Book Review 4: History

Read this book review right here at my blog, or at this more glamorous location.

I love history. And I also love not just books about history, but reference books about history. They clog my bookshelves because I learned it's cheaper to own them than check them out of the library over and over again. They do tend to be big, though. I just got up from my chair and grabbed a few favorites that gather no moss: The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant (12,000 pages); Natasha's Dance, a Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes (700 pages); A History of Architecture by Sir Banister Fletcher (1,600); 30,000 Years of Art, collaborative (1,000); and Europe, by Norman Davies (1,400). What can I say: big thinking requires big writing- right?

Now I have to digress a bit about that last book, Norman Davies' Europe. His history of Europe isn't like other histories of Europe. Unlike the others, Europe has, in supplement to its chronological text, a sprinkling of hundreds of small essays called capsules. Each one reaches forward and back in time, and beyond Europe when appropriate; but each is especially relevant to something on the same page as the capsule. Even after 15 years, I'll still pull Europe down and randomly browse a few capsules, such as Adelante, Fatima, and Szlachta.

Europe set a new standard for me for reference history books. Not just for the capsules, but the capsules themselves were reason enough. [What other reasons? Go check out the book and see.] But suppose you aren't a maniac about European history- or any history? Can't such subjects be competently covered in, say, a mere 500 pages? Thinking big- but writing small?

I like that number 500, because Fr. Robert Barron's Catholicism series on DVD recently gave a worthy answer to the question, "how does one treat Catholicism in all its aspects in only 500 minutes?" One approach would be to spend 15 seconds on each of 2,000-odd years. That would be thorough in a punctilious way- but would anyone learn anything that mattered? Probably not.  But half of the fun in watching Fr. Barron is to appreciate not only what he chose to talk about; but also what he excluded. Every second had to count. It was that carefully edited. (I'm optimistically assuming every one of you Dear Readers has seen it.) But being a reader as well as a watcher, you now want to know about treating Catholicism in all its aspects in only 500 pages.

Last week I started reading James Hitchcock's History of the Catholic Church. It's subtitled From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium. It thinks big. But it's only...wait for it...500 pages long, 4 years per page! Just kidding: it's 500 pages, and it takes the small-essay concept of Europe's capsules; and expands it into an entire history. In other words, what one normally expects in a history book, pages of narrative, is replaced by a timeline stream of digestible individual articles. I was joking about 4 years per page, but the articles are about 4 to the page. For example in the "Reform and Counter-Reform" chapter, p. 297 lists these: Protestant Divisions, The Tridentine Spirit, The Baroque, and Patrons. They may be read as freestanding articles; but they're arranged to lead from one to the next, and cohere over the span of the chapter into a comprehensive understanding of the whole period.

History is a unique joy. Pick an era, browse the subtitles in the margins. Stop on one that strikes you. Read that article for a couple of minutes. Proceed to the next one, or jump to another page. History is less of a braid, running from top to bottom; and more of a long tapestry, going back and forth as well as up and down. And like Barron's Catholicism, each few minutes of information has been carefully edited into a self-contained little essay, a thought capsule, to use Europe's term. For example, I just read Hitchcock's capsule on Fr. Damien of Molokai. 230 words don't just tell us why he matters, but draw an empathetic portrait of the saint that unexpectedly pricks my heart, as Chaucer would say. Like Catholicism, in History every second, every word counts, sometimes movingly so.

The structure of the book aside, History's content reflects the mind of the Church. That is, it covers what matters to the Church, and how the Church matters to the World; and does so from a Catholic perspective. That's not to say the book isn't critical of the Church, it is; but its critiques are orthodox. 

Theology, Scripture, politics, people, art, society, philosophy, architecture, music, science, and Church, are all treated by 2,000 or so interrelated chunks in a mere 500 pages. In its comprehensive and compact wholeness, Hitchcock's History is both Catholic; and catholic.

Greenville-Ephrathah 9: Organic Gravity

Little Ephrathah 

My Fabulous Wife & I had Sunday lunch with a Priest Acquaintance of ours; his Wife; a visiting Catholic Author; and a Deacon Acquaintance, who commented on the burgeoning Catholic Gravity of another Bible-Belt American City Which Shall Remain Nameless. How does its gravity compare to Li'l 'phrathah's?

That's a good question. Li'l 'phrathah is about one tenth the size of Gargantua; obviously 10 kilos has 10 times the gravity of 1 kilo. And any Southerner or Stalinist can tell ya [although from opposing viewpoints] that quantity has a quality all its own. But still, here's a case where quality has a quantity all its own. What quality? Why, the quality of...organicness. Or organicity; or both. See, while Gargantua does have Catholic Gravity, it's mostly Institutional. Top-down. Cathedral. Higher Education. Seminary. Big Numbers. And there's nothing wrong with that, y'know? But 'phrathah's gravity is bottom-up, lay-driven, informally-structured, self-organizing, self-motivating, self-energizing, diffuse, nimble. A Catholic Swarm Intelligence transcending local parish boundaries and other geographies.

