tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82847967756513120552024-03-21T14:59:10.006-07:00The Decent Inn of DeathDe Ecclesia arienarum republicae or living in a post-dubia ChurchCarlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-86384407101490188232018-04-17T00:22:00.002-07:002018-04-17T01:23:18.657-07:00The trouble I've seen(In an earlier version of this post, I said the father of the child was an atheist. The original Italian, however, says he was a non-believer. I have corrected that here).<br />
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These days, before I cast a stone, I like to spend a little time reflecting on my own mediocrity. It usually works and I usually put the stone down. I'm sure at least half the world's problems come from those who throw stones without such reflection. Our Lord said something along the lines of taking out the beam from your own eye before you go rooting out the mote from your brother's.<br />
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Something like that happened last night when I watched the footage of the pope comforting a recently bereaved boy. The boy's father, who has died, was a non-believer and the pope spoke to the boy in front of the congregation during a visit to a deprived area of Rome. The boy was crying near the front and the pope beckoned him forward to explain what was wrong. Essentially, the boy had lost his non-believing father who, to his credit, had had all four of his children baptised (no mention of the mother so it is not clear where she is). Thus, the boy asked the pope, "Is my dad in heaven?"<br />
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Difficult questions from children are frequent in my experience. But this is where the scene begins to get troubled. How does one answer such a question? It is the action of a civilised adult to want to comfort a child. It is the action of an innocent child - or indeed of anyone not solidly committed to materialism - to wonder where their father is after they die. Two lines of action were on a collision course and the dangers of false consolation or wounded sensibilities were sharp.<br />
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I suppose it all depends on your priorities at this point. I know I'm in danger of doing what my American pals used to call Monday-morning quarterbacking, replaying the game from the safety of my kitchen chair. But surely, we are not without some guiding principles here. The immediate duty is to comfort a grieving child. The wider duty is to enlighten his mind. The risk is that we offer false consolation or else cold comfort.<br />
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Leaving aside his well-known shortcomings, I believe Pope Francis will live long in public perception in part because he does not appear frightened by public intimacy. Compared to the cold, haughty fish who rule us from government offices round the globe, he appears to know how to cut a figure of approachability and kindness. This is not a fault. Losing what Kipling called "the common touch" is a fairly common vice of successful or powerful assholes the world over.<br />
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So what's my problem? Simply that giving warmth without casting light is the property of modernity, just like your corridor radiator. "Everything has been separated from everything else, and everything has grown cold," writes Chesterton (I quote him approximately) in (I think) <i>What's wrong with the world</i>. The pope might have told this child that we confide all our dead to the mercy of God. He might of told him that God alone knows the secrets of the heart. He might have told him simply to pray for his father and to make sure he was a comfort to his mother who must be grieving also.<br />
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Instead of which - to my bafflement and I'm sure to that of many others - the pope provided an irrefutable answer there and then that has got the press swooning as usual over his mercy (so tangibly different from that excommunication-throwing German or the weird anti-abortion Pole). He was a good father, was he, says the pope? Well, how could God the Father refuse to welcome him? He had his children baptised, did he, says the pope? Well, that is more difficult for the unbaptised parent than the baptised parent, argued the pope (I confess at this point my mind leapt to the Catholic mothers whose non-believing spouses make them suffer every day for wanting to raise their children Catholic). And thus, he finished: speak to your father, pray to your father, Emanuele.<br />
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Don't get me wrong. If I could spray the world with the mercy of God through some huge spiritual hosepipe, I'd do it. Hose it all down: vidi aquam egredientem de hosepipo! Put the world in a coma: we're administering the last rights to all! My model is God: God who wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.<br />
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But not like this. There is not even hope in this reply: the mystery of salvation is solved because God resists no good. Well, there is some truth in the fact that all good is a share in God in some way. But we cannot solve the mystery of judgment in such ways. We cannot say: he looks good, so he's saved. He did something difficult: he's saved. We can hope. We can hope that God who knows the secrets of the heart is privy to secrets we will never know.<br />
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Is that all cold comfort? I don't accept that. On the face of it, falsehoods can sometimes be more comforting than truths but in the long run what we need is what can bring us into conformity with God who is good. Of course we have to deliver milk rather than meat to the little ones. That is true. Their minds are not yet formed; their hearts are not yet strong. So, mustn't we try to initiate them to living with the mystery? Children want to solve everything. They ask the huge questions; they have to learn that some questions cannot be solved.<br />
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Well, that in some people's opinion is surely a lot of unfeeling hand wringing. How dare I question how the pope comforts a little boy who has lost his father? But, speaking as a father, I would want my children not only to be warmed by comfort but illuminated by the light. We must pray for the dead and we can hope that God's mercy is greater than the limitations of our knowledge. There is immense comfort in the mystery of God. Perhaps that is what the pope wanted to underline. We can all be caught out by unexpected questions.<br />
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But - once again in this papacy of double speak - we have something that is close to the truth but misses it by a country mile. It must be tremendously difficult to be expected to produce words of wisdom and guidance every day and that before the whole world's media. I throw no stones.<br />
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But <i>A la douce piti</i><i>é de Dieu</i>, say I, as Bernanos wrote in his final letter to Charles Maurras. Dead non-believers and living popes have this much in common: we cannot solve the mystery of their actions before God. We can only confide them to the ministry of mercy that heaven conducts in ways we cannot fathom. For those of us who remain, we might remember that the severance of light from warmth is a sin we should all be wary of.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-40167413077751986422018-04-11T00:01:00.001-07:002018-04-11T00:30:52.821-07:00The law is an assEaling Council have voted in favour of creating an exclusion zone around the infamous Marie Stopes abortion clinic in its area. Neither pro-lifers nor pro-abortionists can stand within 100 metres of the entrance to the building. It is a perfect solution for the council managing local unhappiness among its electorate and presumably for Marie Stopes UK which can now procede without the risk pro-lifers posed to their objectives. Don't get me wrong: they are a not-for-profit business. They have only the purest of motives: facilitating women's lives by extinguishing those of the unborn.<br />
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This is not incoherent: merely profoundly wrong. Once the law has allowed abortion, it makes perfect sense that those who avail themselves of this freedom should do so unimpeded. Allowing pro-lifers to stand outside these mills of death is like allowing atheists to stand at church doors distributing humanist leaflets. Many worshippers would affirm their right to freedom of worship and to be free of harassment when exercising it. Is poor Marie Stopes not doing the same thing?<br />
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They are all lost in a thicket of murderous logic. The Council can hide behind the law of the land and the idea is that anyone acting within the law should be able to do so without interference. What a brave stand for the councillors! Meanwhile, the academics who have facilitated the buffer zone concept can acclaim their 'impact' and be rewarded with promotions and peer esteem. Their research has had an extra-mural effect, and is this not why we fund universities - to be heard outside the ivory towers of academia?<br />
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And what about the unborn....? Ah, them. Well, the law implicitly says they only matter if we think they matter. If we think they don't matter, then they don't matter. It is that simple. The electorate want it this way, as one can hear in common language. When the unborn are wanted, they are 'babies '; when they are unwanted, they are 'foetuses'. One of the sociologists who has helped drive the buffer zone initiative wrote a rather whiny essay saying how use of the word 'child' for the unborn had to be got rid of. She has not finished yet and indeed has just won public funding to pursue her campaign for deconstruction of the pro-life movement.<br />
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And there is the hard lesson for people such as you and me. We are old fashioned enough to think it is about the issues, the substance of the moral arguments. Those who have facilitated the buffer zones know that once the law is on their side, they must no longer be advocates of direct action but now of the most merciless dialogical warfare. They don't look at arguments (I mean, why bother?); they look at what they call "discourses". They root out what they identify as the oppressive nature of the discourse - the power-driven construction of some set of vocabulary or speech acts - and then they tootle for all they are worth in their academic journals about how "pro-life" discourse is actually "anti-choice" and how irrational and anti-woman such discourses are. The fact that the Church backs the pro-life position works a treat for them, because there are few institutions with more credentials for oppression. Not that they have made that argument openly but need they do so? It speaks for itself. Only the State is the guarantor of freedom after all...<br />
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A few things are certain after this ruling by Ealing Council. First, women walking into Marie Stopes in Ealing will not have to brave the last call of conscience before they deliver the life of their unborn into the hands of the executioners. Second, fewer of them will decide not to abort and more of the unborn will die. Third, other councils will sit up and take notice, not because pro-lifers are a menace but because they will be persuaded that this is a pro-women action and because, after all, there is no electoral cost in smoothing the way for women intending to have an abortion. Dead men have no votes.<br />
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It's at times like this I wish I were both brave and clever. I don't mean clever enough to take a few pot shots at these people from a blog. Any idiot can do that. I mean clever enough, qualified enough, to do the counter studies on the women who have asked the Good Council Network for help and whose children owe their lives to the GCN. The decision of Ealing Council is like an edict against the value of the lives of the children of these mothers. It is like saying that all the hurt of the women approaching that clinic outweighs the dignity and value of the human lives that have been snatched from the clinic's jaws. It is long since time for them to speak and I pray they do so. It is also about time that someone senior in the Catholic Church created the platform for them.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-13939671355588852662018-04-04T00:25:00.002-07:002018-04-04T00:25:25.045-07:00A blast from the pastI'm just about to finish for a two-week staycation. Until the dying embers of Friday afternoon, however, I will be hard at it, trying to finish an important stage of my current project. One of the texts I recently came across in my necessarily voracious reading was Daniel-Rops's <i>Le monde sans âme</i> (1932). Daniel-Rops became better known as a Church historian, notably for his book <i>Palestine in the Time of Jesus</i>, but the 1932 work was written while he was trying to make a name for himself in the literary and critical circles of 1930s Paris. It is not, however, a literary work, so much as a political, social and philosophical one, making the case that France and indeed the wider world was now given over to a cultural project that excluded transcendence and pursued the fullest, fiercest realisation of a consumer system. I nearly used the word 'paradise' then but the point is that it can only be a paradise for those with lots of disposable income. The lower orders either must do without, or must pursue their ends with significant debt.<br />
