Archives for January 2007

…trapped at the most terrifying Last Supper ever. Thanks to Michael for the link.

By the by, there’s tons of brilliant stuff over there at Gallery of the Absurd, but they do work blue when they’ve a mind to. Consider yourself forewarned.

From today’s reading in Benedictus:

“Human beings are such that they cannot stand the person who is wholly good, truly upright, truly loving, the person who does evil to no one. It seems that in this world only momentarily is trust met with trust, justice with justice, love with love. The person who exemplifies all these virtues quickly becomes insupportable to others. People will crucify anyone who is really and fully human. Such is man. And such am I – that is the terrifying insight that comes to me from the crucified Christ. Along with this insight, however, goes another: Man is the being who is capable of expressing God himself. Man is so made that God can enter into union with him. The human person, who seems at first sight to be a kind of unfortunate monster produced by evolution, at the same time represents the highest possibility the created order can attain.”

The Lion and the Cardinal has a new piece, as well as the miniature that inspired it.

The Lawyer passes along a bit from Galley Slaves:

“According to Breitbart.com, certain parishes under the Church of England will now be able to perform services to the tune of U2 songs ‘in an effort to boost congregations.’ Two of the songs to be used are ‘Mysterious Ways’ and ‘Beautiful Day.’

As some of you know, I’ve listened to U2 since I was about 14. But if I were sitting in a church and suddenly I was told to please rise and sing the communion hymn, ‘Bullet the Blue Sky,’ I think I would have to flee.

Sadly, this sort of gimmick is not new. When I was in Catholic high school, someone conned our teachers and the local priest into playing Mr. Mister’s ‘Kyrie’ during the consecration.”

Catholics: leading the way in goofy attempts to appeal to The Youth of Today since 1970. Because, you know, I just don’t get to hear pop music unless I go to church.

This is from the 1944 book Secrets of the Saints by Henri Gheon. After a period of initial resistance, he comes ’round to the appeal of the Little Flower, but that doesn’t mean he drops his critical faculties with regard to her shrine…(Go on, read the whole thing. If you had something better to do, you wouldn’t be here in the first place…)

“I went at last to Lisieux, the Story of a Soul under my arm, resolved to see everything, and to dare everything – even the chapel of her shrine…On entering one strives hard to find some attraction in it. Were it plainer, it would not be half bad; there is a crushing excess of ornament, as useless as it is bad, yet this might be overlooked. But on turning to the right to venerate the holy relics, we are at once up against the masterpiece of hideousness and stupidity that has the high honor of sheltering them. The pseudo-renaissance cupola and its worthless stained-glass windows are the least of the absurdities. The shrine itself is showy, clumsy, quite without beauty: let that, too, pass. And I am not particularly offended by the brocade and velvet with which the recumbent image of the saint is dressed up in its gold and crystal cage…What I canot tolerate are the shrine’s supernatural guardians, two gigantic angels and a child musician: they are carved so flabbily in a marble so white and soft that they seem to melt like sugar when you look at them…To complete the crime, the sculptor (doubtless an ’eminent’ one) has set out on the steps several things like marble-sugar in the form of scattered roses and – to crown the horror – from a dense oily cloud there rises a ponderous bronze cross…The uniform spirit of the repository, pretentiousnes, jingling poeticalness, and pious adulation give a confusing unity to the whole thing…And remember that this gilding will never be dulled, this stucco never fade, this marble never lose its shiny surface – for the lighting of candles is forbidden: bulbs of electric light have superseded them. We are among the new rich, whose drawing-room furniture has cost too much not to be kept like new.

“It would be laughable, if one could find the heart to laugh. It makes the visitor ashamed of his country and of his century, ashamed that he lingers among such enormities. He feels the spirit of the image-breakers rising within him. He is sorry for Teresa and asks her forgiveness for these outrages…”

The poor man tries to pull back from his own outrage: “Be humble about your likes and dislikes, humble yourself even to the extent of accepting ugliness…But reason persists: why does God allow it? Why does Teresa allow it? Why has God let the devil have this triumph, that this holy place should be in the front rank of monstrosities of Catholic ecclesiastical art in the twentieth century? Does the soul no longer inform the body, and the spirit the flesh?”

