RIP Ralph McInerny

Professor Ralph McInerny died peacefully on Friday.  Reports from Zenit and First Things and more First Things. And Sally has comments here.  I couldn't find anything on the ND web page about his death, but I did come across some words that Dr. McInerny said at the death of Otto Bird, who founded the Program of Liberal Studies, my major:

In his autobiography, “Seeking a Center: My Life as a ‘Great Bookie,’” Bird described his personal search for truth, and how he made use of methods learned from Gilson and Adler to rediscover the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, which eventually led him to the Catholic Church. That search was, in the words of his Notre Dame colleague, Ralph McInerny, “the journey of an intellect, of a soul, that puts before the reader a vision of the intellectual life one wishes were more palpably present in Catholic colleges and universities than it is nowadays.”

from http://pls.nd.edu/about/news/


The same could be said of Dr. McInerny.

My own personal memories of Dr. McInerny at Notre Dame are all positive. I first was introduced to him at a conference when I was in high school that my grandfather, also named Ralph, took me to.  They both greeted each other with a hearty handshake, and "Hello, Ralph!" "Hello, Ralph!" I suppose if your name is Ralph you have a sense of connection to other Ralphs.  I was touched and a little surprised when Dr. McInerny recognized me on campus several seasons later and asked after Grandpa Ralph. 

My husband was a student in one of his undergraduate Aquinas classes and still refers to something he learned in that class almost every month.  He knew he was in the presence of a genius because Dr. McInerny made something so difficult so accessible. And it was Dr. McInerny who taught my husband that meeting his future wife was providential. While Dr. McInerny was describing the difference between accidental and intentional causes, he used the example of how when you go to the dining hall, you intend to eat a hamburger, but then accidentally meet your wife, the accidental cause is God. And so it was!

His autobiography, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You, is not only entertaining but enlightening, like all of his essays and books and poetry.  Our deacon gave a homily today about preaching the truth with charity, which is what Dr. McInerny always did.  A true man of letters who will be missed.

Poetry for Friday

Taking a break for the weekend. Husband deploys on Monday for 7 months.  I don't think he'll phrase his farewell quite this way, but here's one valedictory:

To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars

       by Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)

Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind

That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind,

To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,

The first foe in the field;

And with a stronger faith embrace

A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such

As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honor more.

We'll also celebrate my second grader's first sacrament of reconciliation Saturday.

Thought Provoking

An interesting article in the New Yorker on depictions of discipline, or lack thereof, in picture books. From a link from MacBeth's Opinion via a link from Castle in the Sea.

I am not an effective disciplinarian - rather like one of those wheedling, idle-threat parents described - which is why we'll miss my husband when he leaves.  He speaks, they listen.

RIP J. D. Salinger

I just heard on the radio today that J. D. Salinger, exacerbator of teenage angst, has died at age 91. Apparently he was following a diet to live until 120.  When as a teenager, I discovered Salinger, I devoured all his stories I could get my hands on.  Will I encourage my almost 13 year old to read him? Definitely not. Will I prevent him if some day he picks up Catcher in the Rye to read? Probably not.  It's a part of cultural history.  Was Salinger a genius? Probably. Has he lowered the standards of what is taught in high school English class so that teachers look for empathetic characters instead of good literature? I think you could argue that. I should probably reread something by him before saying any more, but Holden Caulfield and all his imitations irritate me as a parent. I guess I'm one of those phonies now. 

Feast Day of St. Thomas Aquinas

Almost missed to opportunity to post one of my favorite prayers.

St. Thomas Aquinas' prayer before study:

Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being,
graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding.

Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born,
an obscurity of sin and ignorance.

Give me a keen understanding,
a retentive memory,
and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.

Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations
and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm.

Point out the beginning,
direct the progress,
and help in the completion.

I ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

This version is used in the Notre Dame student prayer book, Day by Day.

Wish I knew how to make oxtail soup...
Through St. Thomas's intercession, prayers are offered for a favorite professor, Dr. Ralph McInerny, who has been ill.

Post in which I learn about southern culture.

I learned a new word yesterday: a friend was telling me how she catechized a Protestant friend by saying that “The Catholic Church is the Christian Church with a little lagniappe” – a little something extra.

Keeping with the theme of integrating into the south, I made my first pot of gumbo yesterday. I know it’s not authentic because I started with roux from a jar and put the rice in the pot, not on the side. I did this because I don’t like to wash extra dishes and because the Cajun sausage I used was so darn hot I needed to down a beer to douse the flames and the rice to soak up the heat. Maybe I should have tasted the soup before I added some Slap Your Mama and hot sauce. Tiana never would have done that. But my husband loved it even if none of the kids did!

At the movies

For $13 we can take our entire family of 8 and Grandma to the movies on the base. This weekend’s fare was The Princess and the Frog, and since we had infected our grandpa with a stomach bug, we gave him some peace and quiet by going to the show.

I’m not a real connoisseur of animation, but I appreciated that this was not the 3-D computer animation that has become de rigueur over the past few years. On the other hand, it was pretty standard Disney fare of “wish hard enough and your dreams will come true.” Initially, the main character, Tiana, sings about the idea that hard work was the route to making her dream of owning a restaurant come true, but she still needed to wish on a star for a lucky break and a prince to make her restaurant a reality.