Of course, a bottom-up approach isn't unique to the Upstate. Check out these Cascadia guys, they get it too. Put in more familiar terms, what we are seeing are evolving, living models of the New Evangelization.

Brazilian Stoats

A few times a year for as long as I care to remember, I think about stoats. If you're American you may not know what a stoat is...maybe a kind of cigar, like a stogie or a cheroot? Good guess, but no: a stoat is a short-tailed weasel. In winter, the stoat's fur becomes white, and is called ermine. It's still associated with European royalty.

That's a good-looking Queen. By the way, the black bits are the tails- they don't change color.

So yesterday during a discussion of playing trivia in pubs, an English friend said he clinched a recent round "through identifying a weasel, stoat, otter and ferret." That being the first time I've ever heard stoats mentioned in conversation, I said I think about them regularly. To which he replied "...what?" I explained that decades ago I read a story based on Orwell's 1984. Couldn't remember its name, but in the story the political apparatus was so dilapidated that there were no rats available for Room 101. The interrogators asked Winston if he might be afraid of stoats, they had one of those. He said he didn't much like them, so they brought in the stoat. But it was an old stoat and not very scary.

A few minutes' online searching turned it up. Was it 1985 by Gyorgy Dalos? No! Was it 1985 by Anthony Burgess? No! It was "Owing to Circumstances Beyond Our Control 1984 Has Been Unavoidably Detained" by Alan Coren. Here's the critical bit:

*************************************

 "Ah, Smith, Winston," cried the white-coated man at the door of Room 101. "Won't you come in? Rats, I believe, are what you, ha-ha-ha, fear most of all. Big brown rats. Big brown pink-eyed rats..."

"NO," screamed Smith, "NOT RATS, ANYTHING BUT RATS, NO, NO, NO."

"...rats with long slithery tails, Smith, fat, hungry rats, rats with sharp little..."

"Oh, do shut up, Esmond," interrupted his assistant wearily. "You know we haven't got any rats. We haven't seen a rat since last December's delivery."

"No rats?" gasped Smith.

Esmond sighed, and shook his head. Then he suddenly brightened.

"We've got mice though," he cried. "Big, fat, hungry, pink-eyed..."

"I don't mind mice," said Smith.

They looked at him.

"You're not making our job any easier, you know," muttered Esmond.

"Try him on toads," said Esmond's assistant. "Can't move in the stockroom for toads."

"That's it!" exclaimed Esmond. "Toads, big, fat, slimy..."

"I quite like toads," said Smith.

There was a long pause.

"Spiders?"

"Lovely little things," said Smith. "If it's any help, I can't stand moths."

"Moths," cried Esmond. "Where do you think you are, bloody Harrod's? We can't get moths for love nor money."

"Comes in here, big as you please, asking for moths," said Esmond's assistant.

Smith thought for a while.

"I'm not all that keen on stoats," he said at last.

"At last," said Esmond. "I thought we'd be here all night. Give him a stoat, Dennis."

So they put Winston Smith in Room 101 with a stoat. It was an old stoat, and it just sat on the floor, wheezing, and as far as Smith was concerned, things could have been, all things considered, a lot worse.

**********************************************

But that's not why I think of stoats. I think of stoats because I think of Brazil:

 

 

No, not Brazil; Brazil:

 

You know, the movie:

Brazil (1985) is a satirical take on George Orwell's 1984. Being the brainchild of Terry Gilliam, who did all the whimsical graphics on Monty Python's Flying Circus, it's a visual spectacle. And there are no stoats in Brazil in case you were wondering. But it still reminds of stoats, because in Brazil, the government is buffoonish, bumbling, intrusive, and incompetent. For all that silliness though, it's no less dangerous to its citizens than 1984's Big Brother. So Brazil has always reminded me of Alan Coren's shortstory, and by extension, stoats. I've always assumed that the story was the inspiration for the movie. That would make sense beyond the similar concepts: "Owing to Circumstances Beyond Our Control 1984 Has Been Unavoidably Detained" was first published in Punch magazine in 1974. It's no stretch to imagine Terry Gilliam reading Punch.

But I haven't been able to find any connection between the story and the movie.

Who What When Where Whow

  Lascaux? Uh-uh. Altamira? Uh-huh.

Who would disagree with the idea that the more cars you can drive, the easier it will be to drive yet another one? Bueller? Bueller? OK, nobody.

The same is true for languages, especially within language families, such as the Indo-European family (IE). IE languages have so much in common that like cars, the more of them you drive, the easier it is to drive another one. Here's a quick (not the only by any means) example:

Check these basic English interrogative particles: who, what, when, where, why, whow. I add a w to how to clarify that "how" belongs to the family of wh- interrogatives.

