or delight. Like a fruit machine with a hundred windows all showing the same fruit at once. (I've never actually used a fruit machine.)

I've noticed that such moments of nostalgia often take years for me to "decipher", and even then they only seem partially deciphered. So perhaps other people are like me in this regard.

Feast of the Most Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today is the Feast of the Most Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Although it's an obscure feast it dates back to at least 1684.

Interestingly, it was removed from the liturgical calendar after Vatican II, but re-introduced by my guy, St. John Paul II-- along with the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus.

I find the "name" feasts very interesting, along with the Feast of the Holy Face of Jesus (which occurs on Shrove Tuesday). I like how anti-rationalistic they are, although that's a negative way to put it. Maybe I could better say they are particularistic.

I do believe that the name of Jesus has a special power. I don't know how to elaborate on that theologically, but it seems an observable fact that just invoking the name of Jesus changes the atmosphere in a room. Of course, that could be explained non-supernaturally. Supernatural or non-supernatural, I'm all for it.

I personally prefer to use the name "Jesus" than "Our Lord", for this very reason. And don't get me started on "BVM", a usage I can't stand, even if it's been used by saints and bishops (as it might well have been, for all I know). I also dislike the abbreviation of Mary Immaculate College in Limerick to "Mary I." (Every year I fight back against "Paddy's Day", despite being a defender of "paddywhackery" more generally.)

I struggle with Marian devotion. It's never come naturally to me. But I keep praying to be cured of this.

Back when I was an agnostic, I wrote a poem about the name of Jesus, though I took it from a rather negative perspective. I wrote this in 2005:

Jesus

Even the name is difficult to say,
Except as a curse.
Now even the dying hardly think to pray
And even prayers get by without the name
Since we found all gods to be more or less the same.
But the echo of that sound won’t go away–
The roll of the tombstone filled the universe.
And the words that the Bible-printers put in red
Live on in daily breath, carelessly spoken.
Some try, like a girl whose heart's been broken
To speak that name in an even voice.
But all our sleepless nights down centuries,
The weight of Tartarus and Paradise,
Won’t vanish. Something sturdier than faith
Lurks under all our jokes, our ironies.
And the atheist and the old man on his knees
Still share a world watched over by a wraith.

This Office Life

I've just finished watching This Office LIfe, a TV comedy that aired on the BBC in 1984. Someone has uploaded it onto YouTube.

It was written by Keith Waterhouse, who also wrote the novel from which it was based. I read the novel many years ago. I think I was in my early twenties when I read it. It was one of Waterhouse's better novels, though not a patch on his masterpiece Billy Liar.

Both the novel and TV adaptation feature something of an everyman character (or perhaps someone slightly dimmer than an everyman) who goes to work in a company called British Albion, a labyrinthine and bureaucratic company typical of the time. (Or perhaps somewhat more typical of the seventies, when the novel was published.) But the odd thing about British Albion is that nobody seems to know what they actually do.

My memory of the book is that it was a rather light satire on corporate bureaucracy for about half of its length, after which it became an equally light Kafkaesque mystery. I preferred the mystery to the satire. Satirizing office life is shooting fish in a barrel. Besides, how many people are now nostalgic for that "stultifying" corporate environment of the past?

Whether or not my memory of the novel is accurate, the TV version leans much more towards the Kafkaesque mystery. The mild surrealism kicks in very early. One effective visual has a man in a gorilla suit banging on the glass doors of the company's reception area, as a sort of incidental background event. He turns out to be a novelty act for an office birthday party. In a later scene, "Administration Services" is directly across the corridor from "Services Administration", and is staffed by the same guy.

A central plot point involves The Albion Players, the company's own amateur dramatic troupe. I'm guessing that, when the show was broadcast, this was something that might actually exist. I love the idea and I'm sad that this kind of thing became obsolete.

The story itself is absorbing and suspenseful enough to keep you watching, with a few reasonable twists, and an emotionally satisfying conclusion.

The only review of any length that I can find is on the Curious British Telly Substack. Not a single person has reviewed it on IMDB.

I never know whether anyone takes up my suggestions when it comes to these "recommended viewing" posts. So if you do watch it, let me know.

The Liturgical Calendar and Mystical Experiences

Here is an interesting passage from a Catholic Exchange article about Therese Neumann, a supposed stigmatist and visionary from Germany who died in 1962. (I use the word "supposed" not to convey scepticism, but only because she has not yet had any official recognition from Church auhorities.)

