Fifth Meeting of the Irish Chesterton Society!

I'm sure readers of this blog won't mind me putting on my hat as organizer of the GK Chesterton Society of Ireland, with this plug cross-posted from its blog:

It's been a long time coming, I know, but I can finally announce the fifth meeting of the Irish Chesterton Society.

It's on Saturday the 28th of April (sorry for the short notice), at two o' clock, in the Central Catholic Library, 74 Merrion Square, Dublin.

This time we have a special treat as the Irish philosopher and writer Mark Dooley (author of Why Be Catholic? and Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach) has kindly agreed to give us a talk (title: the Democratic Faith).

Hope to see you there! Please let me know if you are thinking of coming as that will give me an idea of turnout!

Admission is free. All are welcome. No oath of loyalty to the Pope is required, despite the setting.

In Praise of Boredom

"Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike."

Those famous words by Walter Pater have acted as a kind of banner for legions of aesthetes, dilletantes and thrill-seekers since they were first published in 1868. They are plausible enough, at first sight. Isn't it true that we are all under sentence of death? Isn't it true that every moment is precious beyond all calculation, and that each might be our last? Shouldn't we do our best to keep the lens of perception clear, not to cloud it with habit and preconception, to brush away the gauzy film of familiarity from our eyes? Shouldn't we seek out new and fugitive sensations, never content to simply fall into a rut of repetition?

But then, as soon as we have resolved upon this, another image might swim before our eyes; the figure of the jaded old roué and dandy, who looks out at the world through irony-heavy eyes, who sighs with weariness at the staleness and cliché all around him, and for whom life has become nothing but a never-ending, undendurable bore.

There are two ways of responding to our natural tendency to boredom. One is to seek ever new experiences. The other is to persevere in our familiar experiences, seeking to peel away the layers of skin that have formed over our imagination, seeking always to rediscover their primal freshness.

It is not the world that grows dull, but us.

I think of this often when I go to Mass. I love Mass, and I know that I should participate fully, with my heart and mind as well as my voice and body.

But it is almost impossible not to become blasé.

There is nothing more thrilling, more important, in the whole world than the moment when the priest intones: "Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my body, which will be given up for you." This moment is infinitely more wonderful and precious than an eclipse of the sun, seeing the aurora borealis, or the last-minute goal in a World Cup soccer game.

And yet- how often have I found myself planning the rest of my day during those words, or imagining a clever answer I might have made in an argument, or something equally banal!

How owlishly I blink at the consecrated host before me, as the communicants make their way to receive it! I would travel a great distance and wait in a long queue to see the Shroud of Turin. But here is the reality of which that is (or may be) simply an image-- how am I not struck with awe?

How do I find myself thinking of the Lord's Prayer, the prayer Christ himself instructed us to use, as a baby's prayer, a beginner's prayer, and find a more subtle and delicate savour in some mere human composition?

Even outside the realm of the sacred and the sacramental, I think this truth applies.

I went to the film Tron Legacy recently. It wasn't a great film, I didn't even stay till the end, but it was visually enchanting, set (for the most part) in a virtual reality of unearthly, fluorescent light.

At one point, a character who has lived all her life in this otherwordly beauty asks the main character, who is an exile from our own society, if our sky is as beautiful as she imagines it to be.

He replies something like: "More beautiful than you can even imagine."

How can we ever stop looking at the sky? How can we ever stop marvelling at it?

Whenever my bus passes the river Liffey, I insist upon looking up from my book and gazing for a few moments, savouring the way the waves crinkle along its surface, its unique colour, the pleasing way it recedes into a point on the horizon. I enjoy the feeling of passing a threshold, migrating from the Northside to the Southside of the city (or vice versa) in a moment.

Whenever I pass a crossroads, I make myself pay attention to the concrete symbolism of the thing-- a point where, every moment, so many different lives and stories intersect.