I had two profitable years of highschool Spanish, followed by two explosive years of Latin. Latin was the first foreign language where I noticed that like English, the interrogative particles shared a common initial sound, kw: Qui, Quod, Quando, Quo, Quid, etc. Not the same sound as in English, but still nice to know the pattern.

Over the next few decades, due to education, travel, and adoption, I learned some more languages; not fluently, but enough to not need English or gestures to communicate. Because the main benefit of speaking a language is to be able to ask questions, a good learning shortcut (among many) was that any language's interrogatives were all likely to start with the same sound, and it's usually true:

Wer, Was, Wenn, Wo, Warum, Wie, in English's lovely and creative cousin, German.

Qui, Que, Quand, Quoi, Comment, Où, in Latin's daughter, French. Note that comment starts with the same k sound as the q- words. And où is short for Latin ubi, which I suppose is itself contracted from an older proto-Latin word starting with q, something like "quobi".

And in Russian: кто/ Kto, что/ Chto, когда/ Kogda, где/ Gdye, куда/ Kuda, как/ Kak. The exceptions in Russian are worth some digression: Kto means who; Chto means what. I'm guessing that distinguishing between people and things created Chto- simply altering the k-sound enough to make a new word. By the way, it's pronounced shto, not chto due to the speed at which the word is said.

Gdye (gd-YEH), where, may be a newer, voiced version of the unvoiced Ktye, an imagined word I'm backfiguring to fit the k- pattern.

These, and many more, Indo-European languages are assumed to spring from a common tongue which left no written record; what Germans call an Ursprache (ur- primeval, original + Sprache, language) My guess is that all of these interrogative particles originate in a single interrogative proto-particle, khuh. Khuh would sound like huh, but with a kh sound like the ch in loch. Here's how over time we get from khuh to the other words:

For some peoples, kh would sharpen to k or kw. Depending on their own aesthetic sense, others would soften kh or kw to wh. From wh, speakers may further soften to h (as in who), or w (even as we do today in saying wite instead of white). W could shift to v as it has done in German. You may think I assume too much, but listen to my Russian-adopted son Michael. When he was first learning English, he could not say 'house'. He said khouse. But 'hospital' was gospital. Why not khospital? Dunno...Russian has its reasons. And 'dinosaur' (dinosawr) was dinosavr.

Now a little digression. You know the intonation for "I don't know" when the note rises on don't and is lower for both I and know: iDUNno. Sometimes we will hum mmmMMMmmm and be understood. Of course without already knowing the English words, the humming won't communicate a thing.

Now you also know what this means: huh?

And huh...they aren't the same.

And this: uh-uh.

And: uh-huh.

Unlike mmmMMMmmm, none of them is based on English; but they can also be hummed or grunted because we know the "words" already. Those sounds aren't words from any language, any Sprache. They don't enjoy the status of "word;" but they're language, and we understand them. My guess is that those sounds are vestiges, living fossils of the oldest human oral communication which predates Proto Indo European. What the Germans might call a Vorursprache, before an original language. Communication so old and basic it's simply nuanced grunting. And huh? would be the root sound from which the word khuh developed.

Maybe the the first word. It'd be just like humans to make their first word a question.

Behold the West 2

This post links to RAnn's Sunday Snippets 

This past winter on successive Thursday evenings our parish showed the ten episodes of Catholicism, the series featuring Fr. Robert Barron. My Wife the Art Historian asked me if I wanted to go.

Well, I've seen a ton of Fr. B's bits on YouTube, and he's kinda overexposed there, y'know? And besides, isn't this for people who don't know squat about the Catholic Church? That includes us out. On the other hand, lots of my friends'll be there and we can schmooze. And the pastor will be leading some discussion after each episode. So even if none of it's new to me I can still have a good time; at least I can give the first Thursday a shot, right?

So we go to the first one...and it is the best. It's a spectacle of painting, theology, architecture, faith, music, philosophy, the Bible, sculpture, literature, saints; every spoke on the huge wheel of Catholicism, all treated as a one big thing, like a softly whirling spiral galaxy. Which Catholicism is: the complete foundation and underpinning of the West. But Fr. Barron isn't so obvious as to say so. He simply spends 10 hours (less, really) talking about the Catholic worldview so comprehensively that it'd be hard not reach that conclusion on your own.

And the wonder is that he does it so well in a mere 10 episodes. Janet & I discuss the problem: treat the faith in all its aspects in 10 hours, and speak to the well-catechized as well as the unchurched. What would I cover; what would I leave out; how many seconds to spend on each idea; how to knit the parts into a whole, etc.,etc. So I liked the series, and was better off by far for having seen it. Plus much of how he treated things reminded me of my class, which was gratifying in the shallowest way.