Therese’s sufferings and visions conformed exactly to the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.  Just as she received the wounds of the Crucifixion on Good Friday, so also were her visions and ecstasies aligned to the liturgical calendar.  For example, when she initially received the sacred stigmata, it was during the liturgical season of Lent.  Although Therese had the wounds of the Passion for the rest of her life, she only experienced the ecstasies of the Passion on Fridays, and only on Fridays during Lent and Advent, and on some of the sorrowful octaves.  Thus, her experience of the Passion was connected only to the relevant liturgical days, and never during joyful seasons, such as Christmas or Easter.  On the Fridays when she did not endure the Passion ecstasy, she would have a vision of the death or martyrdom of the saint whose feast day it happened to be, in recognition of the liturgical calendar.  On All Saints Day, November 1st, she would have a 24-hour ecstasy and see souls of saints from Heaven, and similarly on All Soul’s Day, November 2nd, she saw saints from Purgatory.  Based on the timing of the mystical experiences of Therese Neumann, it seems heaven honors with great respect the liturgical calendar; perhaps we should pay close attention to this as well.

This alignment of mystical experience with the liturgical calendar isn't unique to her case, either.

Full article here.

When Can The British Be Patriotic Again?

 I'm not talking about patriotism based on "shared values" or any of that lark.

I've just started watching the miniseries This Office Life, taken from a Keith Waterhouse novel written in 1978. (I read it a long time ago. It was pretty good.)

The company it's about is called "British Albion Limited."

This seemed pretty common at this time. For instance, there's the Britannia Hospital in the roughly contemporary film of the same name. Both fictional, but realistic.

Why can't British companies call themselves after Albion or Britannia or the Lion and the Unicorn or any of those regal, splendid names?

When is this sort of naive patriotism going to come back?

My Latest Cartoon

I especially like "guy in bed" cartoons and I'm going to do more of them. 

("Guy" because I'm not good at drawing women. Or, if you prefer, I'm even worse at drawing women than at drawing men!)

Poems I Like: Father O'Flynn

This one isn't really a poem, but rather the words to a song. But it can be read as a poem.

I'm not claiming this is great poetry, but I've found myself thinking of it lately. Lines from it have come into my mind unbidden.

I've always liked it. It's gentle, sentimental, and good-natured. It's well-written, too-- there's nothing awkward or crude about it. And it's a reminder of a time when priests in Ireland were admired for being priests-- not for being social crusaders who happened to wear dog collars. I very much like the fact that Father O'Flynn is lauded in the poem for being something of a disciplinarian.

As for the Irishisms:: "Sláinte" is the Irish version of "Cheers" or "To your health!" (you probably knew that), "Father avick" means (rather nonsensically) "Father, my son", and there are two renderings of Irish dialect that might throw you: "onaisy" just means "uneasy", and "Is it lave gaiety all to the laity?" means "Should we leave gaiety all to the laity?".

"Dad and the devil and all" seems to mean "everybody". I've never heard "Dad" used in that way but that's what the context suggests. It's probably a contraction of "Bedad", which is a dated Irish exclamation.

My favourite verse is the one that begins: "Oh, Father O'Flynn, you've the wonderful way with you..."

This poem was written by Alfred Perceval Graves. I never knew, until I looked him up just now, that he was Robert Graves's father. Robert Graves is a poet I've never admired at all, although I can see he had talent. I've never read I, Claudius and I'm never going to. Historical novels are not to my taste.

Father O'Flynn by Alfred Perceval Graves

Of priests we can offer a charmin' variety,
Far renowned for larnin' and piety;
Still, I'd advance ye, widout impropriety,
Father O'Flynn as the flower of them all.

Here's a health to you, Father O'Flynn,
Slainté, and slainté, and slainté agin;
Powerfulest preacher, and
Tenderest teacher, and
Kindliest creature in ould Donegal.

Don't talk of your Provost and Fellows of Trinity,
Famous for ever at Greek and Latinity,
Dad and the divels and all at Divinity,
Father O'Flynn'd make hares of them all!
Come, I venture to give you my word,
Never the likes of his logic was heard,
Down from Mythology
Into Thayology,
Troth! and Conchology if he'd the call.