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The connection of this analysis to my own interests is that technology becomes the lynch pin in a system driven by an essentially hedonist motive. Daniel-Rops sums up the machinery of this system in terms that roughly translate as follows:<br />
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<i>Do not go looking for anything other than the physical joy of living, of buying things, of delighting in appearances as technology refreshes the horizon for us every six months. There is the order you are looking for: the perfect adaptation of production to consumption, solid stock market performance with five percent gains, and an increase in well-being and the pleasure of living</i>.<br />
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I'm still reeling from how contemporary this kind of prospect sounds. With a few adjustments, it could have been said by just about any of the last six British Prime Ministers, and probably quite a few more before that. All of which suggests that ever since Daniel-Rops's time, the world has moved on little. He had not quite seen how much of a 'throw-away' culture such principles would encourage, but his contemporary Georges Duhamel had, describing in his book <i>Querelle de famille</i> (1932), published the same year, the masses of household detritus left by the roadside in country villages, soiling the green vistas of a fast-technologising France.<br />
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Of course, today we would have to add in the pseudo-causes that help sustain this consumerist culture: identity politics, Gaia-style eco-politics, etc, etc. But we are all consumers now, whether we like it or not.<br />
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Something in the appalling logic of consumption and throwing-away has led to my recent interest in the World Down Syndrome Day event, held annually on 21st March. It came to my attention a couple of years ago when its Youtube clip "Dear Future Mum" was judged to have breached advertising standards in France - ostensibly because it was not selling anything, but fundamentally because its contents were likely to upset women who had had abortions to avoid bearing DS children. Jean-Marie Le Mené, president of the Jerome Lejeune Foundation, has written about these children as the first victims of transhumanism. That seems to be rather too complimentary towards a project that involves eradicating individuals who have DS. It is no more than the rebirth of old-fashioned eugenics under the cover of the contemporary cult of individual choice.<br />
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There is the lie that DS can be eradicated in this manner: it cannot of course. What is eradicated are the individuals with an extra chromosome. What makes their eradication all the more gruesome, however, is that the decision to abort such children seems to be predicated on the most impoverished account of what life is. Here is where Daniel-Rops is again prophetic. The reconciliation of 'well-being' with the choice to abort the DS foetus tells you everything you need to know about 'well-being' in the 21st century. Towards the end of his book, Daniel-Rops points firmly to the origins of this culture:<br />
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<i>The Enemy will not come to impose his reign on earth, a winged figure of might, appearing through terrible cloud formations. He will rise up among us discretely, looking like one of us, dressed soberly. He will not stand for negativity or the passionate rejection of truth; he will be indifference, a kind of gap, the sum of forces that tether man to matter and force him to betrayal. He will be that soiled form of renunciation: forgetfulness.</i><br />
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If this is so, perhaps one of the challenges of our time is not to forget, not to let the accelerating passage of events and consumer objects blot from our memories the coordinates of truth, the burden of our past faults, and the actions of those who betray us. Forgive and forget in the sense of harbouring no grudges? Yes! Forgive and forget in the sense of becoming naive again? That is not what charity requires.<br />
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Meanwhile, love remains very much the answer, as it always has been. That is one reason why, in spite of it all, the World Down Sydrome Day phenomenon surprises me. It seems like a heresy against the pursuit of 'well-being', a defiance thrown in the faces of the 'choice' brigade. This year's video celebrated it with a cheesy pop song, but I find myself drawn in by the words, so much do they contradict the murderous intent that pursues the lives of our most vulnerable brothers and sisters. Annihilation, let us not forget, is a crime against being.<br />
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<i>I have died every day waiting for you,</i><br />
<i>Darling, don't be afraid I have loved you</i><br />
<i>For a thousand years,</i><br />
<i>I'll love you for a thousand more.</i><br />
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<br />Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-14816076197803142952018-03-31T23:44:00.000-07:002018-04-01T00:14:53.068-07:00Another Easter morningAs I have blogged here and elsewhere over many moons, I say again that Easter Sunday morning is one of the most beautiful of the entire year. That first appearance to Mary in the garden...the even earlier appearance of Jesus to the Blessed Mother, according to a tradition St Ignatius and others believed... the peace of a grove that briefly rang with the screams of frightened pagan soldiers who could not believe their eyes and scuttled away to report the return of the Crucified One... If we had no eye for comedy in the Gospel, could we even be true spiritual Semites?<br />
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<i>Peace be to you...</i>There seems no fuller, richer greeting on such a morning. No matter if you feel unworthy of the peace He offers. There are many mansions in His Father's house, even for workers of the 11th hour. This is our hope, those of us clinging on for dear life in this rollercoaster known as the Ark of the Covenant.<br />
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It is unfitting, unworthy even, to dwell solely on the turbulence of the last few days, so we will not do so. I cannot be the only blogger who wrote a post and then deleted it following the latest Scalfari debacle. All we can do is to pray. The greater the evil - and if denial of hell were not bad enough, what is more contrary to the goodness of God than the literal annihilation of souls? - the more we can be sure it is the devil's work. Whether or not the Pope said those words to Scalfari, it has served the devil's agenda to have them spread abroad. Contrariwise, perhaps the fact that some Catholic leaders were dragged in front of the media to explain that there is a hell is a good thing. Fine. But not for me the fatuous excuses of the John Allens, claiming that the pope might prefer dialogue over clarity of doctrine. Because frankly, if you are going to be so utterly misrepresented, what is the point of dialogue? What was reported did not lack clarity; it lacked truthfulness. Who reads beyond the headlines most days? "Pope says no hell?" many will say. "Well about time too." Goodnight, Vienna!<br />
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So this Easter morn, we have to take Peter in our arms more firmly and hold him in prayer. Thursday was not his finest hour. Maybe he did not say what was reported. Maybe he did. I would not be surprised either way. What we cannot doubt is Christ's resolve to drag Peter into the light. Peace be to him and to us all this Easter.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-50459248652011001982018-03-30T01:45:00.001-07:002018-03-30T01:45:13.933-07:00Apologies for today's postWho am I to judge? No honestly. As you were.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-52674989670092990022018-03-10T00:40:00.001-08:002018-03-10T02:00:09.997-08:00More coping strategies<i>It's all about survival</i>! This is what I used to say to my wife when our twins were babies. Just get through! It's important but sometimes treacherous terrain to occupy. You can justify a silly wine bill and more biscuits than are strictly good for you with reasoning like that.<br />
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Yet if the survival mandate is important, it's not the be-all-and-end-all. Charles Péguy once wondered how many betrayals had arisen from the fear of not looking progressive enough; we might equally wonder how many compromises have arisen from making survival an absolute. Survival as an absolute sometimes involves us in uncompromising flight, and sometimes flight is a lesser expression of fear than having to stay and withstand the spectacle of whatever threatens us. For example, I've no doubt the rate of converts from Catholicism to Orthodoxy is on the rise currently. At a distance, it seems like a sanctuary of mystery in the context of moral therapeutic deism that afflicts so many of our co-religionists. It is a flight, however, and the sanctuary is not as safe as we might suppose. </div>
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In this context I came across a passage of Georges Bernanos's novel <i>La Joie</i>. It needs little commentary and the characters' names hardly matter. I'll just leave it here (as they say these days)...</div>
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<i>I have mocked fear too much</i>, he admitted one day. <i>I was young and way too hot blooded.</i></div>
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<i>What?</i> she replied, <i>I cannot believe you are saying that to me</i>. <i>Are you now going to give fear entry into Paradise?</i></div>
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He raised his red, swollen hand as if to calm her down, laughing silently as he did.</div>
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<i>Not so fast, not so fast! In a way, even fear is a daughter of God, redeemed on the night of Good Friday. She is not beautiful to look at - no! - sometimes ridiculed, sometimes cursed, abandoned by everyone...however, make no mistake about it: she is at the bedside of every dying person where she intercedes for man.</i></div>
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The courageous man is not the one who feels no fear; he's the one who holds fast, even when he is fearful. That surely is the meaning of "Do not be afraid". It is not a call for severing ourselves from the desire to flee, as if Jesus were inviting us to a condition of nursery-teatime security; it is a command not to flee when the fear comes. And it surely will.</div>
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<i>These fragments I have shored against my ruins</i>. </div>
Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-72268366973626045652018-03-05T12:45:00.001-08:002018-03-05T12:45:13.657-08:00The technology crutchOur water pressure has gone very low. It's not hard to fathom why. Our week of Siberian temperatures has led to frozen pipes, water leaks and a wave of emergency call-outs across the county. The shortage is creeping closer and closer to us. Tonight by 6pm the other side of the street had no water at all. My young daughter thought it would be clever to flush the toilet for no reason and was surprised that the cistern then refused to fill up again (at least at anything other than a senile snail's pace). So, here we are, in one of Britain's largest cities, and across the suburbs the water pressure is going down to a trickle or stopping completely.<br />
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The shelves of the local supermarket were already cleared of the cheaper bottled water by the time I arrived after 7pm this evening. Bowed figures could be seen struggling through the doors, laden with lires and litres of water. I'd never realised how heavy the stuff is! In point of fact, without a well-oiled trolley or some other means of portage, you cannot actually carry that much without incurring injury.<br />
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Back at home I headed into the garden to find to my dismay that the children's snowmen had already melted with all of today's rain. There goes my water flush supply, I thought! Then I remembered how much was still stockpiled in the front garden and so out I headed with the wheelbarrow to collect it all for flushing purposes!<br />
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Over reaction, you say? Well, we want to be careful, especially with three small children in the house. But bobbling about tonight, making my logistical preparations for a small water shortage, made me think how brilliant our water system is and, equally, how patently vulnerable we are when it breaks down. Here we are in our gloriously complicated civilisation but how close in fact to a state of incipient chaos. Miss a beat or two and the structure begins to sag beneath the strain. We only occasionally have flashes of how close we are to social breakdown. The petrol lorry drivers strike a few years ago was one such moment.<br />
