"Really," protested Martin Wood, "I do think you should be the last man in the world to tinker about with those beautiful Gothic arches, which are about the best work your own religion has ever done in the world. I should have thought you'd have had some feeling for that sort of art; but I can't see why you should be so uncommonly keen on photography."

"I'm uncommon keen on daylight," answered Father Brown, "especially in this dingy business; and photography has the virtue of depending on daylight. And if you don't know that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul, you don't know so much about my religion as you think you do." --Father Brown: The Doom of the Darnaways, G.K. Chesterton

Love It

Love going to the Dollar Store, that last twilight outlet of the store rows, closest to the train tracks. 25 nifty brushes for 3 bucks. You pay that and more - far more - for just one brush at the art store or some ostentatious online Rusky outfit. "But, but!" LOL. Trust me - it's not so much the brush - though sometimes it is (especially with egg tempera) - it's how you use it. You can paint with just about anything. You have to bend that fork. In fact, it's the same with the fine brushes too - it's how you use them. The quality of an instrument does not subsume its proper and most fruitful use. It is the other way around. I love that arts and crafts section and the whole store with its Snickers and Mars bars doppelgangers. It's a place to dream in. Maybe it conjures that old A-Team feeling in me. Going to the Dollar Store is so Chestertonian.

That will settle the Manichees

"You know, Chesterton, if we opened your head, we would not find a brain but only a lump of white fat."  --Elementary school teacher to the future genius G.K. Chesterton


“We call this man a dumb ox, but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world.” --St. Albert on St. Thomas Aquinas

Ah, bellissimo. I always knew Chesterton was a Thomist and St. Thomas Aquinas was a Chestertonian.

Superb article on Chesterton moving towards sainthood

James Parker has this article in The Atlantic: A Most Unlikely Saint.

His piece reminded me of why I love Chesterton so much.

H/T: Joseph Pearce at The Ink Desk.

How often in the name of stability
we have insisted on sadness?

Good G.K.C. - my friend and saint -
wrote well about this state, wherein

the plod of solemnity and weight
is absolutely easy to maintain

precisely for the reason it is
a forced incapacity, a mono-chord

that leaves out the effortless lightness
of our being's contingency.

It is difficulty sealed, rounded
back on itself. But one only breaks

into a smile, into a new vista,
into a skyward sprawling tree

splitting the husk of the seed.
You know, I do not think my Uncle Chestnut

was as fat as he pretended to be.

Judging

Never ever think that you have someone pegged. The "ever" qualifier in that statement cannot be overdone, because you simply never have anyone pegged - far from it.

It makes me queasy to see the ease with which the orthodox and the conservative brush away the injunctions about not judging people (paired with the edification to listen) - the immediate classification they give to this warning as fuzzy liberal relativism. Is it a good sign when the immediate reaction to "do not judge" is to classify the phrase "do not judge" as fuzzy liberal relativism? It is ironic, that is for sure.

But it is a very real warning and it concerns a grave danger, connected with the gravest sin, pride. Is that something to be taken lightly? Is it a waste of time to contemplate the dangers - personal dangers - of the gravest of sins and its intrinsic occasions? Do you think the Devil is stupid?

Do not think you have someone figured out, or pegged, or that you know where that person is coming from. Are you anyone's creator? It seems to me the creator of people knows people best, and that you and me know only a fragment about the people we judge, and those fragments are intertwined with ourselves, making it even more a blind judgement - and out of the entire narrative of that person's life, you are acquainted with...what exactly?

A person is "a unique and unrepeatable creation". A mystery - an unpeggable mystery.

Not only are you judging someone, you are judging history like you were the God of history. A person claims to be vigorous and intelligent with a strenuous demand for clarity, but there is too often a huge and winding slime trail of lazy-assed, presumed-upon, crusty, half-formed and malformed conceptions and assumptions that precede their super orthodox stand-offs, which, interestingly, often lean toward the flippant.

The dangers of pride: the phrase probably sounds very quaint and old fashioned to some or to many. Who hears sermons about pride? About how it's the corruption of the highest, which means it is the worst corruption and the most poisonous, the most far-reaching, and the most undetectable. Anyone often hear a sermon about this?