Och! Father O'Flynn, you've the wonderful way wid you,
All the ould sinners are wishful to pray wid you,
All the young childer are wild for to play wid you,
You've such a way wid you, Father avick!
Still for all you've so gentle a soul,
Gad, you've your flock in the grandest control;
Checking the crazy ones,
Coaxin' onaisy ones,
Liftin' the lazy ones on wid the stick.

And though quite avoidin' all foolish frivolity,
Still at all seasons of innocent jollity,
Where was the playboy could claim an equality
At comicality, Father, wid you?
Once the Bishop looked grave at your jest,
Till this remark set him off wid the rest:
"Is it lave gaiety
All to the laity?
Cannot the clargy be Irishmen too?"

How Can I, Personally, Right Now, Mitigate the Banality of Modern Life?

This question haunts me constantly. I think, instinctively, that it should haunt everybody.

And I think this despite the fact that it's hard to make a moral case for this. Banality isn't evil in itself. (Which is, I suppose, why the phrase "the banality of evil" exists. They wouldn't have to be paired if they weren't distinct. Besides, we all know that evil is often cool and stylish-- superficially, at least.)

Life is becoming more homogenized, standardized, rationalized, disenchanted, etc. etc. I'm convinced of this, though it's a hard thing to quantify.

What can we do about it? What can I do about it? I'm not talking about a grand strategy for a transformation of society. What can we do about it in our immediate environment, right now, with our way of life?

What element of eccentricity, colour, romance, contrarianism, visual poetry, and so forth...can we personally inject into our world? How can we re-enchant our immediate environment?

I haven't even found an answer to this myself, but I'm always asking it.

I'm inspired by people such as the Poe Toaster and Ferdinand Cheval. It would be hard to reach the heights of the latter in particular. But we could try!

Of course, you could all be doing this already.

My Cartoon of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee

I have a growing urge to draw cartoons so you can expect to see more of them here...whether you want to or not!

I'm a huge fan of both both of these men so this meant entirely affectionately.

Loving America For What It Is

I get very tired of people professing to love the "other" America.

Usually the America of Howard Zinn and the Beat poets and Ledbelly and labour activists and Bob Dylan and college towns and Mother Jones and Allen Ginsberg...you know the drill.

Usually it's that. But choose your own "other" America. It can be Russell Kirk's America just as easily.

I love the America of Mom's apple pie and Fourth of July fireworks and "sir" and "ma'am" and Bibles in hotel rooms and the white picket fence and Norman Rockwell and cheerleaders and  shiny-suited televangelists and the Stars and Stripes on the porch and get-up-and-go. (I don't have much of the latter quality myself, so I admire it.)

You might say this is all a dream, an ideal, an idyll.

Well, you could say the same about the "other America"-- except that's more of a sour-faced ideal laced with resentment. (I'm not having a pop at labour activists, by the way, or even Bob Dylan. You know what I mean. I'm talking about the ensemble.)

Humans are such aspirational beings that it's really impossible to separate the ideal from the reality, because the reality is always striving towards an ideal.

Give me the Norman Rockwell, Happy Days ideal over the one any old day. (Yes, I know Norman Rockwell was a Democrat. Democrats used to be sane!)

I touched on this subject in this blog post ten years ago. I haven't changed my mind.

That's it. God bless America. The vulgar, dime store America.

(You can point out I have never lived in America. I can point to the millions of real Americans who are happier to chant "USA, USA" than to cheer along with "American Idiot" by Green Day.)

A Great Interview with a New Convert

I was aware of Joe Schmid, who is a bit of a YouTube philosophy wunderkind, when he was an agnostic. Deo Gratias, he has now become a Catholic.

Here is a very interesting interview between him and Trent Horn, the Catholic apologist, in which he talks about his conversion. Interestingly, he was greatly influenced by many compelling Catholic miracles, including those of Padre Pio and the Eucharist. Joe seems like a very likeable guy.

Strange Likings: A Weird Post

Well, not so much strange, but...

I've been reading a book about Liam Cosgrave, a former Taoiseach of Ireland. He was a devout Catholic. He actually voted against his own government's Bill that sought to introduce contraception to Ireland.

One of the more endearing things about him was his love of Rome-- the city itself. He visited it often and he even encouraged journalists accompanying him on a state visit to Italy to see all the sights in Rome, with a child-like excitement.

How many people have a favourite city? Lots of people, I'm sure, but I'm guessing many people don't. Do you have a favourite city? I'm not even particularly attached to Dublin. I can't imagine loving any city, although I like the idea.