But here's the real surprise: Janet bought the DVD set, and we're watching it again. It's better the second time around. 

Galaxy photo by the European Southern Observatory

Greenville Ephrathah 2

Putatively unrelated data which nonetheless incrementally reveal little Ephrathah's veiled future:

From St. Mary's January 15 Sunday bulletin:

"Father Jon Chalmers is a priest of the Episcopal Church (the main American branch of the Anglican Communion), and for the past two years he has been on the staff at Christ Church here in Greenville. On Sunday 22 January 2012 during the 11 am Mass, Jon Chalmers will be received into full communion with the Catholic Church and confirmed by Bishop Guglielmone, and the following week he will begin his formation for priestly ordination in the Catholic Church in Houston, Texas — the seat of the new Ordinariate. In the coming months, if sufficient numbers of Anglicans desire to be joined to the Ordinariate here in Greenville, Jon will be responsible for their pastoral care, and after his ordination as a Catholic priest, he will celebrate the Anglican Use liturgy as well as be available to assist local Roman Rite parishes."

(It's likely that St. Mary's Parish would host any local Anglican congregation until it gets its own facility, as happened with St. Rafka's Maronite Catholic congregation.)

From Our Lady of the Rosary Parish:

Fr. Longenecker's 12 Days of Christmas

And: "Join EWTN personalities and authors Joanna Bogle, Joseph Pearce, and Fr. Dwight Longenecker on Saturday, January 21 from 8:30am-3:30pm at OLR Church for "A Day Conference on English Catholicism Then & Now."

From the diocesan newspaper:

"Father Christopher Smith, who is studying at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, will become the administrator of Prince of Peace Church...effective Dec. 15."  Fr. Smith, a product of both St. Mary's and Our Lady of the Rosary, has returned to Ephrathah. I should mention that My Mother the English Teacher taught young Chris Smith everything he knows except for what he learned at the seminary. And Pamplona. And Rome.

This article reacquaints us with the diocese's 10 seminarians. Two of them, like Father Smith, are Sons of Ephrathah.

And yet:  Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

Greenville Ephrathah

This post links to RAnn's Sunday Snippets 

I moved to Greenville, SC from alluvial Houma, Louisiana in 1965 when I was 8 years old. Greenville was a hilly Baptist textile town, with disturbingly orange dirt. The local college was fenced-in Bob Jones University, the very Buckle of the Bible Belt. There were only two Catholic churches: St. Mary's downtown, and Holy Rosary (now Our Lady of the Rosary) near the closed Donaldson Air Force Base. Virtually all the Catholics were Yankees, and their faith and accents made them stranger than Martians to the locals. I remember my own culture shock: how can you have a parade without people on the floats throwing necklaces and candy to everybody? Do you just stand there and look at it?

But the Catholic minority has been putting down roots in the hard Piedmont clay for a few generations now. And like a transplanted grapevine, the Church has been shaped by the bracing Fundamentalist/ Evangelical terroir (I just wanted to say "terroir") of the Upstate. Among other distinctives, local Catholicism tends toward Scriptural literacy, an evangelistic readiness to explain the faith, and an appreciation for the Bible-believers' assumption that religion matters- and not just privately, but publicly.

In the last decade or so, this Upstate Catholicism has acquired...what, a momentum? a gravity? that continues to develop. I'm not gonna name names, but my wife and I think of all the people we know who weren't Catholic, and are now; people who were already Catholic, and decided to move here; and people who aren't Catholic, but are being drawn into the Catholic orbit. My parish has about 40 people in RCIA who'll enter the Church on Easter Vigil. And we wonder at this confluence. Is just by accident? Is it for some purpose? And it isn't just one church, but a coalescence that extends across parishes, and even rites. Nor is it primarily driven by the pastors. They play a critical leadership role, but the laity are self-motivating.

Our house nickname for this phenomenon is Greenville-Ephrathah, by which we mean that little nowhere Upstate South Carolina may be unknowingly preparing for an as-yet-unspecified role in some mysterious process. I'm uncomfortable thinking about it too explicitly- maybe it's supposed to be an inchoate (I just wanted to say "inchoate") je ne sais quoi (uh-huh) for the time being, and patience is required. It's scary, but in a good way. I've even been reluctant to make a peep about it here, but in the last year the energy has palpably increased.

Thus far there's been no reason for anything but optimism. But I'm reminded of the Catholic novel Morte d'Urban, in which great promise is ultimately dissipated. And if this swell of faith is indeed real and part of a larger plan, then Satan is sure to try to derail it. So my motivation for blabbing this on the net is that if something bad does happen here (I have no idea what, except it wouldn't be the usual), nobody should be discouraged, no-one should lose heart. If bad comes, it doesn't have to be the end; rather, through renewed faith & works it'll turn out to have been just an obstacle that was overcome.