One touchstone of pride, one of the foremost telltale signs, is a form of pegging other people. The forms are varied as people are. It is not just making gross mischaracterizations about someone. The injunction to not judge people is not simply a refraining from - as in, well, okay, I won't judge people, check, check, check, now let's get on with it. For not judging people only and ever rests upon the positive commandment to love your neighbour as yourself. So at the heart of this judging, this pegging of other people, is a spiritual deletion of a person's image - that person who is made in the image of God. It is more painful in a manner than physical violence. For this judging does not necessarily constitute looking at a person with a conclusive judgement. It also, and today more often, includes not looking at people at all; so that our sound arguments become conclusive categorizations of people - as in, they become the pinnacle or summation of our regard for our neighbour.

It is precisely in our love for neighbour that we see what they are doing wrong, and in that context speak about it, and do what prudence and courage demand and inspire. We cannot make arguments while neglecting love of neighbour, for even our sound arguments will become dirty.

I'm as guilty as anyone. This post only proves it.

*

From the Father Brown story, The Miracle of Moon Crescent, by G.K. Chesterton:

Fenner laughed and then looked puzzled. 'I don't understand one thing,' he said. 'If it was Wilson, how did Wynd come to have a man like that on such intimate terms? How did he come to be killed by a man he'd seen every day for years? He was famous as being a judge of men.'

Father Brown thumped his umbrella on the ground with an emphasis he rarely showed.

'Yes,' he said, almost fiercely; 'that was how he came to be killed. He was killed for just that. He was killed for being a judge of men.'

They all stared at him, but he went on, almost as if they were not there.

'What is any man that he should be a judge of men?' he demanded. 'These three were the tramps that once stood before him and were dismissed rapidly right and left to one place or another; as if for them there were no cloak of courtesy, no stages of intimacy, no free-will in friendship. And twenty years has not exhausted the indignation born of that unfathomable insult in that moment when he dared to know them at a glance.'

Pride is from hell

Two classic essays by the master essayist G.K. Chesterton are on humility and pride.

Here is a quote from the essay on pride, entitled, If I Had Only One Sermon To Preach:

"There is produced also a sort of subconscious ossification; which hardens the mind not only against the traditions of the past, but even against the surprises of the future. Nil admirari becomes the motto of all nihilists; and it ends, in the most complete and exact sense, in nothing."

Here is a quote from Pope Francis' closing speech for the Synod:

"One, a temptation to hostile inflexibility [trans: rigidity], that is, wanting to close oneself within the written word, (the letter) and not allowing oneself to be surprised by God, by the God of surprises, (the spirit); within the law, within the certitude of what we know and not of what we still need to learn and to achieve."

Here is another quote from the pride essay:

"The moment the self within is consciously felt as something superior to any of the gifts that can be brought to it, or any of the adventures that it may enjoy, there has appeared a sort of self-devouring fastidiousness and a disenchantment in advance, which fulfils all the Tartarean emblems of thirst and of despair."

Here is another quote from Pope Francis' closing speech:

"...and also to transform the bread into a stone and cast it against the sinners, the weak, and the sick (cf Jn 8:7), that is, to transform it into unbearable burdens (Lk 11:46)."

and:

"The temptation to neglect the “depositum fidei” [the deposit of faith], not thinking of themselves as guardians but as owners or masters [of it]..."

Here is a quote from G.K.C.'s essay on humility, A Defense Of Humility:

"Looking down on things may be a delightful experience, only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that is really seen when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarified heaven; only he sees everything foreshortened or deformed."

Here is a quote from Pope Francis' closing speech:

"And this is the Church, the vineyard of the Lord, the fertile Mother and the caring Teacher, who is not afraid to roll up her sleeves to pour oil and wine on people’s wound; who doesn’t see humanity as a house of glass to judge or categorize people."

and:

"Many commentators, or people who talk, have imagined that they see a disputatious Church where one part is against the other, doubting even the Holy Spirit, the true promoter and guarantor of the unity and harmony of the Church – the Holy Spirit who throughout history has always guided the barque, through her Ministers, even when the sea was rough and choppy, and the ministers unfaithful and sinners."

Anyways, my allegiance is with Peter.