I also love this line from Groundhog Day, where Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is telling Rita why vermouth (sweet vermouth on the rocks, actually) is his favourite drink: "It makes me think of Rome, the way the sunlight hits the buildings in the afternoon." True, he's just trying to seduce Rita, but it's still a nice line. I can't imagine ever hearing anybody saying anything like this in real life. I've never known anyone who says things like this.

Still, it's a fact of life that people do love all sorts of things-- and that's what this blog post is about.

Not only that people love different things, but that they love different sorts of things.

Here's an example, that I've probably mentioned before. I have a model of a US Airways plane on my desk. (It's lost various parts and others are blue-tacked on.) I developed an affection for US Airways after several transatlantic flights. I liked their whole aesthetic, both visually and aurally (even coming down to things like announcements).

US Airways merged with another airline in 2013. The thing is, nobody except me seems to be nostalgic about them. People don't really seem to get attached to airlines. Why not? They get attached to other consumer goods and services.

People love different sorts of things.

The Irish statesman Eamon De Valera had such a powerful attachment to his old school, Blackrock College, that there's a whole book about it. I've mentioned this before. How many people have this kind of attachment?

I've mentioned in a previous post that I don't feel drawn to any particular "spirituality", at least in terms of specific religious orders. And yet some Catholics are so drawn to a particular spirituality that they join the tertiary order of the Carmelites, or Franciscans, or Dominicans.

People get attached to historical periods, and particular types of animals, and foods, and diets, and places-- all different sorts of places, from nations to streets-- and particular gadgets, and alcoholic drinks, and activities like survivalism, and...all sorts of things.

A world where most people had different interests, but the same sort of categories of interest, would be a world brimming over with diversity and variety.

But the fact that even the categories are different-- that one person can be passionate about something that the other person would never even think about-- that really gives life its glory of variety.

(I'm inclined to ask if anybody reading has any unusual sorts of interests. But asking seems to be the kiss of death to ever actually getting a response-- at least that has been my experience-- so I won't.)

The Inexplicability of Nostalgia

Today is obviously a "feelings" day, between this post and my last one.

I just had a surge of nostalgia, sparked by a memory from more than thirty years ago.

It was from religion class in secondary school. We were watching some film or TV version of the Gospels around Easter time. Jesus of Nazareth, perhaps, or The Greatest Story Ever Told, or something like that. I remember we watched it in several instalments.

The weird thing is that I wasn't happy in that school, I didn't like religion class (which rarely had anything to do with actual religion), and I've never liked screen versions of the life of our Lord. It's not that I'm opposed to them, I've just never felt they add anything. They seem banal and corny.

I can even remember feeling especially bored while watching that particular one.

Why should I feel a warm current of nostalgia when this memory comes to mind? Not for the first time, either.

I don't know.

Maybe it has something to do with my love of "liminal" experiences. (This isn't unique to me-- I think many or maybe even most people have it.)

Easter was barely a "thing" in my childhood and my youth. It seemed like nobody really knew what to do with it. All of my Easter memories have the strange atmosphere of non-event, which isn't quite the same thing as "not an event".

Added to that, my school wasn't particularly evangelical. The nineties were a very weird time for Catholicism in Ireland, for reasons I hardly have to explain. There was still a lot of cultural and institutional Catholicism but there was an enormous loss of confidence and conviction. In Catholic schools (or at least in mine), this led to a bizarre atmosphere of mixed messaging. We had prayers before every class (which I liked even back then), religious pictures and statues all around us (which I also liked), the very occasional assertion of Catholic teaching (for instance, before a divorce referendum in which some of my class-mates were old enough to vote)....but then, quite frequently, a heavy dose of liberalism on top of it. 

I remember one French teacher telling us (very offhandedly, and incidentally to the lesson) that contraception had emancipated women. This was not a trendy young substitute teacher but a rather old-fashioned middle-aged lady. 

Religion class was mostly "Inspiring" feature films and pop psychology. (Actually I'm quite grateful for some of the inspiring films.) One year we had to buy the gospel of Luke as a schoolbook, but we never once used it. (Unless I missed that day, which is very possible.)

So the memory of watching a film about Jesus over Easter was doubly liminal. That Easter was marked in any way, was most atypical, and that it was used to evangelize us in some way was even more so. It felt strange, and perhaps a bit wonderful-- at least in retrospect.

