On art and commitment

[originally posted here]

Shostakovich is a composer very dear to my heart, and not just because I am an ex-Marxist. The power, drive and idealism that his music exudes are truly astounding in a century so dominated by musical experiments that didn’t work. There was no flamboyant experimentalism in his music, even though it was indeed modern. His symphonies are unparalleled works of music in the twentieth century, and he is undoubtedly the greatest master of that genre in modern times.

Shostakovich was not a great composer in spite of being a communist. It was because of his convictions that he could write such moving symphonic works. He very much tried to be a composer of the people, even if the Stalinist bureaucracy tried to put stumbling blocks in his way.

Was he stifled as an artist because he lived in such a repressive regime? One of my favorite anecdotes is that of Bertolt Brecht moving back to Soviet-occupied Germany. When asked by Western reporters whether he felt repressed because of the censorship of the Soviet regime, he replied that at least in this socialist society, important government officials would set him aside for hours to talk to him about his work, when in the West they would simply ignore him.

Do we censor the arts and ideas by simply ignoring them? Is our own society even more toxic to the arts and culture because, rather than persecuting them, we simply ignore them? And does such a situation lower the aesthetic standard of the works that this decadent society produces?

I don’t want to impose a repressive regime on anyone, but what is the true intellectual and cultural cost of the dictatorship of personal license?

St. Joseph’s Cord

[Originally posted here]

AG, as you may well know from reading her blog, is from New Orleans. Her family hails from a small city some ways away called Opelousas. You can read more about her memories of going to this place here, as well as on other parts of her fine blog.

Her parents were recently in the Bay Area, and her father regaled us with many tales of growing up in a sharecropping family in the Louisiana countryside. Being Creoles, they grew up speaking both French and English, and now having met his mother, I can say that I really don’t know when that gentle woman is speaking English and when she is speaking French. (She makes a fine gumbo, though.) And of course, they are Catholics to the core.

Mr. G told one story in particular that intrigued my sense of the unusual and the extraordinary. As in other places in rural communities, doctors were few and far between. People had to rely on other means of healing in order to cure their ailments, sometimes even in emergencies. Mr. G. told me about “treaters”, people who could pray over people and make them better. One story in particular highlighted the role of these people in that community.

The G. family had an old dog that had the useful habit of attacking and chasing away snakes. Usually, it was quick and agile enough to get out of the way of a snake when it would strike. One time, though, it was not quick enough, and a poisonous moccasin bit the dog in the face. The dog’s face began to swell up and it became mortally ill.

Not wanting to lose the dog, the family called the grandfather who was known as a treater. One of the main tools of a treater in that community was the St. Joseph’s Cord, the image of which you see above, and prayers that go along with it can be found here. After this treater recited the prayers of the St. Joseph’s Cord, the dog became a little better. After three days, the dog’s face returned to its normal size and he was up and about again as feisty as ever.

I thought this story was quaint and uplifting for a variety of reasons. I have always been puzzled in the Gospels as to why Christ could not perform miracles in places where there was little faith. I don’t think an easy answer can be given to this question. Maybe this is why the miraculous is so scarce in our day and age. For the miracle is often the result of faith sown in love, and love is the bond of all things, and it can do all things. As we see in this story, it can even cure a lethal snake bite. In this sense, loving prayer can be considered magical.

being to timelessness as it’s to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land

(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy’s
a universe emerging from a wish)

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

-do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools,all’s well

-e.e. cummings

On Forgetting

Poema LXXI

Hasta en tu modo
de olvidar hay
algo bello.

Creía yo que todo
olvido era sombra;
pero tu olvido es
luz, se siente
como una viva luz…

¡Tu olvido es
la alborada borrando
las estrellas!…

-Dulce María Loynaz

(Even in your way
of forgetting there is
something beautiful.

I used to believe that all
forgetting was shadow;
but your forgetting is
light, it feels
like a living light…

Your forgetting is
the dawn erasing
the stars!…)

On the nature of the prophet

The mirror the divine essence was placed face to face,
so that this form was duplicated,
the reflection of the divine essence appeared in the mirror,
the name of this reflection became Mustafa.
If such an image had not been born
the conclusion of beauty would come with him.
All flames come from this one flame
which illumines from earth to heaven.

The explanation of this is given thus by the masters of knowledge and the possessors of inner wisdom. The first emanation of God, may his state be exalted, is the light of Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him. That is, the absolute Creator brought the light of Muhammad into being 1,670,000 years before all other existent and created things. Hazrat ibn Jauzi wrote that God said to this light, “Become Muhammad,” so that it became a column of light and stood up and reached to the veil of divine greatness- then it prostrated and said, “Praise Be to God!” Then God said, “For this I have created you and I will make you the beginning of creation and the end of the Prophets”.

