On trembling

Yo he repartido papeletas clandestinas,
gritando: ¡VIVA LA LIBERTAD! en plena calle
desafiando a los guardias armados.
Yo participé en la rebelión de abril:
pero palidezco cuando paso por tu casa
y tu sola mirada me hace temblar.

- Ernesto Cardenal

(I passed out fliers in secret,
Shouted “Long live freedom!” in the middle of the street
Openly defying armed soilders.
I took part in the April rebellion:
But I am afraid when I walk by your house,
When only a look from you makes me tremble.)

On large families

Above: My great-grandmother, mother of eighteen children

Recently, we were visiting family in my wife’s ancestral stomping ground, Opelousas, LA. (Both of her parents were born in that area, and her roots go back there to the eighteenth century.) Among other places, we visited my wife’s oldest aunt. My wife had always told me that her aunt had lived quite close to her mother’s old house, but I was surprised how close. It was literally right across the fence, and I think you could easily toss something from one window to another. Grandmother Marie Celeste had married late (late twenties) so she only ended up having eight children. (My wife’s paternal grandmother was one of eighteen.) But at the tail end of her childbearing years, she decided to just have her oldest daughter raise the remaining children. To this we owe the rather bizarre proximity of the two houses. Grandmother has since passed to her reward.

Personally, such a story touches a bit of a sore spot for me. My mother is also one of eight children. Now, if some couple has eight children, God forbid that they go in a nursing home in their old age or have a stranger come in to take care of them. At least one of the children, usually the eldest daughter (or perhaps son) will take in the parents or parent in their old age. My grandmother took care of her mother (Mama Tula, mother of eighteen children, pictured above), and so now my mother is taking care of my grandparents in their old age, to the point of living in the same house. (My mother is the second oldest daughter.) Now, being the cosmopolitan person that I am, I am somewhat disturbed that my mother wants to re-play the drama of the protagonist of the movie, Like Water for Chocolate as she is about to enter her sixth decade. But that is how families were. Obligation and duty to your elders came first, even if it killed you. A child would not dream of moving far away if he or she felt needed by the family.

Some Takemitsu

St. Expedite

More on the saint via the Lonely Goth blog:

“In the same family, you can find a Chinese Taoist, an Indian Muslim, a metropolitan Catholic, an African witch doctor and a Tamil Hindu,” I was told by a Tamil Catholic priest. “It all makes a lot of work for the priesthood: we are continually having to explain to our parishioners what is and is not Christianity.”…

In 1931 a box of sacred relics arrived from the Vatican. Somewhere in transit the label detailing the saint’s name had been lost, and the only indication as to its contents was a stamp on the side reading, in Italian, “ESPEDITO” (expedited). So began the cult of St Expedit, whose popularity grew year by year, until what had started as a clerical error ended with St Expedit becoming Réunion’s unofficial patron saint, a saint whose unwritten biography has come to crystallise the most profound hopes and fears of the island’s multiple ethnicities.

There are now about 350 shrines on Réunion dedicated to St Expedit. They sit beside every road junction, crown every hilltop, lie deep in the bottom of the island’s wildest ravines.

The local Catholic Church has given the saint the trappings of an early Christian martyr, with a silver breastplate and a red tunic. Hindus treat St Expedit as an unofficial incarnation of Vishnu; those wanting children come to his shrine and tie saffron cloths to the grilles.

More exotic still, some of the island’s sorcerers have given the cult a slightly sinister aspect by decapitating the saint’s image, either to neutralise his power or to use the head in their own incantations. According to Loulou, the sorcerer at Ilet des Trois Salazes had a small oratory in which he kept several heads of St Expedit.

“He used them to cast spells,” said Loulou. “We were all terrified of him: everyone believed he had very strong powers. But in the end the people kicked him out because he began to demand bribes not to cast spells on us all.”

“Weren’t you frightened that he would take revenge on you?”

“We took precautions,” replied Loulou. “We used stronger magic. We sent someone to the grave of La Sitarane in Saint-Pierre. It is the most powerful grave on the island. With La Sitarane on your side, no one can harm you at all.”

