LookingLand

got a last-minute ticket to the Vatican Splendors exhibit last night. considering that at this rate i will never get to the real Vatican, this was a nice chance to see some very cool pieces, including a few that have never been exhibited before. it was especially nice to see pieces from the collection that belonged to Pope John Paul II (his pastoral staff was especially wonderful).



votive plaque from the tomb of Saint Peter
i love museums and looking at old crap (right?). i was also excited to see numerous items from the pontificate of Blessed Pius IX, who was Pope during much of the Victorian era (1846-78) and the longest reigning pope (John Paul II comes in a close second). also, there were some delicious hand-written books and wonderful bits and pieces from all over the world. all in all a good deal of feasting for the eyeballs was had.

not feeling terribly creative otherwise. i have to work on my brother's gallery now. gotta get that done.

happy wednesday all!

: D

the weekend is almost here, but that's no relief to my ears since i will be buried in homework during the whole of it. i am trying to visit lj at least once a day and make an update if on nothing else, the reading that i am doing (which may be totally blah to most of you).

i am reading the second book in the Baroque Cycle, King of the Vagabonds and it's not going well 60 pages in. if anyone plans to read it eventually, you might want to just skip these posts because my opinions are hugely subjective and i think you ought to experience it for yourself. also, i'll be posting spoilers upon spoilers.

anyway, so in the second book, stephenson has done 187 annoying writerly things and the only reason i am pressing onward is the hope that eventually we will come back to daniel waterhouse and things might improve. to enumerate the crimes:

1. invented a country from which Eliza comes ~ how convenient now, she doesn't have to conform to any particular mores of 17th century europe and can be just as "modern" as he pleases. yuck. and she's beautiful and clever ~ smarter at Jack's game then he is ~ total dullsville.

2. introduced technical language into the 17th century sphere in a bid to be ~ oh, i don't really know what. i mean, i guess i can see that it's intentional (and that this will later tie in to the whole "systems of the world" thing, but it's annoying when we're been so nicely ensconced in the past until now.

3. Jack and Eliza have now conversed for about 40 pages about their pasts. boring boring awful. not only are both characters these ridiculously rich storytellers (they're all sounding like stephenson now), but he finds the most ridiculous interruptions to cliff-hang their tales. Jack will suddenly say: oh, i don't want to hear anymore ~ just at the most interesting part. oh brother! it literally feels like stephenson was making stuff up as he went along (a lot of it is also repetitious), then he would get tired and stop. and no one ever bothered to edit any of it.

honestly, were it not for my prurient interest in 17th century plagues and disasters, i doubt i would still be reading. i will say, however, that stephsenson as a storyteller is still generally pretty good and i think most people would really love this and love getting away from the political and scientific blithering of the Royal Society which preceded it for 300 pages. it's active and campy and even though they are endlessly talking and walking, it moves well enough. it's just everything i hate about an adventure story; your mileage may vary.

finally, and this is just a personal thing: i am not liking the anti-religious bent emerging in the book. while it waffles for and against one or another church (or all of them, perhaps), it's a little heavy-handed in the whole "religion is the enemy of science" (which is lame, though i have to concede that this was more likely true in many circles in the 17th century).

ah well, the picture of the day is something i found browsing for 17th century manuscripts, from an article about the "cult" of the Sacred Heart (to which, i suppose, i am a card-carrying member). i am saving the site here because this is a theme that comes up in my own work. the article is really interesting. good grist for you metaphorists out there.

The Story of the Mountain: Mount Saint Mary's College and Seminary by Mary E. Meline & Edward F.X. McSween, published by the Emmitsburg Chronicle, 1911

what an excellent resource! came upon this purely by accident ~ it's a rare glimpse into the priesthood and priestly formation during the 19th century with great chapters on the Civil War and the transition into the Reconstruction era.

George H. Miles returned to the College this year, 1865, and as the war was now over Dr. McCaffrey took the oath of allegiance, and invited his neighbors to follow his example.