Does that explain the nostalgia? Possibly, I think. I've come to think that nostalgia is often less about how things were, but how they might have been. At least for me.

The Psychological Need to Be Inside Big Buildings

Does anybody else feel this?

I'm talking about big lobbies in hotels, big shopping malls, airports, big train stations, art galleries, and so forth.

I don't mean being inside an ordinary-sized room of a building that happens to be big. I mean, a big building that has at least one very large space inside of it-- lobbies, atriums, conference halls, that kind of thing.

I've just now found myself hankering for this, and missing a particular big building. It's not a constant need, but if I haven't been in a really big building for a while, I miss it.

It seems to nourish (and satisfy) a sense of awe, and of reflectiveness.

In general, I'm all in favour of "small is beautiful"...but I do have this hunger as well.

(No need for comments about ugly modern architecture. I get it.)

Porterhouse Blue on TV

I'm watching the Channel 4 TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue from 1987. Somebody uploaded it to YouTube. It's very good so far. I was frightened it was going to be a cartoonish version, with lots of mugging and exaggeration and frantic running scenes. But it's not at all.

Porterhouse Blue was Tom Sharpe's breakthrough novel, published in 1974. He's an intriguing novelist. His plots are farcical, bawdy, and full of black humour, while his prose is very literate and full of high culture references.

Recently I've been drawn to fictions with a university setting. Porterhouse Blue is set in the fictional Cambridge college of Porterhouse-- a richly-endowed college with minimal scholarly standards, full of wealthy "hearties" (or jocks). A "Porterhouse blue", the book explains, is a stroke brought on my too much eating and drinking, common among the college's sybaritic staff. (It's a pun on the Oxford and Cambridge term "blue", which means an athletic distinction.)

As I've mentioned several times on this blog, my first encounter with the title Porterhouse Blue is quite amusing in retrospect. To me, at least. I was sixteen years old and reading The Oxford Book of Proverbs, a collection of proverbs that used quotations from various books to illustrate how each proverb was used. Porterhouse Blue was quoted on several occasions.

I really liked the title and imagined the book had to be some dense philosophical novel full of speeches, internal monologues, and dreamy vignettes. It summoned the image of the blue reflection in the glass of a bottle of porter, so I thought it would be both reflective and distilled. (I knew porter was an alcoholic drink but mistakenly assumed it was something like brandy or whiskey.) I really liked the idea of the imaginary book I'd conjured up.

When I eventually read it, I discovered my mistake, but I liked it just as much for what it actually turned out to be.

Here's a review of the book that I wrote twenty years ago.

Given that I'm an Irish nationalist (although I'm increasingly sceptical that Ireland is going to survive globalization, or that its population even really wants it to), people are often surprised that I'm also a fervent anglophile. Well, my anglophilia is rooted in things like Tom Sharpe books. (And Carry On and Hammer films, English poetry, English placenames, English situation comedies, P.G. Wodehouse books, and so on.)

Poems I Like: To Autumn by John Keats

Well, this morning I noticed the fallen leaves crunching under my feet. Summer is definitely over and we're into Autumn. (I like to capitalize the seasons.)

John Keats wrote the definitive poem about Autumn, at least in the English language. I'm sure you know it already, but that's no reason not to revisit it.

I've put this in my "Poems I Like" rather than my "Favourite Poems" series, because it's never quite got into the latter category. The main reason for this is that I've never been a fan of nature poetry. I'm very much an indoors person.

The best thing about this poem (and I'm sure most people would agree) is the opening line. It's undoubtedly one of the greatest opening lines in all of English poetry. (Keats has two immortal opening lines: this one, and "A thing of beauty is a joy forever".)

What is there to say about "Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness?". It's one of those miracles of language where the whole is infinitely more than the parts. The soul of autumn has been captured in six words.

(I often wonder if poets realize they've written a classic line when they've written it.)

I used to post on the Philip Larkin Society Forum many years ago, and there was one rather curmudgeonly contributor who insisted Larkin was the only poet worth bothering with. I plucked this line out of the whole body of non-Larkin poetry and asked him: "Surely you see merit in this?". He said he saw nothing special about it. This astounded me. (He wasn't a troll.)

Aside from the opening line, my other favourite line comes at the very end of the poem: "And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." It's such a gentle, dreamy end.