And maybe in a sense, that’s the way things are: you really do need a lucky break, or a friend in the know, to achieve the fantastic. I don’t mean this in a cynical way – that lucky break is really providence at work. And I really don’t expect Disney to make a movie about the mystery of God’s hand in our lives. But it means that I have to give my daughter, who said something about wishing hard enough on Sunday, a spiel about how we should pray instead of wish for the things we want, and not to expect to marry princes, even though I did.


I think I enjoyed the movie a little more after our visit to New Orleans, although the movie stereotypes the bayou folk and glorifies the city. And the villain thoroughly frightened my kids away from voodoo fortune tellers, even ones like the potbellied guy in a t-shirt and jeans who had set up his card table in front of St. Louis with the other gauze and velvet draped fortune tellers. They had preprinted signs advertising tarot and palm readings; he had torn cardboard on which was written with sharpie marker: “Fortunes. Professional. All true.”

On Reading Say You're One of Them

I feel like a wrung out dish cloth. Just finished reading Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, short stories about children caught in the middle of religious and ethnic violence. Reading it is harrowing, but I couldn’t put it down. Each story recounts a horror some child tries to escape: there is the on-the-edge of starvation Jigana, who lives on glue in a box with his family of 7. He rejects a chance to go to school because his sister leaves home to become a prostitute. Jigana is wounded more by her departure than by her choice of work. Then there are the two siblings Kotchikpa and Yewa, who are going to be sold into slavery by their uncle. Their innocence and trust prevents them from understanding what is happening to them until their uncle has a change of heart and tries to save them, only to be beaten to death himself. Kotchikpa recognizes the desperateness of their situation before Yewa, who is deceived by her need for affection and food. In her gluttony she doesn’t recognize the deceptiveness of the adults who feed her and give her attention.

The little girl in “What Language Is That?” does not suffer so much that we see, but she must give up her beloved Best Friend because one is Christian and one is Muslim. Her parents offer her a new remote as they pack up to leave, the little girl still somewhat unaware of her pending loss. One wonders if her last communication with her friend will sustain an attitude of conciliation with people of different faith, but that surmise is lessened throughout “Luxurious Hearses” in which a young Muslim teenager, Jubril, attempts to flee his Muslim friends and relations in the northern part of Khamfi to get to the southern part because he has become a target of violence. Sharia has been enacted, and he is being hunted down because his father was a Christian who had him baptized as an infant. Trapped on the bus with Christian and pagan people trying to get to their southern families, Jubril attempts to pass as a Christian and begins to question his Islamic practice because of his contact with these people of different faith. Small arguments break out as the bus riders wait for petrol and the bus driver, but each ends relatively peacefully. But as the bus riders watch the violence on the TVs, both in the north and the south, they start to forget their undeclared truces with each other. And when they finally discover that Jubril is really a Muslim, because he lost his hand for stealing, they forget that they had supported him in an earlier tiff on the bus, and act out with the same violence they saw on TV.

The final story, “My Parents’ Bedroom” is about Monique and her brother Jean, who have the advantage of parents who have been to college and who love each other and their families, even though one is Hutu and the other is Tsutsi. But when their community goes insane with ethnic violence, Monique’s mother sacrifices herself to save some of her doomed people who are hiding in her ceiling. It is hard to imagine that Monique can recover from what she sees, but her life is spared for the time being.

Having read Left to Tell a few years ago about Immaculee Ilibagiza’s escape from Rwanda and her subsequent forgiveness of her enemies, I could believe in the eventual rebuilding of these children's lives, even though the inhumanity of the violence is almost unbelievable. There is something redemptive in the telling of these stories: These children, even in their innocence, learn to recognize injustice, but they also see the humanity of their enemies. In Monique’s case she must watch her beloved father betray his family, under great duress. Although the violence is unfathomable, it is committed by human beings who have been given a face through these stories.  And while at first I wondered how a priest (Akpan wrote some of these stories while in the seminary) could write stories with such gut-wrenching violence, soon I was won over by the empathy with which he presents these weak human beings, both the adults and the children.  He writes with no sentimentality, no pretty resolutions, no sensationalism, but a clear-eyed, unsanitized view of the mysteries of violence and survival. 

A song by Angelique Kidjo inspired by the book is available here.

Southern Styles

In college, my husband studied architecture in a prestigious classical program. He passed on some of his knowledge to me, so now I know a little of the vocabulary of architecture. On one of my running routes, I pass a number of new construction projects. Here is what they say to me:

"Welcome to my Marriott."

"Welcome to Southern Living."

"Welcome to the Brady Bunch."

.

Okay, this isn't new construction. This is what we rented. Its modern lines spoke to us of easy clean-up and the right price. So we sacrificed on looks.

Visiting New Orleans

I’d like to say we did something Monday to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. And in a way, perhaps we did: we visited New Orleans for the first time, site of a once flourishing slave trade, but also of prosperous free people of color - gens de couleur libres they said in Louisiana. We actually didn’t visit any relevant sites, but we did see the baptistery where slave and free were all baptized since the mid 1700’s at the old Basilica of St. Louis. I wonder if babies baptized in such an old font have a special connection to the communion of saints?