And meanwhile, it's an interesting time to be Catholic in the Upstate.



But thou, O Greenville Ephrathah, though thou be little among the thousands of America, yet out of thee shall...shall what? what?

Deutsche Romanische Kirchen

I like church architecture. While I admire the technical daring and spectacle of Gothic architecture, I prefer Romanesque churches. And among the churches built in the Romanesque manner, I like the German ones best.

One of German Romanesque's strong points is its design flexibility: that is, its visual vocabulary and structural system allow each church to be very different from the others while recognizably belonging to the same family. If Gothic churches tend to all be sisters, the German Romanesque family would include aunts and nieces. The German churches may have a front main entry, side main entries, or main entries at both ends along with altars at both ends. There may any number of towers in an assortment of shapes and sizes. Within the vocabulary almost anything goes. And if they don't compare well against Gothic's glamor, they more than compensate by their charm and individuality.

A very few of my favorites:

Maria Laach Abbey, so small it needs 2 photos.

Limburg

Bamberg

Speyer (the town is named after the spires)

Tournai, Belgium (it's not in Germany)

Late in the last century our architectural office (Greene & Associates) designed a 2400-seat Baptist church. For assorted reasons the project borrowed heavily from German Romanesque sources, including the above examples. A few drawings follow.

East Elevation

                      Ground Floor Plan

 South Elevation

A recent photo of the church taken by local photographer Jerry Spain

We do a lot of churches, but rarely have a budget and a client that allows for this kind of project.

American Heroes

It's American Hero Day at Smaller Manhattans.

Yuliya Timoshenko/ Юлія Тимошенко, former prime minister of Ukraine/ Украина (see, Cyrillic isn't so tough) recently co-wrote an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. You don't have to read it.  Actually I was more struck by the article's title than the content: Letter from a Kiev Jail, which is where Timoshenko is these days. Of course the title borrows from Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written in 1963. So this got me thinking again about King's letter, which I read for the first time about 35 years ago.

King and his memorial in Washington, DC are in the news, and I've been hearing snatches of King's "I Have a Dream" speech on the radio, and quotes in print.  "I Have a Dream" is inspiring- no wonder it gets such attention. But I find the Letter to be much more compelling: when I think of King, I think Birmingham, not DC. In fact, the pith of the Dream comes from the Letter.  Part of what makes the Letter better is that, unlike the lovely Dream speech which is a sermon being preached to the choir (which is not a criticism), King wrote his letter to a group of clergymen who did not share his "urgency of now."¹ So it's direct, thorough, and not very charming; but no less eloquent than the Dream speech.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail takes about 20 minutes to read. If you haven't read it before, you may be surprised by its sweep and depth, and the people who influenced King's thinking. Reading it again today reminds me that like the prophets of antiquity, people may still be chosen by God to accomplish a single great and necessary thing.

If you aren't inclined to read the whole letter right now, that's ok. Here is a critical paragraph from the middle:

"We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."

And here is that same paragraph paraphrased in the Dream speech:

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." ²

 American Hero

I love "Somewhere over the Rainbow."  It's a perfect song, especially with the prologue ³ that didn't make it into the Wizard of Oz.  In 2001 it was voted the best song of the 20th century, and I agree that it is.  I don't know if there's been a similar vote for prose, but I can't think of any more significant than this letter, written by one of my heroes.

Speaking of heroes, here's another one.  Even though he isn't mentioned in King's Letter or Dream, the influence is there. Here's a bit from one of his speeches:

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?  I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.  To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.  There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.  Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."

Yeah, that's ummm...William Wilberforce?  Mr. Bleeding Kansas, John Brown?  Harriet Beecher Stowe?  Nope.  That's the escaped slave, orator, author, agitator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass' words don't roll off the tongue as easily as King's, but he was speaking in a more formal age.

You may recall how rudely the prophet Jeremiah scolded the Temple personnel 2,600 years ago:

"Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, 'We are delivered!'--only to go on doing all these abominations?  Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of thieves in your eyes?  Behold, I myself have seen it, says the LORD.  Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel.  And now, because you have done all these things, says the LORD, and when I spoke to you persistently you did not listen, and when I called you, you did not answer, therefore I will do to the house which is called by my name, and in which you trust, and to the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh.  And I will cast you out of my sight, as I cast out all your kinsmen, all the offspring of Ephraim."

You can hear all of Jeremiah's righteous anger and indignation in Douglass.  I imagine that Douglass was also well aware of Jeremiah even as he spoke on that 4th of July.

 American Hero

The older I get, the more I'm grateful that these two men dedicated their lives to cleansing my dear country, America, of this great sin.  Thank y'all both.  I know you can hear me.