We grow weary too easily. We grow weary of our own country and culture, and spend ridiculous amounts of money prospecting other continents for a whiff of exoticism. We grow tired of jokes with a set-up and a punch-line, and congratulate ourselves on preferring observational and surreal humour. We lose our joy in stories, even though the dreamworld of storytelling is a territory of never-ending marvel, and plume ourselves on seeking out vignettes and plotless narratives and character studies instead.

We should remind ourselves more often that our first parents grew tired of Eden, and longed for the one thing they could not have.

I think boredom is good. Boredom is promising. Boredom is the fatigue that comes before the second wind. Boredom is the mist that passes over your eyes before your vision is made more vivid, more heightened.

So when I am bored at Mass, or find myself going through the motions in prayer, I am not discouraged, or even annoyed at myself (as long as I know the boredom is not mere inattention or carelessness). I feel more like an athelete in training who welcomes the strain in his mucles and ligaments, knowing that he is harvesting greater energies for the future-- that he is, in fact, remaking himself.

Whatever Happened to the New Atheists?

William Reville has an article in this week’s Irish Catholic headed “Religion is not Anti-Scientific”. It goes over some very well-trodden ground indeed (has anybody anything original left to say on this subject?), but what struck me was the very first line: “The New Atheists claim that religion is inherently anti-scientific...”

The New Atheists! Remember them? Richard Dawkins, the biologist. Christopher Hitchens, the journalist. Dan Dennett, the philosopher of mind. Sam Harris, a professional atheist with no other obvious claim to fame. AC Grayling, the British philosopher. Philip Pullman, the writer of children's fantasies who drew on Milton and Dante to attack the central doctrine of those authors. PZ Myers, a particularly nasty science blogger who profaned the Eucharist for kicks. And a whole supporting cast of sympathizers, some of whom had been damning and blasting religious belief for decades, but who suddenly seemed to have caught the wind of the zeitgeist; the Amazing Randi, Stephen Fry, Ian McEwan, Ian McEllan, Terry Pratchett, Ricky Gervais, and a whole gaggle of other notables-- not to mention an apparently innumerable swarm of bloggers, protestors, letter-writers and lurkers on various internet sites.

To mangle Byron:

We counted them at break of day--
And when the sun set, where were they?

I shouldn’t be too flippant, as one of their luminaries (Christopher Hitchens) tragically died last year. But even before that the movement seemed to be losing steam, and now it seems downright quaint to hear the name invoked in the first sentence of a newspaper article. I think the New Atheists have joined the Y2K bug , video nasties and Swine Flu in the Museum of Failed Apocalypses.

And that they were an apocalyptic movement is beyond doubt. They may not have heralded a literal end of the world, but they certainly seemed to proclaim the end of one era in human history and the dawning of another (although backward people in poor, ill-educated parts of the world might have been expected to take some time to catch up).

Scientific rationalism was now the gold standard of knowledge, and reason was by definition anti-supernatural. Religion wasn’t just an embarrassment, it was potentially lethal. If someone thought they were in touch with a supernatural entity, after all, what limit could logically apply to their nuttiness? The apple-cheeked old lady at the parish cake sale was a not-so-distant relative of Osama Bin Laden.

Rudeness towards believers was not only permitted, it was positively a duty. There had been too much wishy-washy tolerance. The searing light of rationality would penetrate into all the murky corners of supersition, and soon nobody would get away with proclaiming a belief in the soul, miracles, Providence, or grace. It would not even be allowed as a pious fiction or a figure of speech.

What amazes me in retrospect is how much their clamour intimidated me. I was a religiously-inclined agnostic when I read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, the anti-Bible of the New Atheists. Even at the time of reading it, before I started really delving into the arguments for and against religious belief, I found its logic unconvincing. (I also had no idea, before reading it, that the scientific case for religion was so strong—even in attempting to rubbish it, Dawkins couldn’t help publicizing it.)

But it wasn’t the logic or the arguments that hit me in the solar plexus. It was the bitterness of the rhetoric, and also its confidence. The message was stark: religion was to be driven beyond the pale. Faith in God was no longer intellectually, culturally or socially respectable.