We went as a day trip, a short drive under 2 hours, but we felt like we were stepping onto another continent as we drove down the streets of the French Quarter before pulling into a cramped parking garage that seemed identical to one where we parked in Spain two years ago. A stark contrast to the drive through the desert of urban blight on the eastern outskirts of the city. Remnants of Katrina’s destruction still linger.


I suppose everyone who has been to the city has been transported in a similar way. The narrow streets, the tiles on the walls, the wrought iron balconies and columns on the buildings all make you feel you’ve crossed the Atlantic. We peeked into an old hotel that had once been a convent, the doorman telling us to check out the ballroom. The kids tramped up the curving staircase in their jeans and tennis shoes, but surely weren’t we all in our finest under the crystal chandeliers? Peeking out the shuttered balcony, we could see across the street evidence that this wasn’t all maintained as a tourist destination. Someone actually lived in those garrets…not Sara Crewe, but someone with raggedy curtains and a window air conditioner. Had to be hot, even malarial, in the summer.

Gearing up for Mardi Gras

After consuming beignets and café au lait, we spent the morning walking up and down the streets. Watched the fortune tellers set up in front of the basilica, peeked in shops, hunted out the little building that now houses Faulkner House Books, which about hundred years ago, once housed William Faulkner and a friend while Faulkner wrote his first book, Soldiers’ Pay. It’s a narrow little building, and you can only enter the front room and part of a hallway, which are now lined floor to ceiling with book cases. The hallway houses faded first editions of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren. Look but don’t touch. Even though the space was tiny, hours could easily have been whiled away browsing.

Faulkner House Books

            With the fortune tellers in front of St. Louis

Same thing with the many antique stores. We stopped to stare in one that had elephant leg stools, and noticed a beautiful wooden pieta, paint flecking off, on a pedestal surrounded by other statuary. I went inside to peek at the tag to see how old and how much: 1550s, $95,000.

I wonder who will buy that. A church? A collector? Someone who just wants something pretty in their house? What cost beauty?

Too often I’m too cheap to buy pretty things. A house with 6 kids is not a place for 500 year old statues, even if I had a spare hundred thousand. But I wonder if I lived somewhere like the French Quarter, a place that begged for décor, if I’d spend more time and money trying to make my home as pretty on the inside as it is on the outside. Interior decorating is not one of my talents, but every once in a while I see something that would look nice in our house. I’m not one to buy something that we don’t need, except books - and ice cream – but I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t be more generous with beauty. I’m grateful when someone else was, in these churches and parks and buildings of New Orleans.

Basilica of St. Louis

Ambiguity about Ondaatje

Sigh. I just finished Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Spent Saturday recovering from the flu while reading in bed. Didn’t want the dream to end. Beautiful, beautiful, but sad, sad. There’s a part of me that thinks I shouldn’t like this book after the movie, also beautiful, but bitter, left a bad taste in my mouth. In the movie, WWII nurse Hana runs off with Indian bomb defuser Kip on a motorcycle after shooting the burn victim, the apparently English patient, a man whom she loved, full of morphine, so that he’ll die. The book ends differently – should I tell? – after the dropping of the atomic bomb destroys Kip’s belief in what he is doing and breaks up the coterie in the abandoned villa.

Aside from the act of euthanasia at the end of the movie, I wouldn’t recommend the movie because it’s nearly soft-core porn. Yet here I am unable to take my nose out of this book with naked people kissing on the cover because it is so beautifully written. I felt like I had to hide it from my preteens. Can I excuse my love of this book by citing the difference between reading something and seeing it? A visual image imprints itself differently on the brain - it stays with you longer than one you read and affects your emotions more strongly. Based on this, I let my kids read The Lord of the Rings before letting them see it. Similarly, I felt more moved after seeing the devastation here after Katrina – or in Haiti- than after reading about it. So I read about the intimacies described in this book without feeling as voyeuristic as when watching the movie, but the circumspect, poetic way Ondaatje writes also differentiates the book from the openness of the camera.


Is there something redemptive in the meeting of the four damaged persons at the Villa San Girolamo that comes across in the book but not in the film? I like to think the redemption has to do with Mr. Cairns comments in the comments section below about recovering the body. But it seems what these victims of the war are suffering is the opposite of Gnosticism. They have to recover a sense of the body’s connection to the soul, not because the soul is more perfect, but because they’ve lost their souls. Whether they are seeking the identity of the patient, their own identities after being dismembered, or an ability to reconnect with human beings after turning themselves into statues to survive the devastation of the war, it appears they need to connect physically, not just with their minds, but with their hands and bodies, in order to heal: “Here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defense but to look for the truth in others.”

Could you say that, even though the story weaves around tales of love and death, adultery and betrayal, the characters treat each other with a certain chastity – Caravaggio never fully reaches out to Hana, Hana barely touches the patient, Kip never really gives himself to Hana, but preserves a distance, never really looking into her eyes? I can’t make up my mind whether the book has a resolution or not. And the beauty of the place stands in such stark contrast to the horrors of the war and the doomed love affairs.