-Khwaja Muhammad Akbar Warithi, Milad-e-Akbar, found in the book, Religions of India in Practice

On severed heads and other sloppy thoughts

I was going to write a nice, organized post for this week, but I have been busy this weekend, so expect much shorter posts for the time being. One “Facebook scuffle” I got into was with my “magisterial Protestant” friends. Apparently, they like to study history, but they study it in such a distorted manner that it reminds one of nineteenth century British gentlemen going on safari in Africa. They only really go to gawk at strange beasts, and have a detached vicarious experience from the safety of a civilized party of “explorers” who take a break for afternoon tea. When a Catholic studies Christian history, he tends to realize that he is indeed “one of the natives”.

My friend’s brief essay was on the veneration of the head of St. Edward the Confessor in ninth century England. He has a hard time understanding how medievals could believe such things as people:

claiming that the severed head of a saint-king, which had been callously tossed aside by his killers and lost in the bushes, answered people calling out to it by saying, “Over here! Over here!”, so that they could find it and reunite it with the body – which, as so often happened in these sorts of stories, subsequently remained incorrupt.

Or find edifying the idea of a:

…hagiographical tradition claims that he was so “holy” that he voluntarily slept with his wife for many years without ever touching her in any way not suitable to a mere sister…This problem is, of course, subsequent to the larger problems involved in trying to grasp what a “celibate marriage” might be, and why it is supposedly “holier” to treat one’s wife like one’s mere sister than as one’s WIFE.

Herman Scherman

A ballet by William Forsythe

Also of interest, the interview: Did William Forsythe Invent The Modern Ballerina?

On the Church and Language

Or: On Pizza, Beer, Machine Guns, Transliterated Greek Words, Argentine Sedevacantism, Taxi Cabs and Other Attractions of My Theological Freak Show

This essay was originally posted here

Sometimes I think that there is no such thing as Roman Catholicism. Rather, there are Roman Catholicisms. My religious experiences with Mexicans and Argentines seem so far removed from any conversations about religion that I have in this country among “non-Latins”. There is an antiseptic, dry quality to everything that is said in the United States about the Roman Catholic Church. This quality even penetrates to the fringes and extremes of any Catholic phenomenon in this country.

When we were occasionally let out of seminary in Argentina, I would sometimes be able to go into the actual city of Buenos Aires to see the sights and take a break from the usual diet of gruel and water. A few times, I went out with my best friend Nico, another bohemian who had no business being an SSPX seminarian, to spread clerical terror in the land of the porteños. One of my favorite things to do was to go to San Telmo, the old part of the city, and have some beer and pizza. Now, Argentine pizza is different from the pizza we have here: it is much less greasy, the crust is thicker, and it has less of a sense of being a type of fast food. And it goes wonderfully with a nice Argentine beer.

Unmistaken Child

AG and I didn’t love this movie, but it was still interesting nonetheless. In a way, it was strangely touching.

On being paid to think religious thoughts

…But it went against Maimonides’ grain to use the Torah as a spade. The notion that the communities were obligated to subsidize scholars in their studies was something he regarded as an “error, for neither the Torah nor the books of the later sages have any guiding principle, any indication to support this.”

No one could demonstrate that the great teachers of the past “demanded money from the people; they did not collect money for respected and distiguished academies… Had Hillel asked for help, they would have filled his house with gold and precious stones, but he did not wish to take anything, he nourished himself from the proceeds of his work; he scorned donations for the sake of the Torah.

-Abraham Joshua Heschel, Maimonides

The Virgin in a tree

Some personal notes about apparitions

On June 17, 1992 Anita Mendoza Contreras claimed to have had a spiritual vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She had been feeling depressed that day when she visited the oak grove and “had been sitting at the picnic table under the tree praying. A wind came up, and Mendoza looked up and saw the image.” Contreras recalled that the vision arrived in the image of the Holy Blessed Mother, in a sea shell and carrying the image of the Sacred Heart on her chest. The image spoke to her and before leaving left her mark upon the oak tree. When asked why the form of the Virgin (as well as other images sighted later) had appeared on the oak tree Contreras replied that its purpose is “so people don’t kill, don’t hit their wives, don’t abuse their children and to help people find truth.” After the spread of the news that a miracle had occurred at Pinto Lake pilgrims started pouring in from the surrounding areas.

-taken from this website

This occured in Watsonville, CA, which is about twenty miles from where I grew up in Hollister. In 1992, my mother was active in the Legion of Mary in my hometown, and I went to see this image of the Virgin in a tree when it was very much at the height of its popularity. Mind you, I was a particularly crazy and devout thirteen year old at the time, so I think my disposition was to believe above all else. When I got there, however, the skeptical cynic took hold of me once again. As I looked up into the tree, all I saw was a blotch in the wood that to me could have been anything. Yes, like most Catholics, especially Mexican ones, Fatima and Lourdes had to believed out of piety, and Guadalupe out of ontological necessity. But that didn’t look like anything to me.

“That’s not her,’ I said quite audibly, showing once again my penchant for being rather less than diplomatic in very public situations. I seem to remember some rather hostile stares from those within earshot, but I just walked away, not prepared to try to break my neck to try to see in that bark something that I knew was simply not there.