And for a while, it really seemed like that.

But now, the spell seems to have been broken.

The would-be blockbuster film taken from Philip Pulman's atheistic fantasy, The Golden Compass, flopped at the box office, while Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia-- all fantasy franchises with an unabashed Christian message-- triumphed.

The Pope visited Britain and Germany, to almost universal acclaim. Predicted widespread protests turned out to be a damp squib.

The recent Irish census revealed that nine out of ten Irish-born people consider themselves Catholics. Not many more than five per cent described themselves as non-religious, and the high-profile campaign of Irish atheist groups encouraging respondents specify that they were atheist or agnostic (there was apparently no box for this on the census itself) only resulted in about three thousand such declarations.

All of the candidates in the Presidential election supported the broadcasting of the Angelus bells on RTE. Even the liberal candidates spoke of their spiritual values.

I visited the GPO over Christmas, and was happy to see the Christmas crib still enjoying pride of place, despite grumblings about this from God-bashers.

The closing of the Irish embassy to the Vatican has drawn a backlash from the public way beyond what might have been expected.

Every other day, it seems, there are lively discussions on religion, especially the Catholic faith, on the opinion page of the Irish Times. The topic seems an almost ever-present in the Letters to the Editor section. Is the interpretation of Christ's message, in our day, any less a matter for burning public debate as it was in the time of Newman and the Oxford Movement?

A new RTE radio show on religion, the God Slot, has proved very popular, while the BBC have produced an acclaimed documentary on the lives of Catholics that apparently (I have not seen it) is sympathetic and objective in tone.

Even in the field of British comedy-- apparently a New Atheist bastion if ever there was one, with the likes of Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg, Alan Davies, David Baddiel, and many others making rather a meal out of their unbelief-- there has been a change in the wind. Frank Skinner has recently appeared on stage with the Archbishop of Canterbury, while the situation comedy Rev takes faith seriously and has won prizes and rave reviews, as well as cameo appearances from stars like Ralph Fiennes and Richard E. Grant.

So the mood seems to have changed, and to reveal that the moment of the New Atheists, after all, was only that-- a mood.

What lesson to draw? Simply, I think, that believers should not be too impressed by these ebbs and flows of public opinion. I am reminded of these lines by GK Chesterton, from a poem dedicated to his friend Edmund Bentley, in which he remembers the rationalism and decadence of the Victorian era in which he grew up:

A cloud was on the mind of men
And wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul
When we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity
And art admired decay;
The world was old and ended:
But you and I were gay...
Life was a fly that faded,
And death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed
When you and I were young.

(...)

This is a tale of those old fears,
Even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand
The true thing that it tells—
Of what colossal gods of shame
Could cow men and yet crash,
Of what huge devils hid the stars,
Yet fell at a pistol flash.

We Shouldn't Celebrate Father Tony Flannery's "Silencing"

So the Vatican has finally moved against the flagrantly heterodox views of the Association of Catholic Priests, and its founder Father Tony Flannery has been told to stop writing his monthly column in Reality magazine.

The reaction falls into two easily predictable categories. On one side there are comparisons of the Vatican to the USSR, claims that Catholics are leaving the Church because of a stifling authoritarianism, and contrasts between Jesus's simple life and all-embracing love and the supposed ostentation and exclusivity of the Vatican.

On the other side, there is something close to rejoicing. The Irish Catholic this week prints reactions on its Facebook page (here I am, on a blog, discussing comments posted on a Facebook page and then printed in a newspaper-- how multimedia!)

One reaction is, "Thanks be to god! The sooner action against the ACP is taken the better the Church will be!" Another says, "Le cúnamh Dé, more of them will be disciplined."

To be fair, many of those criticising the ACP have been careful to call for prayers for them, and to acknowledge the great devotion and sacrifice all priests undergo on behalf of their flocks. I might even say that the anti-Rome comments were rather less measured and magnanimous.

Even still, I think there might be something to what one pro-ACP letter writer claims: "I'll admit to being a bit fearful myself when I see a kind of smug triumphalism and schadenfreude emanating from certain ardent Catholics over the silencing of TF."