Yesterday we went to New Orleans and visited the World War II museum, and again came face to face with the horrors of war. How did the men who survived Normandy, or the War in the Pacific, come home and rebuild their lives after such devastation? It was a hard museum to visit, especially when you knew that downstairs was an old man, a volunteer helping fill out membership applications, who had lived these stories and now watched people meandering through the exhibits, looking at photos without knowing that dead soldier in the picture.

Whimsy

My three year old has a favorite subject for her photos:

Should I be concerned?

Higglety Pigglety Pop, Or, There Must Be More to Life

is a little chapter book by Maurice Sendak that I started reading to the three year old but finished on my own. I was sitting in traffic court with all the other lawbreakers trying to get out of paying their fines when I started reading it in a whisper to the little miss, but I quit when I got frustrated with Sendak’s story of a dog who runs away, even though she has everything, “because there must be something more.” Little miss wasn’t following the story anyway, but watching people make explanations of why they were driving without a license or insurance, so I finished the tale to myself.



The dog, Jennie, eats the flower that tries to convince her to stay. Her journey is entirely led by her appetite: first to a theatre, then a milk truck, then a castle, where she becomes a nurse to a bad baby who won’t eat. She herself is almost eaten by the baby’s lion, until a couple characters she had met before show up to tell her she has enough experience to join the theater. Whereupon she becomes the leading lady, writes a letter of explanation to her prior owner, and lives happily ever after.

Sendak is good at making outlandish events seem ordinary, the text is clever, and the chiaroscuro black and white illustrations add to the dreamlike quality, but this story of romantic escapism seemed to come right out of the lecture notes a friend sent me for his “last lecture,” in which he critiques the romantic belief that happiness is found out there somewhere. I keep seeing this theme everywhere, most prevalently in my own daydreams. Is Sendak feeding a belief that an ordinary life is dull and meaningless, but if you follow your appetites, you might find an exciting life out there somewhere? Whereas naughty Max in Where the Wild Things Are returns home to find his hot dinner, Jennie completely rejects domestic life. (A counterpoint we also read: The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats where Peter finds wonderful snow adventures right outside his window.)

My friend made the point that while everyone longs for happiness and wholeness, for intense emotions, the Romantic believes he must escape his current condition to find them, leave behind the fetters of ordinariness, while the Christian believes they will only be found in union with God. So desiring to escape for the Christian should be a desire for freedom from his condition of selfishness, not from domesticity. The journey is more interior, and intimations of this union are found in the beauty of the ordinary things all around him.

But it is all too easy to imagine “if only” situations, even in the desire to make New Year’s resolutions: If only I do these things, my life will be happier. After the highs of holiday travels, I spent a few doldrum days daydreaming about what our life would’ve been like if, six years ago, my husband had taken a job with one of his architecture professors who is designing beautiful churches, instead of staying in the military. We wouldn’t be making 12 hour trips for Christmas visits. My own romantic fantasy: we’d live in one spot, in a cute little bungalow with a cottage garden, or in a house with enough acreage for goats and chickens (hmm, this is really an alternative domestic fantasy). We might travel to construction sites or take research trips to Europe, but I wouldn’t have to keep starting over, making new friends, sorting through pictures to hang, finding a new parish, a new place to fit in. My husband wouldn’t be leaving for a war zone or earning frequent flier miles on trips to international meetings.


But he wouldn’t be as happy, either, I think, drafting someone else’s designs. Or maybe he would’ve been just as happy doing that, but he is also happy doing what he’s doing now with the Seabees. (Which isn't just warfare construction: he just sent a detachment to Haiti.) And I probably would find plenty wrong with that little bungalow, would want to escape the community I was in, would still complain about messes and having no time. My small discontentments would find other sources.


The January Magnificat editorial by Peter John Cameron, OP, addresses this:

“One of the biggest temptations of daily life is to think that our circumstances are against us. We presume that the reason why we are not happy is because we have been saddled with circumstances that make happiness impossible – circumstances that conspire against us. But then how can Saint Paul say, “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10)?”

Fr. Cameron answers this with this quote from Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ,

“What God arranges for us to experience at each moment is the best and holiest thing that could happen to us. . . . You are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one: Making use of whatever he offers you. Everything leads you to this union with him.”

So I guess I should have resolved to look for God’s presence where I am, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, to surrender to circumstances and let go of impossible,delusional daydreams, and instead admire what we have and make use of it to find God where we are.

Is this really the first book I finished this year?

On Jewel by Bret Lott – Picked this one up as part of my Regional Reading plan. I had heard of it before as an Oprah Pick, but wrote it off, I think because I had it linked in my mind with the story about the girl who gives birth in the Walmart parking lot that I couldn’t finish (Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts). Lotts' writing is definitely better than Letts'. He gives his characters enough of a southern drawl to locate them, without letting the dialect take over.

Half of Jewel takes place not too far from where we live in Mississippi, and the other half takes place in LA, which seared itself into my memory when we lived in Port Hueneme. But Jewel doesn’t quite fit with my conception of Southern Lit. It’s not sassy chick lit, but because it focuses on the raising of a girl with Downs’ Syndrome, it’s too much of an issue oriented book to fit my concept of a true Southern Lit book – it’s not about a family struggling in the south, but escaping it.