Watching the enemy at work

Just so that I won’t be accused of being a closed-minded Marxist.

I know, I know, seeing the movie isn’t like reading the book. Maybe one day I will read the book. But if Hayek is just being a senile old man creating facile caricatures of his own thought, someone should step forward and just say so. But from what I saw, I will comment:

One of Hayek’s assertions is that things are just too darned complicated to be planned. And any attempt to plan them will result in the loss of freedom. One can see from here the ultimate appeal of Hayek and the Austrian school of economics to Catholic thinkers (no matter how much like dilettantes they actually are in real life). Substitute “unpredictability” for original sin, “asceticism” for competition, “grace” for the invisible hand, and “the market” for God, and you have systems that parallel each other nicely. One must have faith in Providence, oh, I mean “market forces” and competition to provide the necessary things. And no, they will not provide a utopia, but they will provide an optimum society (for who, I don’t know), and besides, as Hayek asserts, intellectuals want planning because the present order is one not of their making. But traditional structures of society (not the State) work, and they are not made by planning.

Catholic history FAIL

I was browsing around for more information about this CD of Gallican chant of the clerics of Auxerre Cathedral in the 18th century. From information I read about years ago on another website, this was the chant composed by exiled Jansenist clergy who wanted to preserve the pure chant traditions of the French Church against the Jesuits and other future ultramontanist forces.

I cannot confirm the information, other than this review from Gramophone from some years back.

However, I did manage to find a free track from this record at this site, as a soundtrack for, of all things, the Litany of the Sacred Heart. Now, all you novice church historians should know that the Jansenists despised the cult to the Sacred Heart, the much loved weapon of their mortal enemies, the Jesuits. Not sure if this person posted this out of irony, but I at least got the joke.

Notes on personal religiosity

There are four tendencies that have influence, which I rank in ascending order of importance:

1. The post-Vatican II church: To tell the truth, I have never taken the modern Catholic church seriously. I mean, “never”. Even as a child, I knew all of it was rubbish. That goes for the modern Mass, the new catechism, any pope after Pius XII, and so on. If I have any affiliation with it whatsoever, it is because of nostalgia and an affinity for things not the modern church. It sometimes still keeps trinkets of the atavistic past (that pull on my heart strings) and it can defend values that I don’t find so bad at this point (tolerance, pluralism, etc.) But as a thing in itself, I find it all completely ridiculous.

Some Philip Glass for your Friday

An organ transcription of the end of the opera, Satyagraha.

This is not a liturgical post

The trajectory of thought in the last ten or so years of my life has been the following: at first, I thought truth was political. Then, I concluded that it was doctrinal. Later, I concluded that it was liturgical and mystical. I got over that and concluded that truth was theurgical, cultural and aesthetic. That also died off and I have once again concluded that the truth is historical, dialectical, and yes, political. From that strange trajectory, I think one could speak of a Hegelian negation of a negation. It is not that I have concluded that the “spiritual” is a mystification of the true material reality. It is more that I have seen how material the spiritual really is, how conditioned it is by things of a “baser nature”, if one could even speak in such terms. All the while, even in such historically conditioned circumstances, it loses none of its transcendence.

It is in that sense that I can comment on Geoffrey Hull’s book, Banished Heart: Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic Church. I am not really interested in liturgy (as I have stated before), nor did I find the book all that compelling. Nevertheless, even my newly recovered philosophical orientation has not prevented me from pursuing a broad range of interests. A book that claims to analyze the degeneration of the religious ethos of the West can thus be of some interest to me.

On Paradise

When in a vision I saw
A mullah ordered to paradise,
Unable to hold my tongue,
I said something in this wise:

‘Pardon me, O Lord,
For these bold words of mine,
But he will not be pleased
With the houris and the wine.

He loves to dispute and fight,
And furiously wrangle,
But paradise is no place
For this kind of jangle.

His task is to disunite
And leave people in the lurch,
But paradise has no temple,
No mosque and no church.’

-Muhammad Iqbal, translated by Naeem Siddiqui