Anyone who has read two or three posts of this blog will know where I stand. I am not a fan of the Association of Catholic Priests. I think their entire attitude is unhealthy and injurious to the Church in Ireland, and that their constant dissent from orthodoxy dishonours their priestly vows.

And yet, I feel only trepidation and anxiety over this controversy. The ACP represents more than 800 priests, the media tells me, and goodness alone knows how many pew-filling Catholics sympathise with them. For all I know, there may be more liberal Catholics than orthodox Catholics in this country. At a time when parishes are under such strain, and the media is buffeting the Church from every corner, can we afford a schism?

Whatever we think about the open dissent of liberal priests, they remain valid celebrants of Mass and dispensers of the sacraments. We need them.

I feel that we-- and by we I mean orthodox Irish Catholics-- should strenously avoid the spirit of faction, or anything that could be mistaken for triumphalism, and pray ardently that the Catholic communion in Ireland is healed of these breaches.

I happened to finish Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua today, and I came across this passage, which (of course) struck me especially in the light of the Fr. Flannery affair:

And then again all through Church history from the first, how slow is authority in interfering! Perhaps a local teacher, or a doctor in some local school, hazards a proposition, and a controversy ensues. It smoulders or burns in one place, no one interposing; Rome simply lets it alone. Then it comes before a Bishop; or some priest, or some professor in some other seat of learning takes it up; and then there is a second stage of it. Then it comes before a University, and it may be condemned by the theological faculty. So the controversy proceeds year after year, and Rome is still silent. An appeal perhaps is next made to a seat of authority inferior to Rome; and then at last after a long while it comes before the supreme power. Meanwhile, the question has been ventilated and turned over and over again, and viewed on every side of it, and authority is called upon to pronounce a decision, which has already been arrived at by reason. But even then, perhaps the supreme authority hesitates to do so, and nothing is determined on the point for years; or so generally and vaguely, that the whole controversy has to be gone through again, before it is ultimately determined. It is manifest how a mode of proceeding, such as this, tends not only to the liberty, but to the courage, of the individual theologian or controversialist. Many a man has ideas, which he hopes are true, and useful for his day, but he is not confident about them, and wishes to have them discussed. He is willing or rather would be thankful to give them up, if they can be proved to be erroneous or dangerous, and by means of controversy he obtains his end. He is answered, and he yields; or on the contrary he finds that he is considered safe. He would not dare to do this, if he knew an authority, which was supreme and final, was watching every word he said, and made signs of assent or dissent to each sentence, as he uttered it. Then indeed he would be fighting, as the Persian soldiers, under the lash, and the freedom of his intellect might truly be said to be beaten out of him. But this has not been so:—I do not mean to say that, when controversies run high, in schools or even in small portions of the Church, an interposition may not rightly take place; and again, questions may be of that urgent nature, that an appeal must, as a matter of duty, be made at once to the highest authority in the Church; but, if we look into the history of controversy, we shall find, I think, the general run of things to be such as I have represented it. Zosimus treated Pelagius and Cœlestius with extreme forbearance; St. Gregory VII. was equally indulgent with Berengarius; by reason of the very power of the Popes they have commonly been slow and moderate in their use of it.

As I say, I couldn't help being struck by this passage. But the passage that struck me even more, and that saddened me more than I can say (considering its contrast with our own time and country) was this one:

And next, I was struck, when I had more opportunity of judging of the Priests, by the simple faith in the Catholic Creed and system of which they always gave evidence, and which they never seemed to feel, in any sense at all, to be a burden. And now that I have been in the Church nineteen years, I cannot recollect hearing of a single instance in England of an infidel priest. Of course there are men from time to time, who leave the Catholic Church for another religion, but I am speaking of cases, when a man keeps a fair outside to the world and is a hollow hypocrite in his heart.