So while I enjoyed the book, I didn’t love it. I found it hard to believe that this backwoods family could move so easily to California, find a house and jobs, get their child into the too perfect Foundation for Exceptional Children, and make it. That the daughter, Brenda Kay, who was to be put in an institution until she died at 2, lives to her 40’s and learns seems a little more believable, and Jewel’s dedication to helping her rise above those expectations is admirable. That Jewel’s five other children grow up and don’t resent her devotion to her sixth child also seemed a stretch.

But perhaps the hardest to believe, and perhaps what I appreciated most, was that the marriage between Jewel and Leston survives Jewel’s single minded pursuit of what is best for her daughter. She sacrifices her relationships with her other children and with her husband to force the family out to California. She watches Leston give in to humiliation after humiliation without ever seeming to give him a lift. And when he finally asserts his will that they return to Mississippi, she goes only because “Wife” is her identity, as she realizes one day, looking at the name tags other people are wearing and her simple clothing. She balks and tries to undermine his joy at their return to MS, even prays that he "will have died enough" to see what is best for their family.

"I never knew when or how I fell asleep, only knew that when I awoke each morning I sat straight up in bed, my nightgown soaked with sweat, and shot my eyes round the room in an effort to remember where I was, and who this man in bed next to me was, and that word Wife still circled me, swirled round me like a fearless ghost in the pale, wet light of dawn on a bayou, outside the open window behind me the lonesome, measured drone of a woodpecker in a cypress, this next day in Mississippi already begun."

Finally, when she begins to accept the way things are after a few months, Leston himself admits he wants to return to California, so they move back, not far from where their other grown children are living. (It is telling that the author grew up in California, although his parents were from Mississippi; in the book it is a place of mosquitoes, cottonmouths, and racists.)

Their marriage survives these blows, but in the end Jewel seems to suffer more about the decision to put Brenda Kay into a home than she mourned Leston’s death. I found myself rooting for Leston who finds himself pushed and pulled by his wife and surroundings but never breaks down or runs off or even seems to waiver in his love for his domineering wife.

Even though she was a southern Baptist, Jewel surely would've been happy to see these sisters with Downs', via Pentimento from Laodicea.

Self-consciousness at Mass

“Can I ask you something personal?” my friend from daily Mass leaned up to ask this morning. I thought she was going to ask a question about NFP, even though she’s well past the age of needing to use it. But what she asked was whether I received the Eucharist on the hand or by mouth. A tougher question.

“Usually by hand” I replied.


So she asked me to read a small, worn booklet detailing why receiving by hand is disrespectful. Allowing it was originally a concession to disobedience. A quote from Mother Teresa about the decline in reverence in the church was repeated multiple times, as was an anecdote about how if you go to the Vatican, you have to kneel to receive and you receive on the tongue. Probably the most effective argument was about how the priest has consecrated hands while our hands are not.


I read most of the booklet right there because we had a few minutes before the start of Mass. But half my attention was given over to what I was going to say when I handed it back.


“Well that’s a lot to think about. He makes some good points,” is what I came up with. Then I told the story of how once a priest, a wonderful Cistercian, dropped the Host when he was putting it in my mouth. It was excrutiatingly embarrassing. The priest, gasping, stopped me from picking it up so that he could consume it himself. That was not so bad, but what pained me was the announcement at the end of Mass about opening your mouth up and sticking your tongue out so that this doesn’t happen again. I was sure every eye was accusing me of carelessness with the Body of Christ.

So I have gone back and forth with how I receive. If I’m holding a baby I receive on the tongue. Ditto if the parish we’re attending has altar servers holding patens. But our current one doesn’t. Some priests and ministers seem dainty about placing the Eucharist on the tongue, so I’m always afraid it is going to fall again.

Since my parents are converts, I didn’t even know about receiving on the tongue until probably college – or maybe senior year of high school when I went to daily Mass once a week with my dad as a part of a Lenten promise. At the time, we went to a typical suburban parish: lots of families, not a lot of super Catholics. It took awhile for the riches of the faith to be uncovered, but they were there and there were people wanting to share them.  Eventually, I met a few people who received on the tongue and read a few things and began to receive that way for a while before that scarring event.


So during the Eucharistic procession, in front of my friend, I went forward feeling very self-conscious. And since I was receiving from an extraordinary minister, I went ahead and received in my hands.

