A Conservative is Somebody...

...who thinks the future will be here soon enough.

Awful Hymns

I go to Mass on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Even though Sunday is the Lord's Day, and should be the high-point of the liturgical and devotional week, I have to admit that I much prefer Saturday morning Mass. And the main reason is the awful hymns that have to be sung on a Sunday (we don't sing any hymns on a Saturday).

Now, I know the Mass is not an aesthetic experience. I am not there to be entertained. And I know further that every validly-celebrated Mass is quite literally Heaven on Earth, and that we stand in the presence of all the saints, angels, martyrs and apostles in each celebration-- and, mostly importantly, Our Lord himself in the Blessed Sacrament.

So I don't attach too much importance to my own aesthetic preferences, but I do think aesthetics are an aid to devotion. When the priest urges us to lift up our hearts, it is easier to do so when our hearts have already been lifted by the ritual and atmosphere-- and harder to do so when they have been downcast by banal and uninspired hymns.

Some hymns are amongst the greatest poems in the language. I have to admit that the hymns I really admire tend to be Protestant hymns. Take Bunyan's To Be a Pilgrim:

He who would valiant be
'Gainst all disaster
Let him in constancy
Follow the master
There's no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.

That swells the heart and braces the soul. It is an evocation of spiritual warfare, of spiritual heroics. It is a manly hymn. And the metre adds to the meaning, with each line rising to a climax.

Now take one of the hymns we sung at Mass today:

The Lord will heal the broken heart
God will seek the lost and find them.

I will bless the Lord all of my days.
I will bless the Lord and give God praise.
For the humble heart the Lord will guard
In the Father's care may you rest from harm.

Can the spirit really rise up at words like this? They are flat, unfeeling, dutiful. There is no movement of thought from line to line; you could almost switch the lines around into any other order.

Let it not be thought that I am merely preferring a more vainglorious hymn to one of humble submission and reliance. It is not a question of subject matter. We could take a hymn whose tone is almost opposite to that of To Be a Pilgrim, but that is equally masterful-- I mean Abide with Me:

Abide with me; fast falls the even-tide
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.
When other comforts fail, and helpers flee
Help of the helpless thou, abide with me.

Those are lines to give you goose-pimples!

I am of the same temperament, in regard to hymns, as CS Lewis: "What I, like many other laymen, chiefly desire in church are fewer, better and shorter hymns; chiefly fewer". (On Church Music.)

This, however, is what Pope Benedict wrote when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, in The Spirit of the Liturgy:

The importance of music in biblical religion is shown very simply by the fact that verb "to sing" (which related words such as "song", and so forth) is one of the most commonly used words in the Bible. It occurs 309 times in the Old Testament and thirty-six in the New. When man comes into contact with God mere speech is not enough. Areas of existence are awakened that spontaneously turn into song.

Bah. It seems a Catholic is stuck with hymns (especially since our Lord is recorded as having sung one with his disciples at the Last Supper). But can't we at least have good hymns? Can we have some decent new hymns, or else just revert to decent old hymns, as a part of Church renewal in Ireland?

To soften the curmudgeonliness of this post, let me add that the recessional hymn at today's Mass is actually one that I have always found almost breathtakingly gracious and simple and moving.

As I kneel before you, as I bow my head in prayer
Take this day, make it yours and fill me with your love.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu.

All I have I give you, every wish and dream are yours;
Mother of Christ, mother of mine, present them to my Lord. 

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu.

You Can Never Really Switch the Television Off

I was brought up by television.

Immediately I write this, I feel I should qualify it, if only for the sake of my parents' honour. I was by no means a "latch-key child", or in any way neglected. In fact, it's probably truer to say I was spoiled. Nor is it at all the case that my home was culturally impoverished. Amongst the most vivid of my childhood memories were the hundreds of books on the bookshelves, their very titles and covers brimming over with promise and mystery. It was the most eclectic assortment of books you could imagine. My father would recite nursery rhymes to us, as well as chunks from Yeats and Shakespeare. We were always encouraged to read. When it comes to "cultural capital" (as the Marxists would put it), I have nothing at all to complain about.

So when I claim that I was brought up by television, I really mean that everybody my age was brought up by television. Of course, "everybody" hardly ever means "everybody". I am sure I will get an indignant comment from somebody my own age or younger who didn't have a television in the house, or who had one but never bothered with it because they were always out bee-catching or cycling or knick-knacking. (Although I am rather sceptical whenever anyone claims that they never watched television, past tense, or never watch it, present tense. It's amazing how much knowledge of shows and actors and presenters is accumulated by people who "never watch television".)