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Henri Bergson believed that every technological progress required an equally profound spiritual progress in order to counterbalance it. We might say in a different sense that every technological progress comes at the cost of some skill or practice. Most of us are rubbish at letter writing now. Mind you, conversational skills are probably on the wane also. Invent the phonograph/record player/CD player/mp3 file and while you will not kill musical skills altogether, you will encourage above all their vicarious enjoyment: let others play while we sit back and listen. And soon enough there will be hardly any parlour pianos and youths will even privatise their own vicariously performed music with earplugs.<br />
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So what did the water system destroy for us? Well, probably quite a bit of death and disease, and that is no bad thing! The problem, however, is our infrastructures are now organised on the basis of water being piped clean and fresh into our own homes. We don't have wells (and their loss was probably another killer of social cohesion). At least we know we have to boil water if it comes from a standing pipe in the street (if things get that bad), but our whole lifestyle supposes this is not the way of things. Before I had a mobile phone, I kept probably a dozen phone numbers in my head. Now, I don't even remember my wife's!<br />
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So, you say, in that case, why even learn to write? Well, quite. In Greek mythology Theuth presents Thamus with the gift of writing and the latter complains precisely that it will destroy memory. That's the cost of the technological crutch. Use a tool of some description and you risk losing something else. I make no argument in favour of grass-skirted, native-level, Luddite obscurantism, but I do argue in defence of the ethical gate to technological progress. In the <i>war of all against all, </i>you cannot <i>not </i>pursue a technology when your neighbour has it. Such a decision would leave you tactically, not to say strategically, weaker. In a world under ethical guidance, however, there are other calculations to be made beside that of how to reign supreme. How to be good, for a start.<br />
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Our water will probably come back to normal pressure by the morning (I say with trepidation). Other crises no doubt await when different technologies break down. In this context I cannot help ticking off my privileges and admitting to all the advantages that they provide me with.<br />
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Nevertheless, just a small flirtation with a breakdown of the system is enough to remind one of how thin civilisation's technological skin is. We look orderly, we might even have reasonably clean streets and normally functioning cities. But beneath it all we bleed with the vulnerability of humans. Were we not to protect ourselves so well with our tools, we might live a more human life without even trying very much. Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-89311029180359063182018-03-03T02:10:00.004-08:002018-03-03T02:16:54.619-08:00The joy of disconnection Well, a near miss! Debacle postponed until further notice. I've read the letter from the CDF which was what was published on Thursday and, frankly, wondered what on earth had prompted it. Here we are in the middle of a nasty doctrinal storm and we get what looks like an interesting sideshow. Sure, pelagianism in anything but name is always relevant. There has probably been a kind of pelagianism attested in every period of the Church, even before Pelagius! Human agency is a universal phenomenon arising from our status as moral beings. It's always relevant to talk about it, except when perhaps there are more important things to talk about. Just saying.<br />
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Meanwhile, we're snowed in where we live in the UK. After days of inaccurate weather forecasts, they finally got it right, and when the Beast from the East met Storm Emma - which sounds like a mixed wrestling match - the snow came down in relentless flurries. I love this kind of moment. I'm not moving the car because the handbrake freezes in sub-zero weather. The roads are treacherous in any case because, as far as I know, they have not been gritted. At least I don't have to go to work. I've told my children that all we have to do this weekend is snuggle for warmth and make it to Mass. They have responded by going into a fit of cabin fever and are now taking it in turns to sing loudly down opposite ends of a physiotherapy roller. The joys of childhood!<br />
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There is something therapeutic when the natural elements reduce our freedom and squeeze us into some creative corner. The contemporary instinct is to reach for a device and enter it (damn it, much as I have done now). Albert Borgmann, the German-American philosopher, talks about the device paradigm: the network of options and actions that flow from and to a device, organising our activity (and, let it be said, reorganising our spiritual palettes). Normally, when people use the word 'paradigm' these days, it makes me want to reach for my copy of Thomas Kuhn and whack them with it. Borgmann isn't a pretentious theologian, however, so we'll let him off. We'll let him off also because the contrary of the device paradigm is no kind of paradigm at all but what he labels a 'focal practice': an action creative or otherwise that serves as a focus of attention individually or collectively. Watching a TV talent show locks us in a device paradigm; singing together would be a focal practice. Surfing my neighbours' Facebook page would encase us both in a device paradigm; inviting them in for a cup of tea and a chat around the fire would be a focal practice.<br />
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You see, one of the problems with seeing pelagianism everywhere - and I'm not saying there is not quite a bit of it about - is that one risks being insensitive to what technology does to human agency. What I mean is that the more we force our actions through a technological instrument, somehow the more we are exposed to a phenomenon of vicarious substitution where our agency is transferred to some artifice. Google will save our passwords for us; electronic diaries will remind us of appointments; we bank online (well, I don't but the rotten banks are making things increasingly difficult for people like me). That is all well and good but the same kind of transfer in other areas of life can only be an impoverishment. I have letters written to me twenty-five years ago that I treasure but oddly enough no texts from even twenty-five months ago. Friendships forged around a dinner table and bottles of wine somehow (mostly) go deeper than their electronic equivalents. Worse still, people you thought were electronic friends sometimes disappear like a fart in the wind when pressed into real life.<br />
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This last phenomenon could be indicative. One of the troubles with technology is that the more complicated the instrument the more we are capable of divorcing ourselves from engagement with its outcomes. Technology allows us to colonise spaces that are a thousand miles away but also to hold those that occupy them at a distance. I have no doubt this appeals perversely to certain personalities and even cultures, the British in particular. Yet I cannot help but reflect not on the gains but on the losses. If there is more rejoicing in heaven over the return of the one lost sheep than over the ninety-nine faithful ones, I wonder if there is also more rejoicing at one real human connection than over ninety-nine digital ones. Sometimes even the most digitally connected of us longs for that digital connection to elicit a truly human response.<br />
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And so we arrive at these curious paradoxes: first, that in the age of connectivity we are often less connected, and second, that humanly connecting more might mean digitally connecting less. I was reading yesterday a text written in the late 1920s that was lamenting the domination of technology. "Men are now the slaves of machines, to the point of even becoming one body with them," the writer lamented. Perhaps this is yet another paradox of the technological culture: that as we distance ourselves more from our bodies through our technologies, we become the vicarious bodies of artificial intelligences. After all, we are all unwittingly working for the big internet companies who process our data trails, repackage and sell them on for profit. Oh, glory of the age of Zuckerberg! We are the living, breathing beasts of digital burden, investing our time by chomping our way through clickbait, and leaving a surprisingly exploitable slurry behind us in our wake. Behold the digital man!<br />
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At this point, there is only one thing left for me to do, which is to disconnect and intervene in my children's game which has now reached some extraordinary flight of fancy, based somewhat disturbingly on the abduction of Persephone...I wish my reader a snow-free, and more especially a technology-free, weekend (when you're finished here of course!)!<br />
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<br />Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-77013428785724306622018-02-27T23:03:00.001-08:002018-02-27T23:51:57.374-08:00Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...... another papal document is announced! Since I'm blogging from a new tablet and have not yet cracked all its intricacies, I cannot provide the link that is circulating online to the announcement by the Vatican press office. You'll find it. If you want to, that is. My betting is that by Friday we will not be able to avoid it very much. Or will we? Prepare for a two-paragraph tangent on my favoured hobby horse...<br />
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See, that's the problem with the information age. It always assumes you are ready to hear the news and that you will want to know the news. Indeed, it always assumes you need to know the news and that any news out there is good for you.<br />
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One of the major problems with all those assumptions is that the information age is absolutely indifferent to whether news is true or not. Notice the language used about false news: it is not called false but 'fake' news. Could it be that this is no misnomer? If they called it false news, then the news consumer could rightly demand true news. But the opposite of fake is not true; the opposite of fake is authentic/original. And the problem with that Greek looking word is that it is full of German subjectivist guff about the supremacy of sincerity (not meaning to knock sincerity obviously). No, the information age does not offer true news! It offers authentic news, sincerely meant, honestly fabricated from sources verified by no lesser moral authorities than journalists, many of whom are even honest souls. But none of this produces true news; only authentic news, quality sourced and - ooh err, feel the love! - responsibly reported. But I digress...<br />
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Assuming this announcement about a new papal encyclical is both true and authentic, my simple question is: why read the story? Why get drawn into the whole sorry storm of fawning idolisation and incoherent rage that will no doubt attend the letter's publication? We all know what will happen. Spadaro et al. will gather around to talk about a new parallel theology or a quantum interpretation of the moral law or perhaps a bio-evolutionary rereading of theandric hermeneutics or some such. They will hold the largest levers of the information pump. Meanwhile, the Christians,<br />
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<i>...a declining band</i><br />
<i>Will point with monitory hand,</i><br />
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and say what we are now accustomed to saying repeatedly, desperately, fruitlessly about Pope Francis's utterances (I here abstract from all carefully made distinctions about magisterial authority about which I profess my incompetence). Need I go on?<br />
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I'm not advocating incidentally that the best response is one of blythe indifference - the response that no doubt 97% of the world's population will have - or a well-studied yawn. Heaven forfend.<br />
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I'm not quite sure what to label my strategy, if I can stick to it (which I doubt). But I'm minded to call it the "post-coenam" strategy. Don't panic. This is the kind of moment lived by the disciples while Christ was in prison overnight. We sometimes think - I know I'm tempted to think - that the wheels have finally come off the Catholic Church and that this papacy is proof that whatever is true, it's not what we thought. That is not a wholly unfaithful thought but it is a dangerous one without tethering it to the gospel.<br />