But I do feel unsettled. The book’s tone suggested it was motivated by scrupulosity. I couldn’t find anything specific in the Catechism about hands vs. tongue. In the early Church it was the practice to receive in the hand and St. Cyril of Jerusalem is often quoted about making a throne with your hands, which is what I taught my kids. I wonder if Christ would balk at being touched by hands (also a remnant of our first parish and of years in Protestant Sunday School: my images of Jesus came out of 70’s theology.) At our former parish, the priest once instructed the congregation on when to kneel and stand and bow because too many parishioners were doing things differently, but he did not dictate whether to receive on the tongue or in the mouth. (see pertinent quotes below)


My reaction was similar when I read Dressing with Dignity a couple years ago. After I read it, I went out and bought a few skirts at the thrift store. Even though I had never felt wholly convinced that wearing pants was leading men to sinful thoughts, I did recognize that wearing skirts made me feel more feminine and like I needed to be on my best behavior. But I couldn’t get down and play with my kids or chase them around the park easily. And I resented that the lady who wrote it lived in Texas and didn’t have to wear tights all the time. A friend liberated me from fastidiousness about how to dress by linking how we dress to whether we are called to be more contemplative or active in our lives. Some of us live a more cloistered life; others of us live more in the world and evangelize by our actions and appearance.


Which leads me back to reception of the Eucharist. Like the little book pointed out, we are an example to others when we receive Communion. Either manner we receive should be marked by reverence.



A few good quotes:
From the Bishops:

The liturgical assembly of the baptized that comes together for the celebration of the Eucharist is a witness to, a manifestation of, the pilgrim Church. When we move in procession, particularly the procession to receive the body and blood of Christ in Communion, we are a sign, a symbol of that pilgrim Church 'on the way.' For some, however, the experience of the Communion Procession is far more prosaic, analogous perhaps to standing on line in the supermarket or at the motor vehicle bureau. A perception such as this is a dreadfully inaccurate and impoverished understanding of what is a significant religious action …



Over and over again the prayers of the liturgy and the norms of the General Instruction emphasize this fundamental concept of the unity of the baptized, stressing that when we come together to participate in the Eucharistic celebration we come, not as individuals, but as united members of Christ's body. In each of the Eucharistic Prayers, though the petition is worded in slightly different ways, God is asked to send his Holy Spirit to make us one body, one spirit in Christ; the General Instruction admonishes the faithful that they should become one body, whether by hearing the word of God, or joining in prayers and singing ...(GIRM, no. 96) it describes one of the purposes of the opening song of the Mass as to ... intensify the unity of those who have been gathered and says of the Communion Chant that its function is to express outwardly the communicants’ union in spirit by means of the unity of their voices, ... and to highlight the communitarian nature of the procession to receive Communion. …


It is difficult for some of us to embrace this emphasis on Mass as the action of a community rather than an individual act of my own faith and piety, but it is important that we make every effort to do so. Christ himself at the Last Supper pleaded with his Father: Holy Father, keep those you have given me true to your name, so that they may be one like us ... Father may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you ... Jn. 17: 11; 21. Baptism has joined us to Christ and to one another as the vine and its branches. The life of Christ, the Holy Spirit, animates each of us individually, and all of us corporately and guides us together in our efforts to become one in Christ.


http://www.usccb.org/liturgy/girm/bul5.shtml

Excerpt from Pastoral Answers

by Msgr. M. Francis Mannion


Communion in the Hand


Question: I know the practice is optional, but where did Communion in the hand come from? Don’t you think it encourages disrespect?


Answer: Communion in the hand was the norm for most of the first millennium. Because of the dangers of misuse and the growing concern for reverence, the practice of giving the Host on the tongue was introduced about the ninth century.


The present practice of giving communion in the hand dates from 1969, when Pope Paul VI opened the way for episcopal conferences who wished to reintroduce the practice. Permission was granted to the U.S. bishops in 1977.


In my opinion, there is nothing intrinsically more reverent about reception on the tongue or less reverent about receiving in the hand. Reverence or irreverence are generally determined by other factors: the spiritual attitude of the recipient, the demeanor of the one giving communion, the adequacy of eucharistic understanding, and the manner in which the eucharistic elements are treated both within and outside Mass.


St. Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century offered a powerful catechesis on the mode of receiving communion in the hand that is still applicable today: "When you approach, do not go stretching out your open hands or having your fingers spread out, but make the left hand into a throne for the right which shall receive the King, and then cup your open hand and the Body of Christ, reciting the ‘Amen.’ Then sanctify with all care your eyes by touching the Sacred Body, and receive it. But be careful that no particles fall, for what you lose would be to you as if you had lost some of your members. Tell me, if anybody had given you gold dust, would you not hold fast to it with all care, and watch lest some of it fall and be lost to you? Must you not then be even more careful with that which is more precious than gold and diamonds, so that no particles are lost?"


http://www.osv.com/OSV4MeNav/Sacraments/TheEucharist/EucharisticQandA/tabid/498/Default.aspx

Fom the Catechism:

1378 Worship of the Eucharist. In the liturgy of the Mass we express our faith in the real presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine by, among other ways, genuflecting or bowing deeply as a sign of adoration of the Lord. "The Catholic Church has always offered and still offers to the sacrament of the Eucharist the cult of adoration, not only during Mass, but also outside of it, reserving the consecrated hosts with the utmost care, exposing them to the solemn veneration of the faithful, and carrying them in procession."208


http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c1a3.htm

Winter comes to the South

“I wonder why someone has lined rocks up along the edge of the bay?” I thought when I saw the white line along the low water line. On closer inspection I realized it was ice forming a break line on the shore.