Happy Easter

Just back from Easter Vigil Mass at the Holy Spirit Church in Ballymun. Even though the congregation was rather scanty, and hardly anybody sang along with the hymns, and the Exsultet was played on a tape recorder, and there was more than a little bit of muddle and confusion about lighting candles and the Paschal fire...even despite all that, this most august Mass somehow retained its majesty and power to inspire awe.

I wondered about the sense of euphoria, of exaltation, that was in the air as people gathered at the back of the church afterwards, made jokes about going straight home, and even hugged one another. Where was the emotion coming from? Was it imagination, atmosphere, childhood memory?

Or was there a stirring in the depths of the soul that realized something very real-- something more real than anything in the world outside-- had just taken place?

A happy and holy Easter to all my readers!

Nice Holy Week Meditation from Peter Hitchens

"Something about the weather and the sky at this time of year, combined with my good fortune in having many times visited Jerusalem...makes each spring twilight very poignant. It is easy to imagine the surreptitious gathering, the expedition to the Garden of Gethsemane (gardens are everywhere in the Bible, and a tiny trace of Gethsemane still, astonishingly, survives), while the arresting party assembles, Judas nerves himself for his treacherous kiss, and then the chilly early morning where Peter warms himself by the fire and betrays his master, and the agitators prepare the mob for the show trial, and the orchestrated calls for the release of Barabbas, which will follow soon afterwards.

Read the whole post on his blog (it's very short).

Peter Hitchens might well be my favourite living writer. He writes so profoundly about so many topics, but it is obvious that his entire worldview centres upon his Anglican faith, fragile and tentative as he admits that faith to be.

I Admit It-- I am an Aesthetic Protestant...

As we celebrate Palm Sunday and move into Holy Week, the liturgy becomes more elaborate. This, of course, is a wonderful thing. It would feel very anticlimactic for the high point of the Church's year to be celebrated with the usual liturgy.

Nothing seems more appropriate, or more satisfying, than the crimson vestments of the priest in today's Mass, or the dramatic re-enactment of Christ's trial and condemnation, or the blessing and distribution of palms to commemorate that long-ago and eternally-present entry into Jerusalem. (We now have an altar boy and an altar girl, for the first time since I returned to Mass-going.)

But before I set off to my parish church, I had a look at EWTN, the Catholic TV station, and watched some of the Palm Sunday Mass that was taking place in St. Peter's Square.

After the sung Confession of Faith came prayers of the faithful. They were read out in one language, then another, then another...by the time I left the house, a young-ish man was reading out the prayer in German.

This reminds me of Housman's little piece of doggerel:

It is a fearful thing to be
The Pope.
That cross will not be laid on me,
I hope.
A righteous God would not permit
It.
The Pope himself must often say,
After the labours of the day,
'It is a fearful thing to be
Me.'

Imagine having the cameras and the eyes of the audience focused on you during all those endless High Masses!

Maybe I am a philistine, but sung Masses, soaring cathedrals, and the booming of organ music leaves me cold. It's all too much-- my sense of wonder is buried under all the baroque brilliance.

Don't get me wrong-- I think ceremony is wonderful, essential. Ornament is wonderful. A sense of occasion is wonderful. And the transformation of ordinary bread and wine into the body and blood of Our Saviour should most emphatically not be approached in a casual or offhand spirit.

But is more always better? The words of the liturgy fill me with more awe when they are spoken rather than sung. Hymns always seem more haunting to me when they rely on the human voice alone, rather than the accompaniment of an organ. And a simple chapel with a few statues and hangings always seems more reverential to me than lofty spires, monuments dripping with marble, flying buttresses and enormous rose windows.

There is an enormous difference between the understated and the prosaic.

I will probably offend Traditionalists even more by admitting that I prefer the great English Protestant hymns-- He Who Would Valiant Be, Abide with Me, Jerusalem-- to the Latin hymns I've heard.

Of course, this is all a matter of aesthetics, and it is always dangerous to pay too much attention to aesthetics in sacred matters. But I do think it is woth pointing out that you can be an orthodox, traditionally-minded Catholic and still think less is sometimes more.