Re-reading this poem, it strikes me that, when it comes to Keats's odes, the "Nelson touch" (look it up; I refuse to say "secret sauce") is the shortened eight line in every stanza. It always serves as a pause and an intensification at once. It makes the movement of the verse more stately. For instance, in the third stanza of this poem:

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

I also love this couple of lines, which hardly need any comment:

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.

Out of Keats's four great odes, this is actually my least favourite. "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn" are, in my opinion, among the very greatest of English poems. "Ode to Melancholy" has already featured in my favourte poems series.

But "To Autumn" is also sublime, and deservedly beloved by the common reader-- the true judge of poetry, given sufficient time. It's probably just my (lamentable) lack of interest in the natural world that stops me from ranking it higher.

In My Day Being on the Spectrum...

 ...meant you were playing War of the Worlds or Sport of Kings.

(Though I never did. I just watched other people doing it. The Spectrum was a games console of the eighties.)

Is A.I. intelligent?

No.

This is the gist of every single blog post and article I've read about artificial intelligence.

I agree, but it's getting a bit tedious. Move on.

The Sentinels

When I was growing up, I lived opposite a fourteen-storey tower. At night a red light glowed on top of it, to ward off low-flying aircraft.

I used to fall asleep staring into that light. Back then I was a radical socialist. (This was almost inevitable, given my background.) I remember seeing the red light as a symbol of a future socialist world. One way or another, it comforted me. The tower no longer exists.

Then, in my twenties or thirties, I remember taking comfort from an orange streetlight that was just outside my front garden wall.

Currently, I live in a block of apartments. There's two globe-shaped lights on either side of the gate to its carpark. They give off a pleasant amber glow all through the hours of darkness. I like to look at them when I get up during the night.

I know lights can't be sentinels. They're just lights. But it's amazing how much they please and beguile me. They shine through the night, whether I'm looking at them or not, watching over my sleep.

More Interesting Words (And Terms)

Several people have contacted me and asked me to write a follow-up to the recent selection of words I shared from my "interesting words" notebook.

Actually, that's a bare-faced lie. Not a single person has contacted me. I can't think why not. But here is a follow-up list anyway. Suck it up!

Mulct: To punish someone by making them pay a fine.

Scutage: A payment made in lieu of military service. Literal meaning: shield money.

Passel: A large group of people or things. Apparently, this is a well-known slang term in America. I'd never heard it until recently, after which (as always seems to happen) I heard it again soon after.

Taffrail: The handrail on the stern of a ship. Has other related meanings, but that's one.

Fungo: A practice throw at a baseball batter, just so he can hit it. An American I know hadn't heard this term. (It can also be the batter throwing the ball himself and then hitting it.)

Malkin: A kitchen maid.

Colophon: The part of a book that tells you the publisher, printer, and other bibliographical information, and often includes the publisher's logo. I like this word very much, as I'm utterly fascinated by publisher's logos.

Vault light: Like a skylight, except it's in the pavement and looks down to a cellar. In Dublin (and elsewhere, I think) they have very picturesque glass panes, often discoloured by time.

Onomastic: Pertaining to names.

Allodial: The highest form of ownership of land, having no higher landlords or authority.

Gnomon: The rod or pin of a sundial.

Vigesimal: A counting system that's based on twenty, not ten. The Mayans had this. How did that come about?

Rake: The upward slope of the seats in a cinema or theatre.

Sprocket hole: The holes along the edge of a celluloid film reel.

Anamorphic desqueeze: The process of stretching horizontally compressed ("squeezed") video or photos back to their normal, wide widescreen aspect ratio. I don't really know what means, but I like the phrase very much.

Eisegesis: Reading your own bias or preoccupations into a text. The opposite of exegesis.

Fascicule: A separately printed instalment of a longer printed work. (Like Marshall Cavendish collections, which you might remember if you're as old as I am.)

A Thought About Memory

Here's a thought about memory which I've had for some time (years), but which I've never put into words.

In my experience, memory tends to be a sort of clip that lasts about one second, or half a second.

I'm going to take an example: the memory of "chip day" in my old school. The cafeteria served chips one day a week. I was too shy to use the cafeteria myself, but I saw the queues outside it, and the smell of chips being fried.

When I remember chip day in my old school, the memory is not simply a piece of information: Chip day was one day a week and there were queues to buy chips.

It's not just a visual memory. In fact, my visual memory is terrible and always blurry.

It's not even a visual memory plus an olfactory memory plus an auditory memory.