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In which case, in my view our patrons now are the disciples after the arrest of Jesus. Jesus is in prison; Peter has betrayed him; everything is in disarray; the glory of Palm Sunday is long gone and the sense of power from Jesus' miracles is a thing of the past, a mere dream. We've never been in such a sorry mess, you say? Well, we haven't but the disciples have. Those special friends of Jesus with hardly two acts of courage to rub together in the early hours of Good Friday. Is that over dramatising things? Maybe. But I've known people give up on the Church seemingly for less.<br />
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So, friends, that's my advice (not that you were asking). Walk this mile with the disciples. Perhaps it's better to call it the post-Gethsemane hour. The only question now is whether you are going to stick with him.<br />
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We keep looking for light in the wrong places; that's human. But if you want to face the probable debacle of this Thursday with some peace, don't follow the news trails. Read the gospel. The age of innocence is long gone.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-39694774323498915752018-02-25T22:31:00.000-08:002018-02-25T22:31:03.735-08:00Prayer requestPlease pray for the 9 month old nephew of a friend of mine who must have an emergency heart operation on Wednesday morning. His name is Gioele.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-74693628358873759962018-02-25T22:27:00.001-08:002018-02-26T00:59:02.971-08:00Sawing off the branch on which I'm sittingAnyone who has read this blog before will know I have a downer on digital culture. I am of course thereby thrust unwillingly, albeit not unconsciously, into the classic position of the man who is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting. So be it, say I. If it is so, it will not be the least absurd of all the contradictions that circulate the globe in a digital format.<br />
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Better that than other vices which existed prior to the internet and will always attend those who try to communicate in any way imaginable (which is all the human race!): the vices I refer to are a failure to be conscious of one's tools of communication; a failure to be aware that they shape what we say and even what we think; and the failure to admit that humans always have an ambiguous relationship with their tools. Errors or vices, say you? The former very often lead to the latter.<br />
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I know what you're thinking, so stop it! A bad workman always blames his tools. That may be true but its truth is not nearly so close to home as that of the lesser used adage: we make our tools and our tools make us. What kind of man does the internet make? That is the question. That is all the more the question if, as today, we spend so much of our time thinking, feeling and operating through its channels.<br />
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None of this would matter perhaps until we get to the question of whether the man made by the internet conforms to the man planned in the mind of God. Here the question is not whether the internet can be a good source of information or even a weapon of leverage in the information age. The question is whether immersion in it is compatible with our call to wisdom, the greatest of the gifts of the Holy Ghost and the one that makes us most like God.<br />
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Saw-saw-saw. I know. Some questions are best left to simmer on their own.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-25935954844301245952018-02-24T01:26:00.001-08:002018-02-26T00:04:36.926-08:00And another thing...My wife tells me I often pause during conversation, even during sentences, for an unnervingly long period. Perhaps never so long as eleven months, however! I did promise at the end of my last post (16 April 2017) that I might not be blogging very much but nearly a whole year is perhaps an exaggeration. <i>Is there anybody there? said the blogger</i>, knocking at the moonlight screen.<br />
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Several years ago I published a long extract from Georges Bernanos on the topic of the differences between Martin Luther and St Francis. The burden of the extract was all about how one reacts to corruption in the Church and how one kind of reaction - the obvious kind - threatens to lead us down the same path as Luther. Luther had a point about Church corruption; not that that was his only preoccupation. But his answer to it was a damaging as St Francis's was beneficial. St Francis's response was not to go around the place scourging the evil doers. It was, to paraphrase Bernanos, to return to the fountains of sanctity.<br />
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Bernanos could afford to be wild in his rhetoric. He didn't have a Church to run. The Franciscans were split in the early years - not to say more recently - by the competing interpretations of just how far one can take the demands of evangelical poverty: fountains of sanctity then or sources of dispute? I suppose what Bernanos might have said to those arguing for the utter necessity of competent administration is that it can only ever be one small element in what is the wider, deeper and more challenging vocation of being called to follow the Lord.<br />
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But I digress. I only wanted to say that I decided out of the blue this morning to start blogging again. Anyone who has read me over the years will know what I think of the Church's current administration. Indeed, my strap line beneath the blog's title refers to it. But if I come back here now, it is only in the spirit of Bernanos's St Francis. I said some time ago we are living in a post-dubia Church. Indeed, we still are. But why should it also belong to the dubia-refusers?<br />
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One of the many insights of French cultural anthropologist René Girard - among some silly things - is that if we allow our actions to be shaped by reaction to our aggressors, we unconsciously risk imitating them. Much better, therefore, to adopt the St Francis's agenda. Dip into the sources of sanctity and share them with others. As I come back to blogging, I would much rather adopt that strategy than any other.<br />
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The waves crashing around us have sunk many a small ship in the last couple of years. The going has been hard. The questions many and complex. Not a few people have taken as their gospel point of reference the story of Jesus asleep in the boat in a storm while the apostles, hardened fishermen though some of them are, get increasingly desperate. It is the Lord himself who tells us not to be afraid, although I have to say my feeling is less fear and more like nausea.<br />
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Still, the solutions are now what they have always been. Love, duty, joy .. and no panicking. Easier said than done.<br />
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Still, for what it's worth, 'Ahoy there, shipmates.' I'm back, at least for a while.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-11140689973598901432017-04-16T01:43:00.000-07:002017-04-16T01:45:46.902-07:00The Magdalen Hour<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I love early morning on Easter Sunday. It is the Magdalen Hour, the hour of peace restored and joy renewed.<br />
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It is the hour of recognition: coming about not through some automated exercise in information collection - Mary didn't Google Christ after all! - or through some methodologically sound collection of verifiable data subjected to the most rigorous examination and deconstruction... certainly not! As contemporary French author Fabrice Hadjadj tells us in <i>The Resurrection: Experience Life in the Risen Christ, </i>it came simply through Christ's call across a quiet spring garden just stirring after dawn:<i> </i><br />
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<i>'Mariam!'</i><br />
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'<i>Rabonni!'</i><br />
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It is one of the only exchanges that St John preserves in Hebrew.<br />
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I don't know why the translator or the editors chose such an appalling title for Hadjadj's book. The French title is <i>Resurrection, mode d'emploi</i> (<i>Resurrection: a user's guide</i>),<i> </i>which tells us two things: first, what the book is about (the Resurrection) and, second, that it is consciously setting out to parody the infamous classic <i>Suicide, a User's Guide</i>, a taboo volume that came out in the 1980s and a go-to self-help book for suicides before the internet took over that particularly evil role.<br />
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But I digress...<br />
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The Magdalen Hour - the counterstroke to the hour of darkness announced on Thursday evening by St Luke (22:53).<br />
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These moments are comforting in a week when we've seen flashes of conflict in the Middle East and the Korean peninsula. It doesn't do to feed oneself a diet of geopolitical panic. That has not stopped us redoubling our prayers for world peace to the Immaculate Heart of that Mary whose own hour - according to St Ignatius and I'm sure various others - came even before Magdalen's.<br />
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Hadjadj's book also contains another gem which has occasioned me much thought this Lent. His first chapter is actually a reflection on the soldiers who took money from the High Priests to lie about what they saw at the Resurrection. It seems this fact is often passed over in commentaries on the gospel but Hadjadj points out very adeptly that there is something universally relevant about the opposition between belief in the Resurrection, and the getting and spending of some other token in place of that belief. I suppose the Old Testament calls this idolatry, although we hardly recognise that as a metaphor for our own practices any more. Fools that we are...<br />
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Different versions of last night's Collect show this. The words <i>'puram tibi exhibeamus servitutem' </i>are translated <i>'that we may render to Thee a pure service'</i> by some older translations, but <i>'that they may render you undivided service'</i> in at least one modern translation. <i>Undivided</i> service is what it's all about. How often - I articulate Hadjadj's thought no doubt in a garbled way - do our hearts get involved in the trading of affection for imaginary benefits, like those soldiers who let their desire for money get the better of the truth they had witnessed at dawn (Matthew 28:15).<br />
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We tend to think of the conspiracy predating Christ's death. But St Matthew's account of the High Priests' actions after the Resurrection suggest they are still at it afterwards. If it took gall to conspire against Christ before he was slaughtered; how much worse was it for them when they heard from the mouths of these soldiers that the Temple had indeed been rebuilt in three days. Let us hope for their sake that the Chief Priests simply did not believe the guards; but in that case why bribe them, rather than punishing them for lying?<br />
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But we are all conspirators in fact, actors in a grand auto-destructive plot: promising ourselves this or that benefit at the cost (and what cost!) of the truth we have learned and professed belief in. We do not know the <i>puram servitutem</i>. Our hearts are still divided by an affection for those coins - name your poison - that will block up the door to the opened tomb. Who will roll the coin away?<br />
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I don't know how long this blog can stagger on for. I'm increasingly committed to digital minimalism and am more inclined to simply dig my own field rather than spraying my thoughts over the internet. The single most fruitful thing we could all do is to cut ourselves off from the net and spend the time we would have wasted on it in prayer, reading and reflection. I have been teetering on the edge of this contradiction too long now to remain a committed blogger.<br />
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The challenge instead - the challenge I set myself - is to find the things that bring nourishment to our own souls and those of our families. So little of that can depend on a microchip. The neo-scholastic naive reductionism about the neutrality of technology has hurt us all long enough.<br />
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But let me finish on a happier note. One of the joys of today is the music of the day Mass. There are few more perfect hymns in the <i>Liber Usualis</i> than the <i>Victimae Paschali Laudes</i>. It is the soundtrack of the Magdalen Hour. <i>Dic nobis Maria quid vidisti in via?</i><br />
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She can tell us of course and indeed she does. But it doesn't matter what we hear, unless we prefer it to all our big data and wretched bit coins.<br />
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Happy Easter.<br />