We have also a last glimpse of our third president [of Mount Saint Mary's College and Seminary] standing before the bar of the State this year having been indicted by the grand jury at Cape Girardeau, Mo., for not taking the oath of allegiance to the Federal Government. "The fine old man whose ancestors fought in the Revolution was arrested with four other priests on a December Saturday night at nine o'clock." (Catholic Mirror, Jan. 13, 1866.)

i've often wondered about reintegration from the Church's viewpoint and here's an interesting look at a handful of dissidents and other characters (all the usual suspects are mentioned briefly: hughes, whelan, etc.) ~ some great period details (with regards to the coursework and life at the seminary, students who went to war, etc.)

i hope to go back to this and read in depth when i get a chance.

~ * ~

another beautiful day. i'm getting so spoiled.

: D

the Christ is risen ~ alleluia!



this morning, with the windows still flung wide, i could hear the bells ringing, carried over the mississip, i presume, on the early breeze. it's threatening to rain today, but somehow all the more clean and beautiful for it ~ and the tree outside my window is exploding with buds (literally overnight!).

in my spiritual sloth, i've not mentioned much about my feelings this past season, or maybe i've just been struggling silently to work my way out of old skin. can't say definitively that i've turned a corner, but i've had a lot to think about since my last chat with sweet wally the elfin priest who hears my confession these days ("oh gee, all right," he says). in short, i'm trying to cooperate with God's grace a little more and be mindful of the ways in which i slide into easy choices and habits. small steps.

may God bless all the fine peeps on my flist. happy happy day.

†

I don't know why, but it struck me funny to be hearing the story of the Annunciation so late in the Advent season. Still, the message it imparts: for all of us to take up the challenge as Mary did to "bring Christ into the world" is really an important one on the eve of the big day. Okay, we weren't immaculately conceived and God isn't asking us to bear a child or anything nearly so immense as that, but what God does ask of us is just as important. Christ is present with us through one another and this Christmas so many people who don't have Christ in their lives in any shape or form need to see the manifest love of God in the world today. And we can be that for them.

I was going to go to Saint Agnes today, but missed the 8:30 mass in the morning (scraping out the car is always more work than I lease room for ~ gotta get on top of that). The next mass was at 10 and in Latin and for some reason I just didn't feel like going to the Latin mass this morning (who knows). So instead, I went to Our Lady of Guadalupe down the street ~ a very modern, very community-oriented church. The service was nice enough and the music was beautiful and the priest was a good speaker (though started off on what I thought was a pretty bad joke and then rambled off topic into some political I-don't-know-what). But it's definitely not the place for me. I try not to be a snob about these things and I'm willing to bet most of the people there are far better Christians and far more devoted than I, but I really have a hard time attending a church where the minimum amount of reverence for the Eucharist in the tabernacle is not displayed.

I still have a few more parishes I can visit. I am thinking of making an effort to go to weekday mass at Saint Agnes perhaps. Although it's pink, I think I can deal with that far better than I can deal with people chatting it up around the altar like they're at Wyatts with their cafeteria trays trying to pick between the carrot slaw and the green jello.

There's also a Saint Mary's here fairly close by. I might try that one as well ~ it's an older church off to the side. Maybe after being at the cathedral for all these years, a less-well-known church would be the ticket (Saint Agnes is pretty famous, I guess, for Father Altier being there).

Anyway, I'm rambling on here about nothing in particular. I didn't think parish-shopping was going to be this difficult. But hopefully I'll find a home soon.

: D

started reading Stendhal's The Red and the Black last night (why i torture myself with anti-clerical 19th century french literature is anybody's guess).

i only got about 40 pages in before sleep bludgeoned me, but what struck me most peculiarly is that thus far it's Gormenghast, which makes me look a wee cockeyed at at mr. mervyn peake.

but there it is: instead of Steerpike, we have Julien ~ harshly abused by his manly sawmill-operating father, sensitive intellectual Julien is thrashed for reading on the job and then thrown out like so much garbage to become a Latin tutor to the three children of the mayor. Julien, who loves all things military and yearned for a career in the army, having found himself unsuitable for such, decides instead that the real profit lays in the Church. Once he is in the embrace of the mayor's house and patronage he begins his rise to power. the mayor, of course, is a dupe, a conservative religious man who will naturally fall for Julien's fake piety and then the games will begin.

while the circumstances are very different than from Steerpike being evicted from the kitchens, just to read the books suggests so many similarities ~ right down to the familial narrative voice (chatty and intentionally intrusive).