We are rapidly reaching the stage where nobody will remember a time without television. I find this very interesting. Public life is still full of writers, journalists, academics and other people who have vivid memories-- and your earliest memories are usually your most vivid-- of a time when this puppet-show of light and shadow had not taken up residence (or taken up court) in our living rooms. But not for much longer.

TV was our first window onto the wider world, and one's earliest influences always imprint themselves upon the imagination. The blank slate is gone forever. When we started to read, we were already adepts of television, and we did not come to the glowing screen with minds formed by the printed page. We came to the printed page with minds formed by the glowing screen. When we read stories, we imagined them brought to life in a studio. When we read history, we brought to it pictures of period dramas, with all the assumptions of elegance and stiltedness that entails. It took me a long time-- until very recently, in fact-- to stop assuming that the most salient fact about anything that happened before 1960 was its pre-modernity.

Part of the glamour that the printed word had for somebody my age was that it was not television. This fact conferred a kind of prestige, an assumption of high-mindedness, upon every book whatsoever. It only occurred to me after many years that the printed page was simply the only method of mass entertainment and mass communication before the invention of radio. Millions of people had opened copies of The Strand magazine or Peg's Paper or Tit Bits without feeling this aura of edification, or anything like it. They read Sherlock Holmes in The Strand in exactly the same way they would watch CSI: Miami.

In the same way, millions of people in ancient times sat around campfires and listened to stories of Osiris, Loki and Finn McCool in exactly the same way, and with exactly the same motives, as suburban housewives today watch Prison Break or Heroes. They were not thinking about allegorical meanings or breathing the heady mountain air of Mythology.

Reverence is a double-edged sword. In general, of course, reverence is a good thing. But an excessive reverence towards the printed word does have something of a dampening, an inhibiting effect. What was reverence to Charles Dickens in his childhood reading, as fictionalized in this famous passage from David Copperfield?

When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour of our little village alehouse...

C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy describes the same kind of simple, voracious childhood reading, with no conception of self-improvement hovering over it:

I have now to tell you how Wyvern made me a prig. When I went there, nothing was further from my mind than the idea that my private taste for fairly good books, for Wagner, for mythology, gave me any sort of superiority to those who read nothing but magazines...The claim might seem unbelievable if I did not add that I had been protected from this sort of conceit by downright ignorance...Never in my life had I read a work of fiction, poetry or criticism in my own language except because, after trying the first few pages, I liked the taste of it.

And this, I think, is perhaps crucial (or at least, very conducive) to developing a genuine taste for something, including books. C.S. Lewis adopted as a motto for readers, "Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears." He meant that we should come to a book (I almost said 'a text') with no preconceptions or expectations or prejudices. An educated young person today, gingerly reading poetry on his own initiative for the first time, is expecting every poem to crawl with double-meanings, irony and ambiguity. A simple lyric, for instance by Housman, will seem disappointing and flat to him.

I remember, when I read Dante's Divine Comedy, being astounded at several discoveries about Dante and the poem. One was its sheer sophistication; I almost expected I would have to stoop to fit into Dante's primitive mental universe. Instead, I found that the universe he inhabited was broader, deeper and subtler than my own. Another astounding discovery was that Dante wrote in Italian rather than Latin, and chose a form of story that he thought would have universal appeals, precisely because he wanted to reach the common man and woman. I had girded myself to scale Mount Everest, and realized that I was instead invited onto the open plains and into the broad daylight of universality. The most stupendous discovery was that Dante had written his master work first and foremost to win souls to Christ. It was-- horror of horrors!-- a didactic poem! All of my expectations were confounded.

In a similar vein, I always remember a moment in English class in school, when I was fifteen or so. We were studying The Merchant of Venice, and the teacher was describing the anti-semitic assumptions that lay behind the portrayal of Shylock. One girl suggested that Shakespeare would have foreseen how his play would be read in the future, when anti-semitism was discarded. I realized I had been thinking the same thing. We were brought up-- by television, especially-- to regard Shakespeare as a universal genius who existed somehow beyond time and space, a god-like figure. It took me a long time to appreciate that Shakespeare was a working writer who wrote for money, who wrote plenty of forgettable stuff, who had an often-tiresome sense of humour and who was not immune to the prejudices of his time.

Coming to books and literature and poetry with such trepidiation-- on tip-toe, as it were-- it is very difficult to make yourself at home there. And even when we do, we are naturalised citizens from another country-- the country of television.

I am a typical social and cultural conservative, with all the typical conservative hostility to television-- a case that has been made so often and so powerfully, I will not bother to rehash it all here. You've encountered it; you agree with it or you don't. I do recommend everybody to read Peter Hitchens's wonderful chapter on television, The Telescreen Triumphs, in his masterpiece The Abolition of Britain. I agree pretty much with every word of that. I have given up television many times in my life, although I always find myself taking up the viewing habit again. Television is just too convenient, too omnipresent, too obliging. Shunning it seems like a futile gesture at best, a form of priggishness or self-congratulation at worst.