Every conversation and local radio broadcast from the past few days has begun with a discussion of the cold weather. Our landlord called to ask us to wrap the hose spigots in towels and plastic bags. The kids didn’t go outside for recess all week. The stores have had a run on hats and gloves.

Having spent the first 20 some years of my life north of the Mason-Dixon line, I want to scoff at all these soft southerners who are getting so worked up about temps in the teens and twenties. During the day the highs are in the 40s, so the freeze isn’t even sustained through the day. This is nothing, I want to say. As a teenager in the Midwest, I would go out for runs and come home with my nostrils frozen and my scarf stiff and crunchy with frozen condensation. When we lived north of Chicago, I kept an extra supply of hats, gloves and scarves, a blanket, and a foldaway snow shovel in the back of the car just in case we got caught somewhere. I regularly wore two pairs of socks. We kept a basket of boots by the back door, so the kids could go out and skate on the puddle that froze over the low spot in the back yard.

I want to tease these Southerners who have wrapped their palm trees and tropical plants in sheets and tarps and Saranwrap. But gosh darnit, I’m too cold.

Quick Take Resolutions

After spending a week conducting various informal polls and researching ideas on the internet, I hereby resolve:



1. To be a better person (ha.)


2. To handwrite a letter per week to my husband after he deploys next month. 7 months x 4 = 28 letters. We already bought a new netbook so we could skype and a new camera so we both could take photos. Then I splurged on some nice Uniball pens. Now I just need to stockpile some stationary.


3. To lose 5 lbs by giving up sugar (after I finish a last bag of holiday M&M's. Since I already run nearly daily and eat mostly healthy foods, I figure totally eradicating the midafternoon chocolate fix is the only way to lose weight. That goes before the evening glass of wine. I suppose I could also try to give up the breakfast cereal and cut back on dinnertime pasta, but my spirit is too weak. Either the choc or the carbs, not both.)


4. To get up 30 -45 mins earlier to read Magnificat and do morning pages.

              4b. To accomplish #4, go to bed 30-45 mins earlier.


5. To limit internet time to 2 hrs, unless working on a project (such as taxes, bleh…)

              5b. To accomplish #5, write a blog post, if I’m going to, before I read a bunch of blog posts.


6. To make something pretty. And/or useful. And to get rid of any clutter that is neither pretty nor useful. Ditto on clothes. Goodbye, ill fitting clothing.


7. To work on that book list – I meant to add Bleak House after reading recommendations here and here and somewhere else that I can't find now. And for spiritual reading: Spes Salvi. I have a plan to pick at least one Brit lit novel, one American, one spiritual classic, one nonfiction work, one book of poetry, one book in translation, one Greek/Roman classic, at least one new chapter book my kids are reading, one short story (Nabokov's "Cloud, Castle, Lake" for Reading for Believers) and one fun book. And then fill in with recommendations or what grabs my fancy.


Last year my resolutions were

1. To fear less, regret less, enjoy more. Um, pretty much a silly resolution that I made little if any progress on.

2. To be more willing to accept help. I actually did better with this one. Same with

3. To capture memories in writing. Thanks, blog. But I did not do so well with

4. Reading aloud more to the kids. Mixed results were had with

5. To be more conscientious about shopping. Moving caused me to shop frequently at Walmart, but I tried not to shop for Christmas there. And because we now pay tuition, I don’t buy as many organics, but I am buying more fruits and vegetables for their lunches. Another resolution I failed at was

6. To pray more openly – listening instead of asking. But I did better with

7. To get organized. Moving into a bigger house with built in book shelves, office files, and cupboard after cupboard with tall, deep shelves or pull out shelves and plenty of drawers helped with that resolution, as did the major purge before the move.

Books of '09

This is Miss Kitty Jenkyn, daughter of Thomas Hart, who took her godfather's last name, Reading, when he died, before she married Charles Packe. So the informal name of this portrait by William Beechey is "Miss Reading,"  a cute double entendre. Painted around 1820, the formally titled "Portrait of Kitty Packe (nee Hart)"  is not in my Women Reading calendar, which I want to keep pristine so I can tack every month up in my office when the year is out, but was a find at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. The gift shop didn't have a postcard of this piece.

I’m a little late to the party, but I intended to make a list of my favorite books of 2009 some time ago. In the midst of all the Christmas celebrating, I just couldn’t remember what I have read this year, which is part of the reason I started this blog. I’ve been a book consumer instead of a book digester for the past few years, although when I was thinking about it, I realized I remember more books that I read in 2008 than in 2009. 2008 was the year of Brit Lit with my homeschool group: I returned to Beowulf, the Everyman play, Canterbury Tales, MacBeth, Robinson Crusoe, Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth, and David Copperfield with new appreciation. (Although my opinion remains that Robinson Crusoe is dull. All those details about how he made his house and bread don’t interest me.) At the beginning of 09, we read Pride and Prejudice, no comments needed, and we ended the class with Murder in the Cathedral, which, while it tied together British history, really didn’t bind me in interest.

Last year was also the year I discovered Tim Farrington’s Lizzie’s War and Alan Bennett’s An Uncommon Reader, and George Weigel’s Letters to a Young Catholic. Nancy Mitford’s Love in A Cold Climate stands out too. Maybe because of our move or because of blogging, I don’t think I read as much or as well (which is not part of the reason I started blogging.)