Stendhal evidently embraced Jansenism (a rather Calvanistic heresy worming around in the Church in that era ~ very inclined toward predestination and the "elect") and, predictably, seethed with animosity toward "Jesuitism" which, then, was considered a rigid ultramontane hypocrisy so embedded into the Church heirarchy as to corrupt it entirely (yet another case of Jesuit education gone bad and its recipient spending a whole lot of energy trying to "get even"). i find this stance so interesting, really, because Jansenism is positively anti-Liberal when you get down to it, and the harsher of the two ideologies in terms of Christian theology. so i'm not really sure why Stendhal defends it ~ perhaps only because it's a form of protestantism and anything against the Church is good for him?

at any rate, i am sure this book will be an adventure. i am not in love with Stendhal's style. mirabeau and hugo are so much cleaner. he reminds me more of flaubert or de balzac: dense and warbling. i like a good dense warble now and then, but it's not exactly something you can rip through, so it'll take me a while before i get to the end of this book's tirade against the Church.

i will say this for the anti-clerical literature i have read thus far out of france: its villains readily admit that they are hypocrites. none of them believe they are doing as the Church bids (which is what makes mirabeau's Abbé Jules so intriguing, i think: Jules knows he's an evil man and struggles with it to his horrible death). so it seems to me that the real gripe against the priesthood in that era was not the Church so much as the sort of people who took advantage of the Church for their own gain (specifically men who became priests for the job and not the vocation). while i know most anti-Catholics don't bother to separate the Church from her imperfect clergy, i do find it rather interesting that the attacks at this time are almost purely political and have nothing to do, really, with the actual theology.

whereas today, you could say that attacks are purely emotional based on a misunderstanding of the theology. once the political threat of the Church was minimized (with the downfall of the papal states in the 1870s), the protestors needed a new reason to attack the Church. criticizing the newly promulgated Immaculate Conception and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin were easy targets in this climate and that's what you see mostly today: a lot of anti-Marian sentiment borne out of pure ignorance.

but i don't want to go off on a bender just now about all that. maybe later.

Okay, my cousin sent me a ticket (via Fandango) to go watch The Exorcism of Emily Rose and I saw it tonight.

I'm still forming an opinion, but my initial reaction is: really good story, sadly lousy script.

It wasn't cheap, I'll give it that. It was making an earnest attempt to do something, but I can't decide whether it went over lamely into the prosletysing column or if it was actually too chicken-hearted to say what it really wanted to say. Hard call on that.

I do know that the character development was poor, very poor. And that depictions of the faith (as it were) were negligible. You hardly notice that anyone is even Catholic except the guy wearing the collar (an even he doesn't tend to talk like a priest might under the circumstances). The exorcism itself, as expected, is sheer Hollywood, but it's not gratuitous, which surprised me. They really restrained themselves ~ and I think it's because they want the audience to take it more seriously on a lot of other levels.

The conclusion was also, I gotta admit, a little surprising. Just a wee little. For me, that's a huge plus. Mighty huge. So I give it points for that.

Is it a "horror" film? No. The PG-13 rating should alert people to that fact, but evidently people don't pay attention to such things. It's a drama with some skeery elements and clearly engineered to appeal to a broad audience (there's no cussing, no blaspheming, no girls in skimpy underwear, no gratuitous gore). For a movie about demonic possession, this is pretty amazing (and goes to show how much you can suggest without showing in a film).