But today I found myself thinking of television, not harshly, but tenderly. Nostalgia is irrefutable. My dawning consciousness of life's wonder and solemnity and possibilities came through television, and I cannot prise any of those elements entirely free from my memories of the small screen. Even all my romantic notions of the simple, the pre-technological and the traditional were supplied by television. In setting myself against the cultural influence of television and popular culture, I am in a sense like some post-colonial African leader who was educated at Oxford or Cambridge. My idylls of cornfields and old farmhouses and pipe-chewing old timers were all dreamed up by a TV director. The very atmosphere of wonder, in my mind, comes with the memory of low lighting and haunting music, or dust motes playing in a beam of light in some cluttered and mysterious attic-- all drawn from long-forgotten broadcasts.

Today, strangely, I feel more gratitude than resentment of this. It is impossible to stay on your high horse all the time. But that doesn't mean you should never mount it. I believe in fair-mindendess, and, as a critic of television (and of the consumer culture of which it is the main pillar), I feel obliged to admit how much I owe to it. I believe that television, on the whole, erodes the world's stock of wonder and awe and magic, and stunts the imagination; but I would never pretend that it is itself bereft of wonder and awe and magic, or that it can never spur the imagination, either.

My Letter in the Irish Times yesterday

I had a letter in the Irish Times yesterday, responding to a Fintan O'Toole article:

Sir, – Fintan O’Toole (Opinion, May 1st) is entirely right when he criticises the Catholic Church in Ireland for its former slowness to react to clerical child abuse, and entirely wrong when he criticises it for disciplining priests who question defined Catholic doctrine – this too, let it be noted, hardly done with lightning speed, considering how long many of these figures have been undermining orthodox teaching.
He calls the Catholic Church “stupid” and says “it is doing a far better job of destroying itself than its worst enemies could dream of.” But the truth is that the Catholic Church existed long before any of the fashionable causes O’Toole espouses, and will continue to exist and flourish long after those causes are a footnote in history.
Perhaps the church’s critics might open their minds enough to accept that such an ancient institution has learned to look beyond the catch-cries of the moment in favour of enduring truths? – Yours, etc,
MAOLSHEACHLANN O CEALLAIGH,
Sillogue Gardens,
Ballymun, Dublin 11.

I find myself wondering, though, if a letter like this does any good. Sure, it gives me the satisfaction of having made a point (a rather clichéd and obvious one), but will it have any other effect? Will it draw anybody towards Christ and his Church? Or does it simply seem smug and triumphalist?

I wonder a lot about the validity of religious arguments, on the part of ordinary folks like me. The gladitorial face-offs with New Atheists and rabid secularists-- what do they achieve? They are highly unlikely to convert the Dawkinsite, who has invested so much emotion and self-image into their infidelity. (To be fair, they could say the same thing about "dyed-in-the-wool faith heads"-- and they do.) Perhaps an onlooker who is uncommitted will be impressed, will find himself thinking, "Hey, these religious wackos can actually stand their ground in a clash of ideas. Maybe they're not just glassy-eyed cultists after all."

Or maybe the defence of the Faith is best left to those who really know what they are talking about, theologians and ecclesiastical historians and other specialists. The words of Yeats come to mind: "I think it better that in times like these a poet keep his mouth shut..." Perhaps a layman like me should keep his mouth shut rather than jump studs-first into what he thinks is his part in the New Evangelisation, but is really just self-indulgence. God grant me the discernment to know!

Irish Media is Giving us our Two-Minutes Hate

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.

1984, George Orwell

The Irish people are now being treated to their Two-Minutes Hate of Cardinal Seán Brady and the Catholic Church, in the same way that the Party members in Orwell's novel are daily required to rant and fulminate against Goldstein, the Party's obligatory enemy and focus of antagonism.

I do not believe that this is really (for the most part) about abuse, or about the failure to speak out against abuse or paedophilia. If this was what the media outcry was really about, then Senator David Norris--  who appealed for clemency on behalf of a friend convicted of statutory rape in Israel-- would surely be subjected to the same kind of villification, the same calls to resign his office.

I have never been sexually abused. I accept that I cannot understand or appreciate the pain that abuse victims go through. It is easy, incredibly easy, to politicize somebody's pain, to forget the living, breathing human beings involved-- and there is always the temptation to leap unthinkingly to the defence of something you love, as Catholics in Ireland love their Church. I regularly pray for all abuse victims.