1. I love King's phrase "the urgency of now."  And I like to hear it in two songs by Smashing Pumpkins: Tonight, Tonight; and 1979.

2. It always pays to look at the wider context of any Bible quote; King surely expected his Bible-literate listeners to do so.  That bit is from Amos 5: "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.  22 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon.  23 Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.  24 But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.   25 "Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?  26 You shall take up Sakkuth your king, and Kaiwan your star-god, your images, which you made for yourselves; 27 therefore I will take you into exile beyond Damascus," says the LORD, whose name is the God of hosts."

Years later, when Jeremiah laid into the Temple staff, he may have been thinking of Amos a tiny bit.

3. When all the world is a hopeless jumble
And the raindrops tumble all around
Heaven opens a magic lane
When all the clouds darken up the skyway
There's a rainbow highway to be found
Leading from your window pane
To a place behind the sun
Just a step beyond the rain

Somewhere over the rainbow....

Fine Art Handout 3: Chagall

When I used to teach RCIA and adult ed, I never worried much about engaging people's imaginations. But it's a requirement for teaching kids, so I am always on the lookout for anything beyond the classroom that can help me do that: scenes from movies such as Prince of Egypt; excerpts from stories such as A Christmas Carol; newspaper articles; sticks, bones, and rags; and especially fine art. I've posted recently about my preference for art that isn't aimed specifically at kids, but rather art that is the best the world has to offer.

Marriage and children are big topics in Wednesday Sunday School. I give the Bible and the Church every opportunity to teach this valuable life template:

Get married; stay married; have children.

But as often as marriage comes up in my class, I've never seen anything on the subject that really grabbed my imagination. At least not until this weekend, when I surfed into yet another piece of art that will work perfectly: Marc Chagall's Wedding from 1910.

Sweet, isn't it? Little angels, pretty flowers, an affecting and childlike innocence. We won't discuss any of that in class unless the kids bring it up. See, that's looking at the painting as an illustration of marriage; that's ok, but Chagall isn't illustrating marriage, he's painting a portrait of marriage. Whose marriage? My modest amount of research didn't provide an answer.  That suits me just fine: I can proceed with my own opinion. I think it's Chagall and his wife Bella, whom he met in 1909. What a pretty thing she was:

 bella Bella

They were engaged in 1910, but not married until 1915: her prosperous parents weren't keen on Chagall until he showed he could earn a proper living as an artist. But didn't he paint this Wedding in 1910? Yes: he painted the wedding he longed for, created a portrait of his marriage ahead of time. Does that bride look like Bella, and the man Chagall? I say yes. We may discuss Marc and Bella a bit in class, just to broaden the kids' horizons, but they aren't the point of the portrait either. So what is Chagall's point? Let's see.

Right off, I don't believe this is primarily a painting of Marc Chagall and Bella Rosenfeld: rather, Chagall  has made a wedding portrait of Adam and Eve, using himself and Bella as models. Why does he do this? Because he sees his longing to be attached to Bella through the lens of Adam's longing for, and attachment to, Eve. But why would Chagall necessarily think of Genesis when he thought of marriage? Because when little Moishe Segal was growing up in Vitebsk, Russia, he attended Jewish grade school.

Let's look at key bits of Genesis Chapter 2: "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him."...but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh...Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed."

Cling is a critical word. The verb to cling/ to cleave in Hebrew is dabak, דָּבַק. Yes, it means to cling, to adhere, to stay with. But it also means to pursue, to overtake. I like that.

See how Adam holds Eve: he is tender, but forceful: even her arms are caught in his urgent embrace. The couple is not side by side; not arm in arm; not hugging each other. No. He holds onto her; not vice versa. And though she's caught in his arms, he's not elated or victorious: he's profoundly relieved. At last, at last, bone of his bone, he presses Eve close to his left side, where his heart beats.  And he doesn't look at her, but bends a bit to inhale her scent. I don't know how to artfully express that, but I well know its drug-like effect.

Eve is nonplussed by Adam's intensity; surprised even. But to find your rib among a multitude- well, that's the achievement of a lifetime. And once you have it back, never let her go*, as the song says.

Oh yeah, the point. Chagall's point is that this is what he expects his marriage to be. Not so much because he uniquely loves Bella (although he does), but because every marriage should be like the first one. I'm especially moved because he's portrayed my wedding & marriage as much as his own, or Adam's. Isn't it amazing that in 1910 he understood marriage well enough to say so much about it while yet remaining unmarried himself? Well, yes; but through the winsome Genesis account of how God gave Adam his mate, even the unmarried Chagall knew that a man shouldn't be alone; a man misses his rib and wants that one-and-only missing rib to be pressed once again against his heart; that his wife is bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh; and that he is impatient to leave his family and cling to her. And of course that they'd be naked, and not ashamed, and make some babies, but the kids don't need a picture of that.