"When we shut our door on the wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtain knowledge." --G.K. Chesterton, A Defense Of Humility

Photo Portrait

"It is good for us at certain times that ourselves should be like a mere window--as clear, as luminous, and as invisible." --G.K. Chesterton, A Defense of Humility

Coloured Pictures

This is the sort of book we like
(For you and I are very small),
With pictures stuck in anyhow,
And hardly any words at all.

You will not understand a word
Of all the words, including mine;
Never you trouble; you can see,
And all directness is divine—

Stand up and keep your childishness:
Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures;
But don’t believe in anything
That can’t be told in coloured pictures.


---


A poem that G.K.C. wrote in a Randolph Caldecott picture book that he presented to a young friend.

Locus Focus - A home where there are none

Link up, share and read about the settings and worlds in books

"It was already very dense twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable. But if ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the human spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops into that silence has something about it as of evil elfland. It seems to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God - such a place was Buxton Common, near Purley."

This Saturday's Locus Focus looks for a memorable (and recently remembered) setting in an early, obscure collection of short stories written by G.K. Chesterton and published in 1905, called, The Club of Queer Trades.

The six stories, making a slim volume easily read in one day, are narrated by Charles Swinburne, as he follows Basil Grant (former judge gone mad at the bench, now eccentric mystic and somewhat hermetic sleuth living mostly in his attic) and his more practical brother, Rupert Grant, private eye.

The trio is always happening upon inexplicable, often nightmarish mysteries that are inevitably discovered to have The Club of Queer Trades behind them.

This book is a gem. It is an early, crackling concentration (and portending) of many later Chesterton books: Father Brown, Manalive, The Four Faultless Felons, and there's even the air of The Man Who was Thursday in it - not to mention Dickens' The Pickwick Papers.

Before getting to the setting (nice rhyme eh?) in the fourth chapter (or fourth story), some light should be shed on what The Club of Queer Trades is:

"The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men's furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle…is the same. Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, [LOL!] unless he could drive a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world."

It is so good to return to this book! Each story is like a poem.

The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent is Chapter IV, and has the Grant brothers and Swinburne getting to the bottom (or shall we say top?) of an adventurous character named Lieutenant Drummond Keith, "…a man about whom conversation always burst like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room."

After Keith nonchalantly borrows a hundred pound cheque from Basil, both Rupert's and Charles' suspicions are aroused, in addition to the many other attributes about Keith's character. And they all go along with Keith to see whether this house-agent exists, of which Keith said was the purpose for the borrowed money.

The conversation between Keith and the house-agent seems coded and very evasive in front of the suspicious Charles and the far more suspicious and vehement Rupert, while the sleepy Basil seems unperturbed.

The next morning, as Rupert is having breakfast with Basil and Charles, a constable shows up at their door asking about this Lieutenant Keith, because it is apparent he gave the constable a false address after getting into a big street fight the previous night with five other people...

"'It was very simple, sir,' said the policeman, chuckling. 'The place he named was a well-known common quite near London, and our people were down there this morning before any of you were awake. And there's no such house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at all. Though it is so near London, it's a blank moor with hardly five trees on it, to say nothing of Christians. Oh, no, sir, the address was a fraud right enough. He was a clever rascal, and chose one of those scraps of lost England that people know nothing about. Nobody could say off-hand that there was not a particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But as a fact, there isn't.'"

Basil, the mystic, decides he's going to go to the address himself.

"'Get down to that place?' I repeated blankly. 'Get down to what place?'

"'You don't seriously mean,' cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort of confusion of emotions. 'You don't mean that you want to go to Buxton Common, do you? You can’t mean that!'

'Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?' asked Basil, smiling.

'Why should you?' said his brother…

'To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course, ' said Basil Grant. 'I thought you wanted to find him?'

Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently on the floor. 'And in order to find him, ' he said, 'you suggest the admirable expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth where we know he can't be.'. . .

Rupert ran after him with a considerable flurry of rationality.

'My dear chap, ' he cried, 'do you really mean that you see any good in going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but beaten tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place that came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he wanted to give a lying reference in a scrape?'. . .