He is not blinded by the horror, mind you: “Above all, there is the devotion, the true devotion, of the humble folk who fill and transfigure the chapel at every hour of the day…Yet the surrender we are longing to make must wait for one more argument: Was all this stuff really necessary? Could we not have done without it?

“No. Probably we could not. Those of us who are put off by it are only a small minority. Teresa was given to her own times; humanly speaking, and in her earthly aspect she was made a standard for them, and the devotion she excites has taken the external form which it required…We need not try to explain it away, for it does no wrong to Teresa…God bequeathed it to Teresa – and she uses it.

“I do not mean to say that we have the saints we deserve; we never deserve the saints we have. But we are given the saints whose outward appearance is most likely to attract us…Jesus Christ did not die for artists and men of good taste alone: they can go to Chartres and some of them will come back converted. The crowds that descend on Lisieux and carry away its trash as well as its graces to the ends of the earth find themselves quite at home…As they pray they find the real Teresa underneath the sugar roses and the cheesy clouds, behind the platitudes and pet-names that take all the salt of her most heroic story: Teresa, the ascetic of the wasted body and bruised heart and unbending will whose sacrifice was ceaseless, who lived on and died from a love that was all pain. That is what lay behind her smile; i have read the Story of a Soul again, and it is beyond question. Some jam must be mixed with the powder if the multitude is to take so bitter a medicine. She mixed a little herself…”

Cubeland Mystic heads off to the Grey Havens:

“I started the Immaculate Direction almost a year ago to dialogue about materialism and its impact on our Catholic faith and culture. The dominant culture is an unavoidable reality. All of us, to some degree, make compromises with it in order to thrive in it. These may be reluctant compromises, but they are compromises nonetheless. The best way in my opinion to combat an aggressively materialist culture is to be an active creator rather than a passive consumer. Through our own creative energy we mirror our creator. While we create, if our intention is directed toward God, I believe the fruit of that effort is holy. Hence this blog’s subtitle, a journey toward a sacramental life…

This will be my last post. I won’t say forever, but for quite awhile…However, I will share something that I’ve been reluctant to reveal before. I wish to seriously pursue writing fiction. It’s been in the back of my mind for over twenty years. Perhaps it will lead to something someday, nevertheless writing is how I will engage the dominant culture.”

Godspeed, CM. In other news, the ranks of my blogroll do seem to be thinning of late. The Godsbody curse?

…Sister Mary Francis! Barb is busy:

“I have so many things I am dying to blog about (…how considering the competition, Apocalypto should have gotten an Oscar nom …why we are going to see a lot more movies like The Fountain which is an exhausting prospect…the difference between Last King of Scotland and Hotel Rwanda… how the Oscars are grimly and trenchantly embracing their own future irrelevance… Why The Nativity will not undo The Passion effect in Hollywood… Origin Entertainment, the production entity at which I am a partner…The 13th Day – the movie on Fatima I worked on in Australia…What I saw in Australia living in Asiatown, working with Brits and Irishmen on a fiolm shot in Portugal…My movie The Work getting shot this fall with a cool director who it probably isn’t up to me to name here… My thoughts on the script Myriam which I worked on as the co-writer for many months… the Jane Austen adaptation I am working on now and how smug I am about the cool and clever way it is structured – think chukkers not acts – but I say , nothing, nothing!…The thrilling prospect of starting work adapting A Severe Mercy for the screen – just acquired for me by Origin…. My upcoming pilgrimage to Israel, why, how and with whom…) but I have no time to blog!”

Sounds like somebody’s getting their calls answered these days…

[Heart]MYMILF

It’d be downright sweet, possibly a pledge of marital affection, except, well…

Jody Bottum prepares to waltz with the Reaper (or at least, talk about it):

“For several years now, in a slow, circuitous way, I’ve been thinking about death–not dying, so much, as the role that death plays in various forms of human thought. Ethics, art, politics, psychology, metaphysics–what difference does the knowledge that we can die make? What difference does the knowledge that we will die make?

So, for example, in accounting for human behavior, game theory makes much of the risk of death in various activities. But how are actual human behaviors influenced not just by the deadly risks of certain activities but also by the inescapable human knowledge that, regardless of all activities, death will come anyway? And how are we influenced by the knowledge that all those around us can and will die? Slowly, as I’ve worked on these topics, I’ve come to the understanding that the death of others, more than the death of ourselves, remains the supressed premise in huge swaths of human thought.”