No; the best term I can come up with is "clip". It's like a clip plays in my mind for a very brief moment. It has visual, olfactory, and auditory elements.

But above all-- it's the atmosphere that comes back.

There's also an awareness that my consciousness is only part of a larger consciousness, or an aggregate of consciousness. This, to me, is the biggest part of memory. There's always an awareness of expectations, anxieties, hopes, and so forth which were swirling around me. This even marks solitary memories-- because that larger consciousness is notable by its distance (it's never absent).

I don't think my handle on what those other minds were thinking is always very accurate. In fact, I think it was often very inaccurate. But even someone as oblivious and frequently clueless as myself shares (I believe) the extraordinary human capacity to "tune in" to the atmosphere of a place or time.

So when I remember chip day in school-- I'm aware of all the teenage swagger, insecurity, exuberance, yearning, etc. etc. around me. I'm also aware of the consciousness of the teachers, their expectations for us, their disapproval or approval, their greater knowledge of life, and so forth. The whole project of the school is part of this atmosphere-- its push towards self-improvement and career prospects, its Christian ethos, its partaking of the Irish language revival as an Irish language school, and so forth.

All of these "streams" come together in a confluence, like the sounds of hundreds of voices in a shopping centre.

My awareness of this aggregated consciousness (the word seems more diffuse and impersonal than "mind") is like the climate of the memory.

And that's it. That's really all I have to say in this post. But it's worth saying because I rarely hear memory described in these terms, and I often wonder if other peoples' memory works in the same way.

The Death of the Workplace?

This is a depressing thought, from a blog post I found while internet browsing:

So much of The Office already looks antiquated to me, because all of my friends are either working in food service, freelancing, nannying, or communicating on Slack, as I do, with a network of coworkers they haven’t even met, let alone gotten to know well enough to develop nicknames for. It’s a lot more difficult for a 20-something to coast her way into a cushy full-time job like Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Hitchcock and Scully apparently did. In fact, I don’t know any mediocre workers my age, because they never last long in any particular position. That bastion of workplace sitcoms, the bumbling employee no one trusts not to f--- it all up, is a dying breed.

Remote working has transformed my own workplace since Covid. I don't like it. I've chosen never to work from home, except for when I had no choice during the lockdown. As soon as I could come back into the workplace full-time, I did so.

I'm convinced remote working is a bad thing, although I'd probably struggle to make this argument when faced with its enthusiasts (which seems to be most people). For as long as I've remembered, I've feared an increasing privatization of society. I like the formality of work.

The comments on mediocrity touch upon another of my longstanding anxieties. I really and truly believe mediocrity is important, that a society has to find room for mediocrity. Excellence is the peak that rests atop a mountain of mediocrity. The historian Paul Johnson made the observation, which I think an excellent observation, that anyone who really loves a particular genre or art-form necessarily loves the second-rate and third-rate examples of it. I love the horror genre. The idea of only having classic horror movies like The Exorcist or The Wicker Man is a dreary one.

For the heart must pause to breathe

And love itself have rest.

Dare I mention poetry again? The idea that we can have only the tiny sliver of attention paid to poetry that we have today, and that poetry can flourish in those conditions, seems ludicrous to me. Lots of people still write poetry-- it's the readership of poetry that has disappeared. When poetry was seriously read, there was a huge class of indifferent or forgettable poets who achieved a certain amount of success, celebrity, or simply publication. But so what? How else could it be? Do you expect the local multiplex to have a constant stream of five-star films? Do you expect every soccer player to be a George Best?

But these are the sort of things I usually don't say because I fear people will assume I'm just being contrarian.

Is Hype Good?

This question is occurring to me more frequently in recent years.

"Hype" is usually used negatively, to denote commercial advertising and marketing and publicity drives: the sort of thing that most people hate (or profess to hate).

But ultimately what is the difference between "hype" and a sense of wonder?

You might say hype is fake and contrived, while a sense of wonder is authentic and spontaneous.

But how clear is this distinction? I can find very little in life that is spontaneously wonder-provoking. Nearly everything that inspires us with wonder is much-heralded.

Think about it. First love. Parenthood. Travel. The Aurora Borealis. The giant redwoods. Looking at cells through a microscope. Most things that we associate with wonder have been very heavily promoted to us before we experience them (if we ever do).

And is this such a bad thing? I think it's a good thing. I think one of the roles of culture is to prime us for the experiences of life and also to magnify those experiences.