We already cover all of this in class; but we never had the right image until now.


*Some Enchanted Evening

Catholic Time

A couple of days ago I posted about making quick handouts for my Catechism class. One of them included this image of St. Michael's Church (Michaeliskirche) in Hildesheim (Hilda's Home, a Saxon goddess), Germany:

I was tempted then to say something about the pattern of the snow in the shaded foreground, but it wasn't relevant to the subject of catechetical handouts. But I'll say something about it today since it points to something important about Catholicism.

Germany sits higher on Earth's globe than America does (excepting Alaska). Hildesheim lies at the 52nd parallel, further north than Winnipeg, Manitoba. So at the winter solstice, the sun doesn't get very high, and even at noon will cast long shadows. Looking at the shadow in the foreground, you can see that beyond the shadow there's almost no snow.

So I was looking at the snow and thinking that the building behind the photographer lay on an east-west axis. And because the edge of the shadow is parallel to the church, then the church lies on an east-west axis as well. Of course this makes sense: Catholic churches are traditionally "oriented" to face the rising sun. And if the east-west orientation is correct, the shadow of the leftmost tower tells us it's a bit before noon, on a day near December 21.

Idly curious about just how well-aligned the church was to true East, I had a look on Google Earth:

That's odd: the church is oriented a bit North of true East. Maybe it was oriented to align with where the sun would rise on St. Michael's feastday...that'd be September 29. The answer is no, because after the Sept 21 Equinox, the sun will rise and set in the South; look at Hildesheim's solar chart for Sept 29:

The yellow line shows the sun rising about 3 degrees South of 90 East, not North. But wait a sec, Europe used the less-accurate Julian calendar when construction of St. Michael's began in AD 1001. When the Church replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian in 1582, there was a 10-day error between the sun and the calendar. In 1001, there was a 6-day error. To get the proper solar chart for Sep 29, 1001, we have to subtract 6 days, which gives us Sept 23. But that date still has the sun rise a couple of degrees south of East.

Huh...suppose instead of using the saint's feastday, we go with Sept 21, the Equinox? Maybe the builders fully intended to lay the church out at 90 degrees East by measuring at dawn on September 21. Yes, but we already know that wouldn't get them true East; but maybe they didn't know. If we subtract 6 days to correct the Julian error, we have Hildesheim's chart for Sept 15:

    That's more like it. The sun rises about 4.5 degrees North of East, and sets about 4.5 degrees North of West. By the way, the sunset & sunrise are figured from the top edge of the sun. The software also accounts for where Hildesheim lies within its time zone: you can see how the yellow 12 representing clock noon doesn't quite match the sun's noon, which is always 180d South. But no-one knows at what instant after the sun broke the local horizon on Sept 21, AD 1001 (Julian calendar) the authorities might have marked the church's axis. And the sun itself is over half a degree wide, so anything between a 4 and 5 degree northward skew on the church's alignment would be extremely accurate.

I inserted the above enlarged image into an Autocad drawing and measured the angle of skew: despite the fuzziness, I get 4 degrees. How about that.

So what does this have to do with Catholicism? Well, consider that in Genesis God saw that all he created was good. And that even after the Fall, God used his physical creation to show his promise to Noah (the Rainbow); to show the Israelites when to break camp (the Shekhinah cloud); and to show the Magi where Jesus was born (the star). So the Catholic Church still stays in touch with God through his creation, and vice versa. We have churches "oriented" to the East, or a saint's feastday dawn; a holiday whose date is calculated each year based on the movement of the Moon and the Sun (Easter); and another which was probably originally observed on the Winter Solstice (Christmas). Given the intimate relationship the Church maintains with God through the physical world, it's no surprise that it was she who recognized the 1-day-per-128-years error in the Julian calendar, and had the knowledge and the authority to fix it.

Fine Art Handout 2: Hildesheim

In last Wednesday's class we started with about 5 minutes' review of Genesis, up through Chapter 2, verse 24: "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh." In that prior class I deliberately left off the last verse of Chapter 2, "And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed," because I wanted to use it in the next class to link the new material to the just-reviewed material. Planning-wise, I like to treat Genesis 2's innocent nakedness in the same class that we read, "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons."