And yet, for all that, I still believe that the media reaction to the BBC documentary on Cardinal Brady's (minor) role in the history of Fr. Brendan Smyth is excessive and hysterical. Cardinal Brady has pointed out that, even under current guidelines, the responsibility to inform the authorities would not rest with somebody in the role he played at the time. He was acting under conditions of confidentiality. I don't know whether he should resign or not, but I do think that the story hardly deserves to dominate the headlines and news broadcasts in the way it has, both yesterday and this morning.

The Irish Times editorial today began:

DESPITE ALL that has happened in relation to the clerical abuse of children, the Vatican’s response still revolves around the requirements of canon law and the protection of church authority. Unambiguous endorsement of the actions taken by Cardinal Séan Brady regarding the late Fr Brendan Smyth, following the BBC’s This World documentary by reporter Darragh MacIntyre, has firmly placed the importance of internal discipline and obedience above personal conscience.

Is there not a chance that "obedience above personal conscience" might also come to characterize our relation to the State and the law? After all, although Fr. Brendan Smyth should definitely have been reported to the gardai, there are situations that would not be so clear-cut. Are we moving towards a society where everybody will be legally obliged to file every suspicion with the authorities? Is the State infallible? With the attack upon the Seal of Confession, and the proposal to increase the State's power to intervene in family life with the Children's Referendum, are we seeing not only the Two Minutes' Hate, but also the beginning of the Big Brother society?

Aslan Pay Tribute to a Great Ballymun Institution...

As I was walking past Eason in O'Connell Street this evening, I saw a poster for Aslan's new album, featuring the cover that you see above. Aslan, as you might know already, are an Irish rock band. Some of their members hail from Ballymun, the Dublin suburb where I've lived nearly all of my thirty-four years, and where I grew up.

I'm pleased to see that the ad features a "van", which were distinctive (or even unique?) Ballymun institutions of my childhood. Vans were simply van trailers from which groceries were sold. I presume they were pillars of the black market, though I'm not sure. Maybe they were kosher. "I'm going to the van to get some milk", tripped easily of our tongues. Non-Ballymunners who heard us speak thus probably presumed we had trailers full of supplies parked outside our homes.

What I remember most about vans are the sweets and crisps they sold.  We couldn't get enough of them as kids. We used to loiter around outside the van and pester passers-by for "tempence for a bag of cripps". (At least, other kids did. I was too timid.) Everything was priced "tempence", it seemed.

How well I remember all the goodies we devoured! There were Winks crisps, which had a picture of a woman winking on the packet and were the sauciest, tangiest crisps I've ever tasted. They had prawn cocktail flavour at a time when this was exotic. I remember Alien Spacers, which were crisps (or, as my American readers would say, "corn snacks") with a science-fiction theme and (marvels of marvels) actual comic-strip STORIES on the packet. They came in three flavours but nobody wanted the cheese ones.

There were A-Team crisps, Barry McGuigan crisps (Barry McGuigan was an Irish boxer of brief superstardom), Payday bars, Chomp bars, Mint Crisp bars, Macaroons bars, Burger Bites...I remember eating vast quantities of all of them, even the ones I didn't like so much. I think the only reason we weren't all massively obese is because we also spent hours playing never-ending soccer games on the grass, back before all the fields in Ballymun had been built over. No matter how long these games went on, and no matter what the score might be, they always ended in "last goal wins", when it was too dark to go on any longer and mothers were calling us back indoors from tower and apartment block windows.

 And then, after the soccer games (for those who weren't summoned back inside), there was the telling of ghost stories as we lay sitting or sprawled in a dark field and the evening air grew chillier. Those stories! One told of how a kid had drawn a pentangle on one side of a garden shed door, and a witch on the other. When he revisited the shed the next day, the pentangle and the witch had switched places. The sheer economy and oddness of that story seriously spooked me. Looking back, I can only admire the creativity of whoever made it up. If it was made up, that is...

"Shocking" BBC Documentary Reveals What Everybody Knew Already...

...that is, that the Catholic Church in Ireland conducted its own investigations into allegations of child sex abuse rather than reporting each allegation to the gardai, and that Cardinal Sean Brady, when working as a notary on an enquiry into accusations against Father Brendan Smyth, obediently went along with that system-- which he now describes as "an unhelpful culture of deference and silence."

I feel I should blog about something like this, just to prove that I am not ignoring it, but the truth is that news stories like this one barely interest me at all. A lot of the time I don't even read them. They simply demonstrate (again) two things that I knew already-- the first is that the media, whether through bias or mere sensationalism (or both), love to stick the boot into the Catholic Church, and the other is that both the Church and wider society didn't treat the phenomenon of child sex abuse with the gravity it deserves until very recent times.