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<br />Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-79717275282616702552017-02-19T00:28:00.000-08:002017-02-19T00:28:01.138-08:00Deep work, Sertillanges and the temptations of digital cultureWhat a difference three weeks make! Well, a small difference here and there. The <i><a href="http://decentinnofdeath.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-churchs-cold-war.html" target="_blank">guerre improbable, paix impossible </a></i>state we achieved by mid-January seems to be rumbling on. Cardinal Mueller at least appears to want to stand on the right side of the question, even if for now it is only through <a href="http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2017/02/01/cardinal-muller-communion-for-the-remarried-is-against-gods-law/" target="_blank">TV interviews</a> and the like. <br />
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One cannot help be drawn back to the landing site of <i>Amoris Laetitia</i>'s unexploded bomb. I call it unexploded because whatever the crushed buildings and the crater beneath it, it has not yet done all the damage it can and probably will do. The latest rumours of bad-things-to-come include women deacons to mark the anniversary of the Reformation and Vatican III. The former I believe, the latter I find highly improbably. Still, Vatican II was improbable, so who can tell? If any pope since Paul VI is capable of organising the three ring circus of a universal council, it's Pope Francis.<br />
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All that being said, the question on my mind is more or less the same question as we always face: how do we bear fruit in a time of crisis? There is an awful effect of escalation in such moments that is as tempting as the original forbidden fruit. Let me take an example. What the pope is up to, according to my lights, is insufferable. I hardly need explain why here. But I cannot see how that could justify gulping down the name-calling, mouth-foaming wormwood that passes for commentary in some circles. Sure, Jesus called the Pharisees a brood of Vipers and Whitened Sepulchres. But he also knew everyman's inner thoughts and could walk on water. We are enjoined to come after the Lord or to be perfect as our Heavenly Father, but not to pretend we are the Lord or that we can dole out judgment and justice in the same way. Leave that to him. We can only hurt ourselves in so doing.<br />
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Yet, as I say, the real question is about how we bear fruit in a difficult time. Our first response these days is to be up-to-date on all the latest developments. It is the information age, or so it is labelled, and to be LinkedIn, Twittered and PM'ed seem as indispensable as breathing, eating and drinking. Every age lives crises through its own cultural matrices, and the glory and misfortune of our age is to live these things mostly through a social media feed.<br />
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Nevertheless, the crazier things get out there - the more barking mad the rumours of Francis's next stunt become, the more the ranks of AL's defenders swell - the calmer and saner we must all try to be. Living the crisis through the Internet seems inevitable because, well, how else can we get our information? That is true of course to some degree.<br />
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But the thing about the Internet, the thing that not enough people are yet prepared to admit, is that most of us live in the Internet as a swamp into which we are continually sucked, rather than as a river into which we dip for what we need. We are driven to open our feeds not as if we are sipping at tea cups, but gulping like hungry chicks after our parents' regurgitated food. What we want to know may be important - rather like nourishment is important - but how we access it is suspect.<br />
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I have been thinking about this all the more after reading Cal Newport's<a href="http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/" target="_blank"> <i>Deep Work</i></a>. Read it you should, putting aside the rather grinding self-interest that drives Newport. His starting point is simple. In an age where automisation and robotisation risk destroying major areas of the job market, only high-performing knowledge workers will be able to make themselves indispensable. So much for the self interest.<br />
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What follows is a wonderful exploration of how to restore the capacity for deep work in the age of social media. Newport, a computer scientist by profession, calls himself a digital minimalist and has all the latest psychological research on the nature and performance of attention at his fingertips. One of his key arguments - which he proves eloquently and convincingly for my tastes - is that if you want to work deeply, you have to get off digital media and stay off it most of the time. Email too needs a severe reining in, within the limits of your professional duties of course. The capacity of these technologies to disrupt and fragment attention is extraordinary.<br />
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I feel daft writing this now on a blog. Am I not calling my readers to precisely this kind of fragmentation? Well, no! But we are all in danger of it. Let everyone look to their own conscience in this regard. One correlation I draw from Newport's cautious remarks on digital withdrawal is this: if you have to get on the Internet, don't do it with avidity. Go in, get your information and get out before the swirl of hyperlink currents sweeps your attention into a literal cloud of unknowing.<br />
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One of the most interesting references in Newport's book is to Fr Sertillanges's <i>The Intellectual Life</i>. I must say I was taken aback to find a reference to Sertillanges in a book by an MIT galactico, but there you have it. Sertillanges was a French Dominican of the generation of Garrigou Lagrange or perhaps slightly older. His <i>What Jesus Saw from the Cross</i> is reasonably well known. How Newport came across him I have no idea. Nevertheless, it struck me as fascinating that in order to find an intellectual path out of the attentional chaos of digital culture, Newport should alight on a practitioner in the Thomistic tradition.<br />
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There is a tantalizing dilemma for us all in such lessons. We uber-Catholics are unconsciously proud of our Catholic heritage and roots, as well as jumping mad about the current wave of ecclesiastical vandalism. Yet in some ways we hardly make room for our own heritage. We ought to be the first to abandon our routers and smart phones, and yet we find in the Internet a crucial source of information and encouragement that we do not fight alone.<br />
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My sense of this question is that somehow it cannot last. Baptizing the Internet may turn out in the end to have been as misguided as those people who tried to turn rave parties into Christian services.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-24959813704750807282017-01-19T13:57:00.004-08:002017-01-19T13:57:41.428-08:00The Church's Cold War<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I was reading today about Raymond Aron's post-war work <i>Le Grand Schisme</i>. Aron was a leading French intellectual who stood not for any extreme but rather for a secular (in the French sense), moderate consensus. This was at a time when many of France's leading intellectuals were either tainted by association with the hard-right, Nazi-collaborating Vichy government of the war years or else cosy-ing up to Soviet Communism like the myopic Jean-Paul Sartre. In any case, Aron came up with one of the formulae that helped define the Cold War at the end of the 1940s, and it went by way of this delightful juxtaposition: <i>paix impossible, guerre improbable</i>.<br />
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The Cold War made for an impossible peace. Many of the protagonists on either side of the Iron Curtain, at least when Aron forged his expression, were resolved to oppose implacably the ideas and efforts of their enemies. Let's indulge in a little schematisation for the sake of brevity. The Soviet bloc wanted to see the proletarian revolution spread everywhere; the West, on the other hand, having just defeated one dictator, were not about to embrace another dictator of a different stripe. <i>Paix impossible</i>.<br />
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And yet at the same time it was unlikely they would actually go to war. Indulge in a little skirmish via client states? Yes. Agitate and aggravate the other side? Well, of course. But actually initiate the steps for an all-out conflict? Not likely. The costs were too high in reality, and nobody who had survived the Second World War would have been inclined to disagree with the virtues of an uneasy peace. Or, in this case, a state of improbable war.<br />
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*********<br />
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Having read Aron's formula, I could not help but reflect on the post-dubia situation we now find ourselves in. Is this not a case of <i>paix impossible</i>? Those who have doubts about <i>Amoris Laetitia</i> are not looking for the correction of its punctuation. The ambiguities of the text raise questions that touch the very heart of a handful of divinely revealed or Church-proclaimed doctrines. On the other side, no liberal is going to want to give up on the concessions that have just been squeezed through the Vatican approval machine. We know very well that they have no intention of stopping at the facilitating of irregular unions. All the other plethora of irregular situations (and invincibly ignorant consciences) must also taste of God's mercy so long and so wrongly denied them.<br />
<br />
But then we also are in a moment of <i>guerre improbable</i>. Francis is not going to make martyrs out of the four dubia-bearing cardinals. He still reeks enough of traditional pietism to offend large swathes of the liberal intelligentsia. At the same time he will offer no clarification that states clearly where he stands on the question or, better still, what the Church firmly and truly believes.<br />
<br />
On the other side, I just do not believe that the four cardinals will do anything beyond offering a 'formal correction' that will probably be of the mildest kind. Cardinal Muller's recent intervention has gone some way towards spiking their guns. What kind of formal correction could carry immediate, practical weight - we know it will have theological substance but that is not the same thing - without the backing of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? This might not pertain if there are a substantial number of cardinals who associate themselves with a formal correction, but the fear of schism will ensure their numbers are small.<br />
<br />
No, to me, it looks set not for a cathartic denouement with movie-style resolutions and relief all round, but rather a long, slow burn of confusion; a state, as Aron said, of <i>guerre improbable</i>.<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
<i>Paix impossible, guerre improbable.</i> Fasten your seat belts, but not because it is going to be a bumpy ride. More because it will be an interminable traffic jam, and we might just fall asleep at the wheel.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-83816853806390771702017-01-16T09:14:00.002-08:002017-01-16T09:14:55.931-08:00New acts of contrition<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglRj5VWwKjytSI4yDYIceFUYSplCgnvhmoI7TkU4WY0bKetyBefC5Wez-LY_FBhWpOI_L3voYYanbTbxkX0E-I51ohFSDOEp0mbON-Ns3zlIJt0XYdX4tXspYSL_LO7wxdrFITfU39eBA/s1600/Pascal_2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglRj5VWwKjytSI4yDYIceFUYSplCgnvhmoI7TkU4WY0bKetyBefC5Wez-LY_FBhWpOI_L3voYYanbTbxkX0E-I51ohFSDOEp0mbON-Ns3zlIJt0XYdX4tXspYSL_LO7wxdrFITfU39eBA/s320/Pascal_2.jpeg" width="300" /></a>Dr Joseph Show <a href="http://www.lmschairman.org/2017/01/malta-sinks.html" target="_blank">on his blog</a> has given us a new and updated act of contrition for the times. I rather like it:<br />