So the new material began with explaining that sinless Adam and Eve were no more embarrassed or ashamed of their nakedness than a baby would be. Then we covered Adam & Eve & Sin, reading, discussing, and acting from the beginning of Gen 3: "Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the LORD God had made," to "He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life." To illustrate Adam & Eve's shame and guilt-dodging, I described an old bronze bas-relief I'd learned about in Art History back in 1977:

"I love Adam & Eve after they disobey God. God says, "Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" and they start whining about like I would: "The man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate."  Adam means: you gave me this woman, and she gave me the fruit so what was I supposed to do? It ain't my fault! "Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate." That is, it ain't my fault either, the Devil made me do it! So is that right? No, it's their fault! Yes, but didn't the serpent bring the whole mess up? Yes, but they could've said no. Right, because they had...free will! Yes. Couldn't God have forced Adam & Eve to be good? Yes, but it wouldn't have counted. Right. God doesn't force anyone to love Him. Would I want to force my kids to love me? No. Right. So tell me, Adam and Eve should have obeyed God because...he's smarter than them? Yes, but I'm looking for a more wonderful reason...'cause He loves them? Yes, but not so much because He loves them, but...because they love God! Yes, genius! The best obedience comes from love. But Adam and Eve loved themselves more than they loved God. That's a problem all their children struggle with, too.

"Hey, this reminds me of a great picture of this whole forbidden-fruit business, I have to show y'all [I draw and act out]. God's like this, jabbing his finger at Adam & Eve: man, y'all are so bad and I Am Angry! And then Adam's all scrunched over like he needs to pee, covering his crotch with a leaf in one hand like so, and pointing at Eve with the other hand, nooo, it's her fault! And Eve's covering up and scrunched down too, pointing at the serpent: it's his fault! Anyway, I just love all the finger-pointing business. Yes? Where's the real picture? It's on the door of a church in Europe, I forgot what church though. Well, I want to see it! Me too! OK, I'll try to find it on the Net."

Today I pulled out my old Art History textbook and started turning pages in the Renaissance chapters: if it was a bronze bas-relief that'd likely mean it was in 15th-16th century Italy somewhere, but not Ghiberti's doors in Florence. No luck. So I described the image to My Wife the Art History Professor...she ponders for 5 seconds. Then: "Have you tried St. Michael's at Hildesheim?" No! And I love St. Michael's anyway! Yes! There it is...I was off by about 500 years.

This newly-made handout will be part of the review of our last class:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

St. Michael's Church in Hildesheim, Germany

  God, Adam, Eve, the Tree, and the Serpent on the original doors of the church.

Whose fault was it that Adam and Eve ate the fruit?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Isn't that a terrific teaching tool? And St. Michael's is so lovely with its six towers. I show the church just in case any of the kids ever find themselves near Hildesheim, they can tootle over and have a look.

P.S. The handout was quite the success. Some of the kids thought it was so funny that on their own initiative they got up in the front of class to act out the above scene. One might say that hilarity ensued.

Fine Art Handout 1: Ravenna

Regular readers may remember I was in Ravenna, Italy this summer, where I saw some mosaics I wanted to use in this year's catechism class. Images help children learn, but I like to use fine art rather than something specifically pitched at 11-year-olds. The kids can learn from a "grownup" mosaic as well as they can a cartoon; and fine art is simply a richer experience, spiritually, culturally, aesthetically, you name it.

Next week we'll be covering Genesis from Cain & Abel through the Sacrifice of Isaac. I've made up a 1-page handout for the class showing the mosaics, and a bit of scriptural narration to go with the images.

Here it is:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Genesis 4: "Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering..."

Genesis 14: "And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High."

Genesis 18: "Abraham looked, and behold, three men stood in front of him... Then he took curds, and milk, and the calf, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.

Genesis 22: "Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. 10 Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I." He said, "Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me."

These two mosaics flank the altar in San Vitale church in Ravenna, Italy

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is typical of my handouts: one page with big images so the kids can discuss the details, and leftover space filled with supporting verses. Fast and easy. It doesn't mean much without class discussion, but that's deliberate: time & effort go into the lesson plan, not the handout. The handout isn't intended to replace live learning, but to support it. And I want the kids to evangelize their parents. I tell them to show the handout to their parents and explain to them what they learned. All of them don't do that, but some of them do (I get feedback).

As usual there'll be some step-by-step Bible reading, questions, answers, picking out relevant information from the mosaics and relating it to the following themes:

Abel: shepherd, innocent victim, altar, red cloak, sacrificing a lamb, resentment; Abel is a type of Christ.

Melchizedek: a priest outranking Abraham, bread and wine, what a priest's job is, Melchizedek is a type of Christ.

Abel & Melchizedek: God finds both of their offerings acceptable, unlike Cain's.

Abraham and the 3 visitors (the Hospitality of Abraham): Married love wants to create children; 3 visitors foreshadow the Trinity; a miraculous (but not immaculate) conception; Isaac means Laughter.

Abraham & Isaac: sacrifice of only son; pagan sacrifice of firstborn; faith & works; a substitute sacrifice (lamb/ ram); Isaac prefigures Christ.

All of the above can be taught without pictures; but pictures make the learning so much more effective. Depending on how the discussion goes, I may say a few things about how these Genesis stories connect to Jesus and/ or the Mass. If I don't, they'll be reviewed on the fly when we cover the Gospels and the Mass later on.