. . .There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself. But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional wind-stricken trees looked useless, but we, the human beings, more useless than the hopeless turf or the idle trees. We were maniacs akin to the foolish landscape, for we were come to chase the wild goose which has led men and left men in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed men under the captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew was not there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to look at us with a sort of sickly smile before it died. . . .

. . .The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath…There was not a sign of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an innkeeper standing at an open door.

'How jolly it is,' he cried, 'to get back to civilization. That notion that civilization isn't poetical is a civilized delusion. Wait till you've really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel flowers. Then you'll know that there's no star like the red star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you, will be drinking in two or three minutes in enormous quantities.'. . .

Without spoiling anything (though that may be too late at this point) they do find the Lieutenant (and his invisible home), as he greets Rupert and Charles:

'Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in.'

Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing…was protruding the pale face and fierce moustache of the lieutenant…

We fell into the full glow of a lamp-lit, cushioned, tiny room, with a circular wall lined with books, a circular table, and a circular seat around it. At this table sat three people…The spears, the green umbrella, and the cavalry sword hung in parallels on the wall. The sealed jar of strange wine was on the mantelpiece, the enormous rifle in the corner. In the middle of the table was a magnum of champagne. Glasses were already set for us."

Garden Sprawl Friday

""It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride."" --G.K Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Or let me shed tears of pride (and gratitude) reading over this:

No nonsense guide to winter gardening, with charts, times to do the planting, and so on; all of it geared towards growing in southern B.C. It is a product of civilization. I really like West Coast Seeds.

So yes, I have been starting the fall-to-winter garden. Today I planted rutabagas in this empty space at the back of one of the beds:


They are planted on the right side, with a small patch behind them planted with lettuce (the Paris Island Cos lettuce that I started in spring has been really satisfying). On the left (you can see how it's divided with the sticks) will go these leeks,


which were sarted from seed in the greenhouse in early spring. Leeks are very slow growing at first; but then after a certain stage, they grow rapidly. These will probably be harvested late fall. At least that's what I'm hoping. And I will be starting some more leeks (of the same winter variety called 'Bandit') tommorrow, which will be for late winter to spring harvest (overwintering), though for that harvest I am starting them just a weeny bit late (considering their initial slow growth); I'm sure they'll do fine.

August is for planting winter/spring onions (seeds). That is good because it will coincide with the harvesting of the potatoes and other vegetables, making the room I'll need for the winter gardening. It's nice how it works like that. I'll also be trying more carrots, more lettuce, beets ('Winter Keeper'), and of course more cabbage.

I'm also going to get a hold of garlic and horse radish. On top of this all I'm looking to grow for seed saving. Gardening doesn't seem like real gardening until you're attempting a winter garden. And in the meanwhile, the summer has just begun her gravid train.

*

I've made one discovery, after trying a number of times with different plants and seeds. Tin cans, with bottoms punched with holes, don't work very well at all.


Plants hate them. There's something about them that holds too much moisture and then they get way too hot when the sun hits them. It is unfortunate, because I thought it was going to be a great way of re-using all those tin cans we go through.

*

Here's some winter savoury I started from seed:


And some thyme:


The little guy in the tin can I found growing in the greenhouse when I was pulling up some weeds. I noticed a real nice fragrance all of a sudden and located it coming from this 'weed'. I have two of them planted now. It has to be some herb, but I don't know what kind.

*

The pole beans doing their thing:


The pumpkins, doing theirs,


together with the beets (three different varieties, and they obviously require thinning even though I've been thinning them) and the sunflowers, which are going to get a whole lot bigger than they are:


The Minnesota Midget Muskmelons (which yes, are not just little people who hail from Minnesota) are flowering in all that tangle:


All previous photos of beans, beets, pumpkins and muskmelons can be found here.

*

Here is a part of the front yard:


My Dad had been shaving the soil level down since it was too high, and the grass was only starting to reclaim its turf when I came along:


I'm sick in the head.

Same method of digging as found here. There are yellow bush beans and cucmbers started there (click on all photos to enlarge). The cukes might be a bit too lately started, but we'll see.

Next week on Garden Sprawl Fri--oh crap, did I forget to write about kiwifruit again?

Framed

The annual spring art competition and exhibition at the Surrey Arts Center is coming up. For the most part it is fun to look forward to, aside from the one thing I dread most about it: the framing.