I'll probably have more thoughts as I process. Right now I'm still digesting.

cross-posted to catholic_media

i finished reading Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest and am still forumlating an opinion about it, but for now all positive thoughts.

basic premise: runaway teenager Ann Holmes encounters the Virgin Mary in the forest of a mouldering logging community. the vision sparks the predictable sort of chain reaction of faith and exploitation leading to the big philosophical question of the meaning and nature of miracles.

it's an interesting book, well-written, with a bit of a disappointing ending ~ disappointing in that it's somewhat anti-climactic as far as action is concerned, but satisfying in other ways (i.e. there's nothing lacking insofar as closure ~ all the ends get tied up very well, i think).

i think there are things about this book that might offend Catholics (but needlessly in my opinion). the character of Father Collins is rather intensely human, which i find endearing ~ those places where he is weak in some ways. i find more fault with his lack of protocol with regard to wearing his clerical collar than i do with his occasional lapse into matters of the flesh, frankly. it's interesting, really. i think he's well-drawn: he's a good person and trying to be a good priest, but all-too aware of his shortcomings (which aren't horrendous, mind you ~ refreshingly, he doesn't grapple horribly with his faith in that tired old cliché of "lost priest"). i like that he knows he's a coward and yet struggles tangibly with his cowardice in a way that makes him heroic, i think.

and the faith is presented fairly, i think ~ this embodied in the character of Tom Cross: that people can be believers and even devout and yet completely screw up all the time dawn to dusk, all the while struggling in their own way. and that people can be exploitive and greedy and stupid about their faith as well ~ Guterson does this without ever once bashing the faith itself (a difficult and admirable task!). he honestly examines the problems of an institutionalized Church without malice or even harsh cynicism. even Father Butler, the tiring old bore who comes to investigate the veracity of the Marian sightings isn't a monster: just a man with a job trying to do what he knows how to do (the description of him as a sort of endlessly paternal soccer coach with a whistle around his neck is apropos: you hate him, but you don't because you can't, it's just who he is).

there's a few things to object to if you want to nitpick the theology: some strange transgressions into the nature of evil as a tangible force might perk some eyebrows. Father Collins tells Ann that there's no such thing as the devil and i thought that was odd, though he later capitulated in a weird way that doesn't seem reconciled by the end (have to think more on this). but this is so minor, really. for the most part this book avoids the trap of what i often see in religious stories: the gross sort of relativism that negates the place of the Church. Father Collins, sinner though he may be, is no relativist. he stands firm for the Church. period. when Ann asks to be baptized, he doesn't just cave to her request, he tells her the steps she must take to receive it. in the hands of a more careless (less reverent perhaps) writer, he would have done it against all Church protocol because rules are just stupid and get in the way of faith (right).

the more i think about the ending, the more satisfying it is, everyone gets pretty much what they deserve and the last malicious stab of the Carolyn character (who is the most obnoxious and exploitive of all) is blithely set aside with a knowing smile because that's really how it is: it doesn't matter if a bone relic is really a saint or just a leftover piece of a chicken from ages past. and even though the miracles you anticipate happening from the beginning of the book don't happen, others do: more subtle miracles and even more grandiose miracles and then it doesn't matter whether Ann Holmes saw the Virgin Mary in the Forest or not ~ because regardless of what she did see, Mother Mary was there.

: D

i give it two thumbs up.

for those of you with sensitive sensibilities, the book is very honest in its depiction of human foibles, so does contain a lot of cussing, blaspheming, and some fairly frank sexual depictions (but nothing gratuitous, i don't think ~ could cut some of it, but by and large it seems necessary to the plot).

the Christian Science Monitor review says:

Agnostics will resonate to Guterson's ambivalence, and atheists may feel pricked by his insight into humanity's thirst for transcendence, but the Christian reading groups that embraced the spirituality of, say, Leif Enger's Peace Like a River (2001) will be reluctant to take on a story that contains such disturbing scenes of violence and sexual abuse.

i disagree that the book is ambivalent at all, though i suppose you can read into it all sorts of cynicism if you choose to. i think it is actually very clear and i think the final chapters make it clear where Guterson stands on the matter. i also think the violence and sexual abuse portrayed in the book is what makes such a compelling and powerful story ~ the more savage human nature, the greater need for redemption.