Anyway, here are a few of the books I can remember:

• Favorite Novel I hadn’t read before: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty. Evocative.

• Favorite Novel I had read before: Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Haunting.

• Favorite Fun Novel: The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Gripping. 

• Favorite Religious book: I was involved in Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain for a long time. But I was surprised and delighted by Caryll Houselander’s The Reed of God, which was the May pick for my dearly loved and sorely missed Catholic book club back in Virginia. When the group decided to read yet another Mary book for May, I was initially disappointed, but after a few pages of Houselander’s book, I was entranced.

• Favorite Nonfiction book: I picked up a lot of books on writing and reading this year at the library because I considered trying to teaching an entry level class at the local community college. (I applied, had an interview, and was offered a night class at the campus half an hour away. Too inconvenient with my husband frequently travelling and my kids frequently having activities.) But while I enjoyed all these books about books and the process of writing books, I really preferred Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything – a run through scientific history. Accessible but challenging.

• Saddest Endings: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene.

• Most disappointing novel: Elinor Lipman’s Then She Found Me. Boring.

• Favorite Children’s Book: Elizabeth Goudge’s Linnets and Valerians. Enchanting.

Books I want to read in 2010:

• Still working on reading Mississippi/Southern writers: On my table are Faulkner’s As I lay Dying and Go Down, Moses, the later of which I haven’t read before. Also before or after we go to New Orleans, I want to reread Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.

• A friend gave me Ian McEwan’s Atonement before we moved, and I’ve been waiting to try to forget the movie before I read it, but it is a hard movie to forget…

• My son just finished To Kill A Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies before I could get around to rereading them, so they're under my table.

• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith has been recommended enough times that it has come to my attention. I also have never read anything by J.M Coetzee.

• I borrowed Edmund Campion by Evelyn Waugh from my mom a long time ago, and still need to read that. I also plucked Alice McDermott’s The Bigamist’s Daughter from her shelves. I have mixed emotions about McDermott: Loved Charming Billy and After This but was disappointed by Child of My Heart.

• For spiritual reading, I’ve meant to pick up Kathleen Norris’ Acedia and I have had Peter Kreeft’s Prayer for Beginners for a long time.

• Wendell Berry has out a new book of poetry, Leavings, and a book about food with Michael Pollan, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, and Whitefoot, an illustrated book about a mouse.

• Some authors I've been intending to get around to: David Lodge, Kingsley Amis, Mary Doria Russell, Julian Green, Jose Maria Gironella

Hmm, the list keeps getting longer. I'm usually not very disciplined about following a reading plan, except when I'm in a book club, but just look to see whom I recognize at the library.  Maybe I should make being more ordered in my reading a New Year's Resolution, when I get around to that . . .

An honor

A big thank you to Anne from Imprisoned in my Bones for reading my blog and enjoying it enough to pass on this award that recognizes bloggers who encourage and inspire you to live your faith. Although like many other bloggers, I sometimes wonder if I should spend as much time online as I do, I also find that often that time is well spent when it leads me to a prayer, a reminder of a feast day, a suggestion for living the faith, an opportunity for reflecting on my faith life.

So in that spirit I'm going to pass on the award to a few whose pages have encouraged me:

Maria at Two Ways of Renouncing the Devil just announced she is taking a break for awhile, but I've enjoyed getting to know her and hope she'll be back with more thought provoking reflections.

Gretchen Joanna's blog Gladsome Lights has needed reminders of things to be thankful for, and right now she has some good book lists up.

Lots of ideas at As Cozy As Spring.

Jamie at Light and Momentary writes with humor and intellect.

Of course, a hattip to my reallife sister, Betty Duffy, who is way cooler than me, who has a gift for recreating moments of metanoia without sounding preachy, and who forces me to grow in holiness by bringing my shortcomings into focus - another helpmeet on the way to heaven.

And finally, I love the community I've found with my Reading for Believers friends.

Vacation Snapshots

We've returned from the hinterlands. As we pulled out of my parents' icy drive, the thermometer in the car read 12 degrees; as we crossed the bay bridge 12 hours later, it read 45.  Welcome home. Despite the warmer weather, I still had to snuggle deeply under the covers of our own wonderful bed before I felt warm, maybe because I had left the thermostat in the house at 55.  No matter how much I love visiting family, it is always comforting to sleep in my own bed.

Some snapshots of some of our favorite Christmas gifts:

Snow in Oklahoma - a record breaking 14 inches.

Learning to ice skate

Entering the OKC art museum, warm and bright, after skating

Enough snow to sled in Indiana

Watching a calf's birth

Puppies and cousins

Other favorite gifts: safe, uneventful travels, reading Scott Cairns' Recovered Body (poetry as good as Eighth Day Books claims) and Debra Dean's Madonnas of Leningrad (a woman with Alzheimer's recalls the WWII siege of Leningrad when she and others hid in the cellar of the Hermitage. There she walks from room to room to build a memory palace of all the works of art that have been removed to a safer location. A beautifully written, pleasant read, but slight, more of a novella), and unhurried time with family.