Right off the bat I should say that I appreciate what framers do. It is for sure a certain craft that requires care, attention and skill. With that said - and this is entirely from my standpoint - I find having to get my work framed a detestable burden.

It is not because I am picky. It is rather the opposite: typically the first one that the framer shows me makes me want to say, "Yes. That one. Please do not show me any more options."

Really, granted that the frame is not some grotesquely ornate or garish thing, I really couldn't give a hoot about what frame it is. And they proceed to bring out endless possibilities.

There's something else. I don't like bringing my work into the framing store. It feels like I'm bringing a lump of coal into a jeweler's shop and asking him to set it in fancy gold. I'm not trying to look humble here; the feeling is like that, and that's the way it is.

I also don't like the high quality of the frames. That may sound strange. They're too slick, too manufactured, even when they try to look rustic. Even when the frame technically suits my painting, I don't like the way the painting looks with the frame.

Which lands me back to the fact that I may be picky after all. But how can one be picky when none of the options really satisfy? I want to go frameless. I've seen it many times before in past exhibitions. The artist simply paints the sides of the canvas that wrap around its wooden frame; a nice red ochre or something. And they attach the hanging wire to the wood frame already there.

It could be interpreted as being a little too minimalist, or falsely modest - or simply being cheap (with artists surely that is understandable), but I don't mind it.

But the other thing that attracts me even more is making one's own frames. I've come to the conclusion actually that an artist should try and make his own frame; one that is made specifically for a specific painting. (Both painting and carving could go into the frame.) This should be no more a stretch than that the artists of old had to make their own paints from raw material, had to stretch their own canvases - by Lord, even had to make their own brushes for all I know. Indeed, that was half of what the student being apprenticed by a master was all about: you learned how to do everything.

So, one must be vigilant and combative when entering both the framing and the art supply store. Do not let mere availability of supply cripple you.

And yes, I know what Chesterton said:

"Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."

The frame, that is to say, that is the four-square and inherent frame already there by virtue of the painting being, by its very nature, limited to the canvas - as something set apart from the infringing complexities of the world; set apart from them, yet distilling them, so that something is found, discovered, inducing epiphany. In this sense, the frame, by which we mean the wooden or metal thing we adorn a painting with, is just that: decoration of the frame already there.

Outside is the Night

- and strange things in the Night.

Hate

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." --G.K. Chesterton (From: The Blog of the American Chesterton Society)

Time and things

Last night I watched The Passion of the Christ for the first time - though I have watched it at least twenty times before. Film is like that sometimes. It was the same for when I watched Hitchcock's Rear Window and Psycho, having seen both numerous times before, and then watching them after not viewing them for some time. I think it has to do with more than Chesterton's maxim:

"...if you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe, but if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."

For we are not simply talking about "a thing" when we talk about a film, but a number of things - images - relaying in sequence before your eyes; relaying mechanically, so that there is, for want of a better word, a voyeuristic element to it. That is to say, your eyes are taking in material before the retrospective brain can catch up. Alfred Hitchcock knew this well about film, and not incidentally many of his films pursue that very theme: the voyeur; and the getting caught up in something that you cannot control and which puts you and others in extreme danger or in a vulnerable spot, very often in part due to the fault of the one who looks where he ought not to look.

This element of film is also one of the reasons that Andrei Tarkovsky was so adamant (in his book Sculpting in Time and elsewhere) on how necessary it was for the filmmaker to recognize how huge a responsibility he had. Tarkovsky stressed the need for this responsibility to what some would call an exaggerated, blowhard, overbearing stance. But Tarkovsky saw. He knew, and said as much, that film was, in itself, a lumbering mechanical beast; and as such it requires heroic, untiring, vigilant measures of continual threshing and taming.

The power of film is evidenced in this 'ever new' phenomenon, whereby one can return to a certain film (one that is well made) and see it again as though for the first time, or even better than the first time. For film is time. Tarkovsky said that is why people go to see movies. To regain lost time.

And we cannot approach and apprehend eternity except through time.