<i><br /></i>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;"><i><span style="color: red;">'O my God, because thou art so good, I am not at all sorry that I have offended thee, and with the help of thy grace I will offend thee again and again.'</span></i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #990000; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;">Here is my version, as bleak as it is brief: </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;"><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;"><i><span style="color: red;">O my God, because I am so good, I cannot see how I have offended Thee, and thanks to this criterion of inculpability, I will not sin again.</span></i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;"><i><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></i></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;"><i><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></i></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;">What can I say but St Pascal, pray for us?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;"><i><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></i></span>Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-50329170012201964672017-01-15T01:16:00.001-08:002017-01-15T01:16:38.037-08:00Kessler syndrome and the urge to come down from the crossI'm running out of superlative adjectives and metaphors to describe how bowel-cringingly awful this current period in the Church actually is. This week offered us something like a New Year Special Big Mac with Abomination of Desolation Bonanza on Ice. If Ferrari manufactured ecclesiastical crises, this would be one of them.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv0XPVshAy2m8RKmJ9XxZs4op3HlvnN5hd3rfSE-Jpy_VYokKOBv2V9dmuHlmLYLfu6hYcslqTFxAS6ten16jzRYr7boGxBLrBTwvmG642UGRqKYl44muWO-x1b0vp0L3jCXqIhF-BH3Y/s1600/Satelites.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv0XPVshAy2m8RKmJ9XxZs4op3HlvnN5hd3rfSE-Jpy_VYokKOBv2V9dmuHlmLYLfu6hYcslqTFxAS6ten16jzRYr7boGxBLrBTwvmG642UGRqKYl44muWO-x1b0vp0L3jCXqIhF-BH3Y/s200/Satelites.jpg" width="200" /></a>Given the evil times, those of you who have not yet embraced Flat Earthism might be interested to learn about the Kessler Syndrome. As we know, many satellites now orbit the globe at approximately 17, 000 mph. There is not a vast amount of metal in Low Earth Orbit but there is an increasing amount, and the stuff that gets decommissioned needs to be carefully monitored. So far so orbital.<br />
<br />
In the 1970s, however, NASA scientist Donald Kessler wondered what would happen if one satellite collided into another and, as a result, debris from that collision then started triggering collisions with other satellites. On reflection, two immediate effects would arise. First, you would begin to get a cascade; a kind of chain reaction of collision and counter-collision, each one creating another new fissive strand. Second, all the earth-bound systems that depend on satellites would start breaking down. Kessler, I believe, was not so exercised by the latter problem since little did depend on satellite communications in the 1970s. These days, it would pose immense difficulties for communication technologies across the globe (not to mention spy networks!). Thus was born the Kessler Syndrome in which the cascade of colliding satellites in Low Earth Orbit achieved crisis levels of mutual destruction. One artist thought it might look like this.<br />
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<br />
Pretty, n'est-ce pas? Hagan-lio that, m'hearties!<br />
<br />
********<br />
<br />
I only mention it because the news stories rolling in about you-know-what and you-know-who seem to me to be entering a Kessler Syndrome phase. No sooner do we hear about one dreadful story than another one appears in lurid technicolour, bouncing off the first with all kinds of consequences that are apparently unforeseen, though not necessarily unforeseeable.<br />
<br />
For example, ten days ago we heard about three priests being dismissed from the CDF - apparently, three good ones. Then, early last week, <a href="http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/cardinal-muellers-tv-interview-causes-bewilderment" target="_blank">Cardinal Muller </a>gave a 'move-along-folks-nothing-to-see-here' kind of interview in which he admitted that the <i>dubia</i> were indeed <i>dubia </i>but that there was no danger to the faith in <i>Amoris Laetitia</i>. Just to prove there was 'no danger to the faith', the bishops of Malta then issued <a href="http://ms.maltadiocese.org/WEBSITE/2017/PRESS%20RELEASES/Norms%20for%20the%20Application%20of%20Chapter%20VIII%20of%20AL.pdf" target="_blank">the most liberal interpretation of <i>Amoris Laetitia</i> yet</a> proposed, and it was published for them in <i>L'Osservatore Romano </i>(so with apparent Vatican approval). There are only two bishops involved: Archbishop Scicluna of Malta and and Bishop Grech on the nearby island of Gozo. Yes, that is correct: there are two bishops involved, the combined populations of Malta and Gozo come to around 460,000 souls, and the bishops still had their letter published in <i>L'Osservatore Romano</i>.<br />
<br />
Malta isn't exactly a geo-political giant on the world stage but there are still two factors about this that are immediately disheartening. First, Malta is an iconically Catholic culture where the people are overwhelmingly Catholic and, by all accounts, overwhelmingly devout. You have to hope we will hear vociferous objections from the island itself, but if so, we haven't heard them yet. We need to give it time. The second immediately disheartening thing is that Archbishop Scicluna is supposed to be one of the good guys - a leading figure in Rome in the investigation of abuser priests before his elevation to Malta.<br />
<br />
The Maltese letter has already been <a href="https://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/the-maltese-disaster/" target="_blank">gutted and filleted by Ed Peters</a>. Yet its publication in <i>L'Osservatore Romano</i> gives it an importance that it would otherwise not have. Maybe I'm wrong here and <i>L'Osservatore Romano</i> publishes the internal pastoral documents of the Maltese church on a regular basis. I somehow doubt it though. What this publication looks like is a papal pat on the shoulder for a document which contains such egregious gems as the following:<br />
<br />
<i>If, as a result of the process of discernment,
undertaken with “humility, discretion and love for the
Church and her teaching, in a sincere search for God’s
will and a desire to make a more perfect response to it”
(AL 300), a separated or divorced person who is living
in a new relationship manages, with an informed and
enlightened conscience, to acknowledge and believe
that he or she are at peace with God, he or she cannot
be precluded from participating in the sacraments of
Reconciliation and the Eucharist (see AL, notes 336 and
351)</i><br />
<br />
I'm no theologian and far be it from me to carp but look at the utter contradiction. How - just how? can anybody help? - can an informed and enlightened conscience manage to acknowledge that they are at peace with God when they are living in an objectively sinful state? To think one is at peace with God when living with someone who is not your spouse is neither <i>informed</i> nor <i>enlightened</i>. It is precisely and in every sense of the terms <i>deformed </i>and <i>unenlightened.</i><br />
<br />
One of the things that is so bewildering about the letter is that it appears to lump all the difficult cases together. Those who are personally convinced their first marriage was not valid - a case still blocked from the sacraments by <i>Familiaris consortio</i> - are lumped in with those who were abandoned. What counts is that their consciences might not be guilty of serious sin if they acted under any of the following conditions:<br />
<br />
<i>ignorance, inadvertence,
violence, fear, affective immaturity, the persistence of
certain habits, the state of anxiety, inordinate
attachments, and other psychological and social factors
(see AL 302; CCC 1735, 2352). </i><br />
<br />
I can see that such conditions might mitigate sinfulness to some degree in the moment in which a sinful act was committed. But when that act has become a structural part of someone's way of life and when that person is fully informed of their duties, what then?<br />
<br />
If this were not bad enough, the argument then follows that such couples might even continue to live as married persons. This is quite astonishing in its implications:<br />
<br />
<i>Throughout the discernment process, we should also
examine the possibility of conjugal continence. Despite
the fact that this ideal is not at all easy, there may be
couples who, with the help of grace, practice this virtue
without putting at risk other aspects of their life
together. On the other hand, there are complex
situations where the choice of living “as brothers and
sisters” becomes humanly impossible and give rise to
greater harm (see AL, note 329).</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I'm really curious as to what constitutes greater harm than serious sin. This all reminds me of the conclusion of <i>Silence</i>, the Shusaku Endo novel recently made into a film, where the Jesuit missionary abandons the faith and desecrates and image of Christ to save his fellow Christians from being martyred. Why ...? Because, according to this logic, God in the end does not require us to endure suffering at such human expense, surely .... Or else, if we do hold the line in such circumstances, it can only be under the non-compulsion of counsel, not the obligation of precept... Or else, if we choose not to desecrate the image of Christ, it is not that the alternative is unviable.<br />
<br />
Perhaps what is most confusing about this is the following: such irregular situations are compatible with a growth in the life and love of God in the soul. This at least is logical: if these people can be in a state of grace, they must be able to grow in grace and, if grow, then why not become great saints. <i>Amoris Laetitia </i>says it more or less explicitly:<br />
<br />
<i>“It is possible that in an objective
situation of sin – which may not be subjectively
culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s
grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace
and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this
end” (AL 305). </i><br />
<br />
There are only two conclusions I can see in this light. First, it means that God sometimes requires the humanly impossible by precept. But what about grace, you say? Quite, we cannot fulfil God's will without his grace but there is the second problem. By this new calculation, God's grace is not sufficient for us, or at least not sufficient for someone in an irregular marital situation. Yes, apparently God has given us the law but does not give us the strength to fight free of our transgressions of it.... <br />
<br />
To my mind - my poor, fraught mind - it is just like the end of <i>Silence</i>. When Fr Rodrigues is asked by his Japanese persecutors to trample on an image of Jesus, Christ speaks these words in his mind:<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>You my trample. You may trample. [...] It was to be trampled by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
But Shusaku's conclusion is a perversion of the Gospel. It reminds me of nothing so much as the very moment of crucifixion when certain passersby shouted:<br />
<br />
<i>Come down from the cross</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Come down from the cross, because the sin you are accused of isn't really on your conscience; because life is too complicated; or because too many people will be hurt by your obedience to God; or because following God's commands can only harm you; and because those who say you must obey God are being Pharisees anyway. Come down from the cross. You cannot do it anyway and God will not help you commit 'greater harm' than seriously offending him. Come down from the cross. Whatever the priests do, let them not promise a resurrection beyond the crucifixion of separation.<br />
<br />
********<br />
<br />
I know of so many who are broken hearted by current events. I have known much anger, confusion and trouble myself in the last year or more. But, by the grace of God, I think I now understand something that brings me much comfort.<br />
<br />
No response we make to the terrible times in which we live can help us if we do not look upon events with the gaze of God. I hear talk of anger and scorn towards Pope Francis and those involved at the very top. I understand it. I know where it comes from. I am not beyond it myself.<br />
<br />
But we will only offend God and hurt ourselves to let such an attitude take root in our hearts. We should hate collaboration but love the collaborators. Hate betrayal but love the betrayers.<br />
<br />
We have all collaborated or betrayed in one way or another, and there are more sins in the catechism than those against faith. But let us ask God once for the grace to look on these tumultuous events with his eyes and the path of constancy and serenity opens at our feet.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-71184764484516237492017-01-08T09:25:00.001-08:002017-01-08T09:26:24.350-08:00Rachmaninov contra barbaros<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A recent discovery of a new version of Rachmaninov's <a href="http://decentinnofdeath.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/nunc-dimittis.html" target="_blank">Nunc dimittis</a> has been on my mind for various reasons. Most particularly, I suppose, it is because Rachmaninov's music bespeaks the warm blanket of comfort that this period of the year seems to offer us. Some find these months hard; lethargy is all too easy; the dark nights remain with us. The dark nights of city and Church perhaps. But there is always comfort to be found somewhere, and I only need hear a few lines of Rachmaninov's Russian voice to feel almost human(e) once more. Indeed, Rachmaninov is not only one of my barriers against the cold season. He helps give me a further layer of protection against the ghastly forces ranged against us. It might be fun for me to explain that a little.<br />
<br />