But this "hype" is also something that (I think) accompanies us throughout the day. I know in my own case, I make a conscious effort to "hype" my ordinary experiences. The deadening force of habit is so strong that I feel myself pushing against it constantly.

Much conversation (perhaps most conversation) also feels like hype to me-- trying to make the most of an experience, an anecdote, a funny observation, and so on. And it's hard to imagine what else it could be.

I'd planned a longer post, but it's past midnight and I'm tired. Maybe I've made the point anyway, and perhaps started an interesting train of thought in your own mind.

Time and Eternity

If our lives in time somehow determine or influence our lives in eternity...does it follow that this very moment, when you are reading this line-- and, indeed, every moment of our lives-- will be as consequential (and much more consequential) than any moment in human history in its relation to all of human history...more consequential than the death of Socrates, the sack of Rome, the sinking of the Titanic, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and so forth?

What will any of that mean in eternity, compared to the fate of a single soul?

I don't know if this is the case. But I wonder.

The Church and the Bible

I've just left this comment on a previous post, arising out of an interesting discussion with someone who left a comment (and I'm always very grateful for comments): The doctrine of the Trinity is one of those things where I believe because the Church has told me. It seems to me that the Arians had a spectacular proof-text in John 14:28 "The Father is greater than I". The fact that the Arians were rejected as heretics convinces me that proof-texts aren't the way of interpreting the Bible. My own belief in the Church is prior to my belief in the Bible and based on other evidences. I'm aware that all sounds very pompous and nasal, put like that; I was just trying to be concise.

St. Augustine famously said: "I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me." I'm quite willing to admit that I come to faith in Christ through my trust in the Catholic Church. This trust is based on viewing the history and life of the Church as a whole, over centuries and continents-- volumes could be written finding fault with this or that aspect of its history or influence or practice, but this fact doesn't dent my faith. The Church really does behave, as Chesterton said in The Everlasting Man, like the bearer of a message, and not its inventor.

This doesn't mean that I think everything a Pope says is right, or everything a saint says is right, or even that the Church has always been wise or enlightened in all its actions. Pope Leo X condemned Martin Luther for opposing the burning of heretics! Saint Ambrose of Milan refused the Eucharist to an Emperor who had demanded the rebuilding of a synagogue burned down by a Christian mob. It's quite easy to find such scandals, reaching into our own time.

But if you take an overview, the consistency, sublimity, wisdom, and goodness of the Catholic Church-- compared to all other institutions-- is startling, and to me bespeaks a supernatural origin.

First Things First

"When and how the Universe originated is one of the greatest mysteries of science."

The first line of Multyfarnham Parish History by Peter Wallace, published in 1897. (Multyfarnham is a small rural parish in Westmeath.)

The Hunger for Injustice and Grievance

This seems to me the biggest problem with the whole mentality of the left.

Every group (and individual) has grievances and has suffered injustices. It's right to acknowledge these and, where appropriate, to address them.

I say "where appropriate" because it seems obvious that sometimes trying to correct an injustice might cause more trouble than the injustice itself-- if it's a relatively minor injustice, if it's hard to define and isolate, if trying to correct it would involve a serious assault on freedom, if you're simply going to create an opposite injustice, etc.

Both the left and the right, conservatives and liberals, and everybody else, has their pet grievances and injustices-- but grievance seems essential to the left. To them, grievance seems to constitute group identity above all else-- so that it's hardly an exaggeration to say that a group not only has grievances, but is its grievances.

This occurs to me most often when I'm reading something a progressive has written about Irish history. It generally reflects a strange sympathy with the Catholic majority in Ireland, despite all the reasons progressives should have for lacking sympathy with them (including the fact that they were a majority!).

The Dominican Crest

I went to a school run by Dominicans nuns, although even during my time there the nuns were thin on the ground and elderly. I wonder if there are any left. (I've just checked. There aren't. They handed over control to some trust in 2009, although the school apparently still has a "Dominican ethos".)

One thing I really liked about the school was the presence of the Dominican crest. It wasn't exactly everywhere, but it was a fairly common sight. My favourite instance was where it was worked into the linoleum in at least one place, and maybe more. (It's hard to remember.)

I think the Dominican crest, in purely visual and aesthetic terms, is one of the most pleasing and elegant of all symbols.

I'm not aware of having been influenced by the Dominican atmosphere of the school, or even having been very much aware of it. But who knows? Maybe I was.