Horoscopes

Subtitled: yet another long-winded, far too long dictactic essay on a subject you probably don't care about

Crucifixion -- Georges Rouault

“I do not touch the political side,” said the Count serenely, “but only the philosophical. It illustrates how the wise man can get behind time and space and turn the levers of them, so to speak, so that the whole world turns round before our eyes. But is it so hard for you people to believe that spiritual powers are really more powerful than material ones.”

“Well,” said old Smart cheerfully, “I don’t profess to be an authority on spiritual powers. What do you say, Father Brown?”

“The only thing that strikes me,” answered the little priest, “is that all the supernatural acts we have yet heard of seem to be thefts. And stealing by spiritual methods seem to me much the same as stealing by material ones.” -- The Song of the Flying Fish, Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton

Even the Catholic Church's negative proclamations (condemnations, prohibitions) are an embodiment of something at her centre that is not of this world, and of which her followers do not sustain within themselves by following their own will; indeed, not even preserved by their faith, though their faith is essential.

The Church's negative proclamations are not essentially what make her stand against the grain. For every one of her negative proclamations opens out behind itself, if given thought for longer than one's bigotry allows, and connects to a vast cosmology and reason - reason elevated in the Incarnation, which holds the eternal destiny of people in mind.

For instance, the depth, meaning and sacredness of family grows positively and reveals more beauty and gravitas alongside, though not due to, the Church's negative response to contraception. The prohibition of contraception as a mortal sin is inherently tied to an even more uncompromising stance on the positive sacredness and goodness of the family, springing from the sacred conjugal act. The Church's unwavering negative prohibitions are connected to, and outweighed by, an even more extreme goodness, sacredness and freedom - these, as objective realities. One cannot take into account her prohibitions as such and expect to understand them without taking upon oneself the immense positive proposal that is our personal fulfillment and salvation. This positive proposal that is also the most practical and sensible. The proposal that make sense of our very reason, by giving us reason's end.

No sooner do we accept these (prohibitions), even hypothetically, than the whole of the Church's universality threatens our own paradigm with the Word in whose image we are made: it is not the prohibitions that gall and inflame her enemies' cynicism, but that she has all the apparent madness of being unreservedly hardwired to reality, to the core of it, so much so, that the precarious and vastly unrewarding life her accusers are enslaved to, under the forms of entitlement, relativity, autonomy, worldly acceptance and so on, the Church engulfs in the mere advanced initial flames of produced reason. No dichotomy. (What! Using reason as though it were connected to objective truth!) While in so doing, she completely reframes the whole scenario, the entire battle (whether one recognizes the battle or no), from the timeless precursor that is her endless potency within, which is the Blessed Sacrament, the institution of which is the for-real, unbloody reenactment of Calvary.

Now, it is the very point that the Church's rules and guides and principles and prohibitions are there precisely because of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ; because of Christ's coming to us; because of God sending His only Son; because of God's scandalous coming to His creatures as one of His creatures. No, God did not become perfect man for the reason of making a bunch of rules, but what we don't seem to realize is that if those preexisting sanctions were altogether abolished, it would be an imposition - among other things. Since Jesus did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, the rules are there on the basis of His Incarnation - in the form of being simply sustained from the past and transfigured into a whole new meaning. They are in a very real sense no longer rules or laws because our end is not in them, but in Jesus. Because of Jesus' Incarnation, everything of and about the human person, except sin, has been so identified with God - identified to the point of actual incarnation - that everything human takes on an immense and exquisite importance. Not to mention delicate and joyful importance. Man is a sacrament.

Thus, there is a sense in which the true freedom we want is to be found in the Church precisely because she covers all these details about the life of man while at the same time not being bound to them (the rules) as though they were her, and our, end. To repeat from before, the fact that the Church has these prohibitions in actual fact testifies that she does not infringe on one's personal freedom; but she would be infringing on one's personal freedom if she somehow excised the rules and merely minted us with our end. She leaves to us this inescapable notion that the way to true freedom begins where we recognize where we are shackled. Some would say the Church shackles people, merely because the Church addresses all these things that shackle us. The prohibition of contraception is nothing but a perfect thing (as far as prohibitions go). For contraception is nothing but a prohibition. (It would be superfluous to note how ironic it is that a person complains that the Church wants to infringe upon and imprison one's freedom with regards to her stance on contraception - contraception which is the act of putting constrictive, infringing devices around the gift of sex - but well, there it is)

What if, while eating at the breakfast table, you had a curiosity about what 'your horoscope' had to say in the newspaper, which happened to be open at the horoscopes page? Say you had a curious impulse to read just for fun - as though it were no more than say, perusing the comic strips. Would you think it rather extreme if you were told that such an impulse came from the 'dark side'; that it was very much a real temptation to be resisted, and if not resisted, a sin?