Why <i>I</i> would feel better after a few bars of Rachmaninov perhaps has something to do with where and when I heard his music and drank of its depths. In one of my fading sepia memories, a school friend - now incidentally a very successful impresario - fell in love with the Second Piano concerto and played it continually. In his sitting room at home behind his father's butcher's shop, he had one of those rare things: an upright practice piano that could actually hold its tuning. It also had the most sensitive action I have seen on any piano. The keys melted like butter beneath the fingers and the instrument almost played the music for you. My friend pored over the score of Rachmaninov's concerto for weeks, I turned the pages and made the tea, and something like music was the end result.<br />
<br />
Rach 2 and then Rach 3 (way before <i>Shine</i> made it popular) became favoured pieces on my Walkman circa 1988. The tape I possessed boasted both concertos and - pure delight! - also a recording of the <i>Isle of the Dead</i>, Rachmaninov's tone poem inspired by Arnold Böcklin's famous painting:<br />
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Many other Rach memories surface as I write these lines. I once sat in rapture on the edge of my seat while the Halle orchestra performed Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony. I left the concert with a stiff neck but a soul transformed! The tape I mentioned above with the <i>Isle of the Dead</i> once saved me from a very bad bout of sea sickness in the English channel. Not many years later I saw two performances of Rach 3 by young piano students. The first dripped sweat and blood throughout all three movements and practically had to be carried off at the end. The second had such a huge technique he tickled the entire piece out of his Steinway with all the ease of someone playing Chopsticks. I've never seen such an effortless performance, yet today I cannot find any trace of him on the internet. <i>Sic transit gloria pianisti!</i><br />
<br />
My romance with Rachmaninov continued some years later when I came to discover the <i>All Night Vigil</i>. There is not time enough to say how it takes all of Rachmaninov's lyricism - all of its complex colours and silken textures - and distills it into a most sacred liquor. Rachmaninov's bass lines are always coherent, but in the <i>Vigil</i> they are magisterial. His harmonies are always dense but in the <i>Vigil</i> they achieve something of the glory of an Orthodox mosaic - all golds and glimmering and distant depths. It is a reminder of how far the West has fallen from its own liturgical glories; how badly our clunky musical prosody falls short of an authentic liturgical poetry. <br />
<br />
Spending time with such music gradually begins to give you a sense of what the utilitarian and empiricist nineteenth century had tried to drive out of the human soul. We are not just all cogs in a grand machine of profit, tax and painful productivity. There are vistas beyond the measurable, stories that cannot be reduced to calculations, feelings that are ineffable. A few minutes with Rachmaninov and liberation from the treadmill seems possible. Rachmaninov himself found the treadmill overwhelming. He certainly didn't enjoy the kind of perfectionist criticism that has no time for human inconsistency. Blindly he inflicted it on himself as a young man and brought himself to a nervous breakdown.<br />
<br />
The worst and most oft repeated accusation against Rachmaninov is that he is a Romantic, a purveyor of melodramatic inauthenticity bordering on sickly sweetness. I'm not sure what he is supposed to be instead, but frankly the accusation is unfounded. As his fellow countryman Prokofiev wrote (I approximate), "There are still many melodies left to be written in C major." Rachmaninov knew it, though I dare say he preferred C minor. Indeed, I'm inclined to say Rachmaninov's melodic gift was superior to Prokofiev's. He certainly had a more fruitful imagination than the drab but far more respectable Second Viennese School of Schoenberg and Berg.<br />
<br />
His greater achievement though, at least in my view, was to evoke all the vistas of human emotion in an age of abusive repression; an age of stunted Gradgrindism with its self-proclaimed ownership of the human future. Progress sounds fun but why is it always backed by such unconvincing advocates? In all their errors of taste lies a clue to the errors of their mind. A veritable <i>Isle of the Dead</i> indeed. <br />
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Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-79762537709871954562017-01-02T00:43:00.000-08:002017-01-02T00:43:18.397-08:00Spoilt canonisations, or death, the great leveller<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The annual worldwide mortality rate amounts to some 55 million people every year. I'm not sure if last year this statistic went up but if it were possible for the Grim Reaper to die from overwork, he would surely have succumbed by the end of 2016. From Aleppo to Yemen via Kinshasa, the calendar was painted in vermillion hues.<br />
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I've no wish to make light of this figure, particularly where those deaths were possibly avoidable, as in the current Middle East conflict. Still, 2016 also saw an unusually large wave of deaths among celebrities of all stripes. From David Bowie in January to Carrie Fisher in December, by way of so many other well-known names, the Reaper's harvest appears to have been abundant among the famous. <i>Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.</i><br />
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One of the more curious phenomena of the media age is that deaths usually happen twice over, or at least bereavements do. I'm not alluding here to the delectable anecdote about Mark Twain who once corrected a newspaper that had reported his demise: <i>'Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated!' </i>I am thinking of the fact that such celebrity bereavements happen first as a family and private experience, and then as a public manifestation.<br />
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For the family, bereavement is all too recognisable: the absence of the beloved, the complexity of the post-mortem arrangements, the funeral rites, the slow-motion aftermath, etc. For the celebrity, however, a second bereavement occurs closely on the heels of the first. The media are hungry for news and celebrity demise is always worth a few sales or a few clicks. Celebrities seem to belong to the public in some way and even more so in the moment of their loss. They are mourned for the portion of our culture that they represented, for the images they created or the sentiments that they evoked. It is probably for such reasons that over time public mourning seems to grow insincere. Rarely are such celebrities worthy of the accolades accorded them, and there is a kind of laudatory one-up-man-ship that overtakes the commentariat on radio and TV. Now is not the moment to denigrate the fallen hero or even attempt a balanced appraisal of their contribution. The levels of mourning seen in the wake of the death of Princess Diana are now echoed in smaller ways with certain celebrities.<br />
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In such cases of "social canonisation", we also see a variety of myth making at work. The celebrity's death brings a certain consecration to the social values they symbolised. Take the recent death of George Michael whose only shame in the eyes of the myth makers was to have closeted his sexuality for so long. When Michael told the Guardian that his drug taking and cottaging (i.e. anonymous gay sex with strangers in public toilets) were 'just who I am', he anointed himself an archpriest of individual choice, and his auto-consecration was acclaimed by the adoring admirers.<br />
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That 'just who I am' has a powerful narrative function in the current climate. It is a little like 'and they all lived happily ever after', the expression that ratifies the outcome of the traditional story and justifies the trials that had been endured. If what we have done is 'just who I am', then all is well. The paradox is that 'just who I am' rises above its individual origins and stands in some normative position for the rest of society. If what I have done is 'just who I am', then society must tolerate it. Being 'just who I am' licenses everyone to be just who they are. In such circumstances responsibility ceases to concern others and takes to itself the measure of self-fulfilment. Irresponsibility is not to fulfil oneself.<br />
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According to reports Michael was a frequent donor to good causes and generous to a fault. May much, therefore, be forgiven him. Still, what of those around him? What of those whose dignity he helped destroy in tandem with his own? Indeed, what of those who have read his lyrics, imbibed his spirit and became intoxicated on the licentiousness he legitimised?<br />
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From such dizzying heights of human glory I suppose we all might easily fall. Michael lies tonight in some cold mortuary fridge, as somber and silent as any corpse. Dead men tell no tales, but cadavers do give lessons. Oddly, the commentariat are a little less reluctant to celebrate what Michael now conotes, than they were to congratulate him on what he once symbolised. I wonder if the modern love of cremation is less about denying the resurrection of the body - as was once the case for many secularists - and more about trying to disguising the evidence of where it all leads.<br />
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<i>As I am, so once was he. </i><br />
<i>As he is, so will I be.</i><br />
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Well, there is a cheery thought to start the new year. As Dickens' Mark Tapley says, there is no credit in being cheery except in the face of misfortune! In my end is my beginning.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-84310341452803106212016-12-31T02:58:00.003-08:002016-12-31T02:58:36.032-08:00Christmas slackingI'm breaking my Christmas blog silence to say a hearty 'Happy Christmas' to anyone passing by and a happy New Year for 2017 .... whatever it brings!<br />
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Christmas family time is too precious to interrupt with blogarrhea! More from me in January.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-82357478767286122492016-12-23T08:58:00.001-08:002016-12-24T00:16:35.781-08:00And the end game?Anyone who has seen the various interviews of Cardinal Burke in the last few days - no need for links, I'm sure you all have - will have been struck by how resolute he sounds when questioned about his current course of action. The dubia were posed discreetly in private in September. When the pope refused to clarify matters in the growing confusion, the dubia were published. Now, we stand on the edge of the next stage: this formal correction that Cardinal Burke has been talking about is no idle threat. He has not raised this issue without having thought through and contemplated the possibility of having to do it. At least, if he has talked without thinking, he's not half the man we thought he was.<br />
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And now this: the pope has delivered his <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2016/december/documents/papa-francesco_20161222_curia-romana.html" target="_blank">Christmas address to the Curia</a> and ripped into the critics of reform, classifying them in three groups:<br />
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<i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20px;">In this process, it is normal, and indeed healthy, to encounter difficulties, which in the case of the reform, might present themselves as different types of resistance. There can be cases of</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20px;"> open resistance</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20px;">, often born of goodwill and sincere dialogue, and cases of </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20px;">hidden resistance</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20px;">, born of fearful or hardened hearts content with the empty rhetoric of “spiritual window-dressing” typical of those who say they are ready for change, yet want everything to remain as it was before. There are also cases of</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20px;"> malicious resistance</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20px;">, which spring up in misguided minds and come to the fore when the devil inspires ill intentions (often cloaked in sheep’s clothing). This last kind of resistance hides behind words of self-justification and, often, accusation; it takes refuge in traditions, appearances, formalities, in the familiar, or else in a desire to make everything personal, failing to distinguish between the act, the actor, and the action.</span></i><br />
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I know ostensible this is about the Curia first and foremost but are you thinking what I'm thinking? I could go off here into metaphors about unstoppable forces and immovable objects, but I'm not even sure that would capture what looks like the coming clash. The language is a real give away:<br />
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<i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20px;">This last kind of resistance hides behind words of self-justification and, often, accusation; it takes refuge in traditions, appearances, formalities, in the familiar, or else in a desire to make everything personal, </span></i><br />
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Accusation, tradition, formalities ... Now, to whom could Pope Francis be alluding? Mark my words: this does not end well, unless there is some extraordinary intervention of grace and softening of hearts. <br />
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I'm off right now to Eucharistic Adoration. One word to men; a thousand words to God.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-30030187078119241922016-12-21T14:07:00.000-08:002016-12-21T14:07:13.503-08:00Nunc dimittisSometimes the weeks are just so intensely busy that I hardly draw breath from Monday to Friday. I managed to tonight though, mostly by heading to bed at 8.15pm! <div>
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Still in my mood for <a href="http://decentinnofdeath.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/sensible-human-things.html" target="_blank">sensible human things</a>, my thoughts turn this evening to the following piece of music that I came across recently: a version of Rachmaninov's Nunc dimittis (from <i>All Night Vespers</i>) by popster Katie Melua. Melua is a Georgian, so I dare say she might have heard this kind of liturgical music as a child. She certainly sings it with enough feeling.</div>
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The Rachmaninov is still exquisite, even if you do not appreciate the guitar accompaniment. </div>
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And now your servant departeth ...</div>
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Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-6222719914599608972016-12-17T04:57:00.000-08:002016-12-17T09:09:52.331-08:00Sensible, Human ThingsI came across the following quotation the other day. It comes from C. S. Lewis, writing about the atomic age:<br />
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<i>The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.</i></h1>
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In our age of rare wisdom and rarer good sense, this strikes me as a recipe for confirmed sanity. </div>
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Our age of rare wisdom is also of course an age of ecclesiastical drama and chaos - the atomic bomb of the Franciscan papacy perhaps? The internet, moreover, seems to give us a front row view of the unfolding events, and hardly fails to distort them at the same time. The temptation to anxiety that grew after the events of Hiroshima finds a strange echo in the anxieties we now face in the Church. The revolution in Eucharistic discipline has its own potential for fission and perhaps even meltdown. Thus, the growing importance of Lewis's prescient recipe for sanity. </div>
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<i>When the crisis comes, let ift find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts.</i></h1>
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We all have our own recipe for sanity, I'm sure. Parents of younger children, like me, sometimes doubt such sanity is attainable, but it is there, lurking among the meteoric movements that gravitate around us in various stages of entropy. As I write, we are all 'working hard' in our living room, writing with various implements or fingers on a range of receptive surfaces. Breakfast is a distant memory while lunch is a pleasant and imminent prospect. The sharp winter sun has been dampened with a half drawn curtain and for once there is quiet. I know it won't last - this happy and paradoxical mood of sane industry and repose. In fact, as I write, one child has just fallen into jealous paroxysms over a sibling's writing implement - and we're off again.</div>
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But there it was, for a few minutes. Amid the chaos of family life, and the digitally amplified anxieties that would crowd about us like Tolkien's Ringwraiths, there breaks through the cloud such moments of wise, sane domestic normality. Our default condition is not to be in a state of apocalyptic agitation. Or as Chesterton says somewhere, <i>we are most ourselves when the fundamental thing in us is joy</i>. </div>
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The soundscape is important too, for me at least. If I'm in the car on my own, I confess it might be as wild as a little Noel Gallagher unplugged. If I'm at home, it's more likely to be a Schubert string quartet, with all the vast hinterland of Romantic sentiment and classical remembrance that suffuses the music of the Austrian genius. And, like a musical motive that broods and struggles towards its liberation in some inspired cadence, sanity in a mad, mad world, or indeed in a mad, mad Church, is a work in progress. It is not available to us at the click of a button, an easy upgrade or a software update. It is the result of a manual process. Or, the result of a practice. Practice makes perfect. </div>
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In this observation, there is some terrible truth about what contemporary patterns of living do to us; about how they draw us away from the sources of sanity and push our noses into the troughs of consumerism and social media. It's not that we don't need to buy things or communicate and network with people. But how these garnishes of sensible life become toxins in the enclosure of digital space!</div>
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Anyway, enough of the blog. I'm away to be sane elsewhere for half an hour. Rome won't fail to circulate more madness before the end of the weekend, and no doubt it will catch up with us somewhere in the newsfeed or the myriad forms of panic on social media. Still, let it find us being sane and, with any luck, half the world away. </div>
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Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-74455581797537378642016-12-14T13:25:00.004-08:002016-12-14T13:31:38.177-08:00Letter from a rigid CatholicSomeone I know shared the following text today and I think it deserves to be passed on. I admit it is written by a rigid Catholic.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "lato" , sans-serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 29.25px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "lato" , sans-serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 29.25px;">My most dear lord, king and husband,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "lato" , sans-serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 29.25px;">The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "lato" , sans-serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 29.25px;">Katharine the Quene.</span><br />
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Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8284796775651312055.post-14815864991837816422016-12-12T14:15:00.004-08:002016-12-24T00:17:43.326-08:00Prayer: the only revolt that ever remains standing<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Austen Ivereigh admitting he's a bit of a "head-the-ball"</td></tr>
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Austen Ivereigh over at Crux has written an article every line of which drips with a kind of prevenient cynicism. I utterly refuse to link to the site and create click-bait which will drive up their revenue. Still, I cannot help scratching my head at his brand of totalitarising contrariness.<br />
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In Ivereigh's account of the <i>dubia</i> crisis, those four pesky cardinals, their <i>dubia</i> and their lamentable followers have not a gnat pube's worth of sense, logic or grace on which to build their case. They are dissenters, akin to the pro-women priest lobby. They have rejected a Spirit-filled process and questioned the incontrovertible truth that whatever the Church does is what God wants; it's not just an infallible but an impeccable Church apparently.<br />
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Worse still, Ivereigh has seen their inner hearts and is disturbed by them. They are all hidebound by reason, this breed of self-regarding dolourists, who covert their own pain and then anaesthetise it with liturgy. They are also all totally forgetful of the fact that the Synod settled all these questions beyond doubt in favour of Communion for the divorced and remarried in certain circumstances. <br />
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But don't think that you can know why or how the Synod and Pope Francis did this. Asking for detail is casuistry. You cannot be told the principle to apply; you will only recognise it if you are a pastor. But in any case, it is not a principle. It is an understanding of the particularity of difficult cases that means somehow divine law can be suspended because, you know, even Jesus suspended the law, right?<br />
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<i>Roma locuta, causa finita</i>, Ivereigh says, and concludes that the train has left the station and your four pesky cardinals and every other 'dissenter' have just been left behind on the platform.<br />
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I call this prevenient cynicism because no matter what your current reservation about <i>Amoris Laetitia </i>is, Ivereigh has been there before you, considered it all and educed the reasons that falsify everything you think. It's not just that the dissenters are wrong about <i>Amoris Laetitia</i>. They are wrong about everything. Their hearts are wrong. Their heads are wrong. Their sensibilities are wrong. They have not got any points to make. And thus they are being left behind on the station platform. They have made their own fate thus.<br />
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He tries to polish this turd of an argument by making allusions to 'friends' in the middle of it - how he has friends who think like this and how he is announcing to them their uselessness as an exercise in charity. But the effect is cold and he soon leaves off to return to his goodbye theme, presumably because it captures his feelings so well. The unbearable Burke and co. are on the platform as the Church's train pulls away from the station. Good riddance to bad rubbish.<br />
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My only response to stuff like this these days is simply to counsel the quiet wisdom of the long game. Ivereigh is so keen to board this train that he has not stopped to think for a moment about the implications. All these arguments about subjective culpability and obstacles to grace cannot only apply to those in second unions. Must they not also apply to the unmarried as well, because, you know, sometimes an unbelieving partner resists marriage while their devout Catholic partner longs for the Eucharist and sexual rights in equal measure? I mean, if subjective culpability can apply to believing Catholics who are not married after a real marriage, surely <i>a fortiori</i>, they can apply to those not married before a real marriage, <i>capisce</i>? Is this not where the train is heading? And we all know the other 'hard cases' lurking behind those...<br />
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Oh, but wait a minute, now I'm using my reason and following the implications of a principle, and that is not at all how this new station-hopping choo-choo Church works, at least not in Ivereigh's telling. I must suspend my mind. If I don't understand, it is a mystery to be accepted because the Spirit is with us. If I feel I understand it and therefore take issue with it, I'm guilty of using my mind too much. So says Ivereigh anyway. Let it not be said that he can be accused of the latter sin!<br />
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But let me finish on a different note. Let's pray for Austen Ivereigh. His soul belongs to Jesus, and I'm not about to sit in judgment on it. I have my own soul to worry about.<br />
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But, by the same token, we should not underestimate this attempt to demoralise the supporters of the <i>dubia</i>. This article is only typical of a wider strategy of demoralisation that has accompanied the slow clarification of <i>Amoris Laetitia</i>. For ever since its real implications have begun to be drawn into the light, all questions and objections have been met with accusations of rigidity and pharisaism. Now, Ivereigh threatens them with irrelevance and redundancy. His counsel for future action? Resignation to the inevitable. Don't be left behind.<br />
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Personally, I feel the only resignation worth embracing is the resignation of prayer. We are in a maelstrom of chaos and nonsense, make no mistake about it. The rationality of the arguments is peeling off the Church's walls as quickly as it gets pasted up. We are surrounded by blather. We are taunted by cant.<br />
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So, what else is there to do but pray? Prayer is the resignation of the soul not to certain death but to the power of God in whatever circumstances. Prayer makes light of the doctors of abusive rhetoric. Prayer is a shield against certain despair.<br />
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I say it is resignation but that is only speaking from a divine perspective. From the human perspective it is revolt. And, as Bernanos remarks somewhere, prayer is the only revolt which can ever remain standing.Carlylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07064997659784759902noreply@blogger.com0