Aided by the mediocrity and lack of standard surrounding us (indeed, the imposition of non-standards), we find that when it comes to our own experience, we isolate it, in what is a kind of reverse hypocrisy: we give it the "humble" aspect of having no importance, of having no ramifications. This is one of the main causes of peoples' depression, or nagging emptiness; it is not the recognition of the sin and ensuing repentance that is a cause of depression, but the sustained inability to come to grips with it. The sustained inability to see sin as sin is a virulent cause of depression today. In short, unreality. I throw a baseball through a pane of glass…and maybe the glass was made to break; after all, that's what glass does - it breaks. Recall Chesterton's words about how when he was told, yes, he was right, he felt horrible, but the minute he was told he had been wrong, he leapt for joy.

Where does one encounter the spiritual world if not at the breakfast table? In the addressing of such miniscule details begins either our path to truth and freedom, or begins our path of subjective rationalizations. And we are always beginning. How many are there today, who, when you say the word "spiritual", actually think, That which is more real than this world and which actually gives this world material form? Not many. Most are actually inclined to think of it as the reverse. Many tend to associate the ethereal and vague with the word "spiritual", like something produced entirely by ourselves - like gas. But it is here where the Church becomes distinctly clear-cut and not vague.

All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future.48 Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone. 2116

First thing of note is the assigning of horoscopes (those seemingly glorified fortune cookies) in the same section that addresses divination and "recourse to Satan, demons, conjuring up the dead…" While certainly horoscopes are not in the same intensely dark league as "recourse to demons", especially when read for passing entertainment, horoscopes are, in the Catechism, unmistakably placed right alongside all those other much darker things. It is not what you would call a good thing. Then there is the unabashed language itself: "…all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers." (emphasis mine)

Aside from the thoroughness and straight-up manner in which such things are addressed in the paragraph, the word conciliate jumps out at me. Some definitions of conciliate:

To overcome the distrust or hostility of; placate; win over: to conciliate an angry competitor

To win or gain (goodwill, regard, or favour)

To become agreeable or reconciled

To overcome the distrust or animosity of; appease

To regain or try to regain (friendship or goodwill) by pleasant behaviour

To make or attempt to make compatible; reconcile

To gain or try to gain someone's friendship or goodwill

Cause to be more favourably inclined; gain the good will of

Come to terms

Make (one thing) compatible with (another)

Hidden powers. There is in everyone this wish to appease. To win over people (or the unseen forces from people) who would otherwise dislike us, or seem to. One of the things that play in this is the worship of our self. The obsessing over whether we are liked by someone is to 'consult our horoscope', and see what it says about our self. What condiment are you? What does your taste in food say about you? Take our quiz. What art era are you? Take our quiz. Just fill in the blanks and we'll tell you what kind of person you are. I want the full scoop on myself; tell me doc, hold nothing back. Please God, let the diagnosis consist of more than ten syllables. I couldn't bear anything less. The wish to conciliate hidden powers. The actual consulting of horoscopes is but a form (a rather pathetic form) of practising this 'conciliation'.

If that were not clear about where the Church stands in her belief in the realm of spirit, and the Church's place in it, testifying that this reality we call a spiritual world is conveyed through its being a literal war, going on right now, there is the next section:

All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity. 2117

"…by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion". I quote this not as pertaining to horoscopes specifically but for the language. Note how much the Church believes in the objective reality of this subject. There's no generality here; no making it fuzzy by declaring it a lot of fickleness; no pietistic incompetence about the reality of the darkness. It is the language of one, a soldier perhaps, coming in from the noisy battle lines, with injuries perhaps, and, being on his way to get healing, doesn't mince his words to the bystanders who ask him for a little information about what is going on out there.

Her declarations of truth (in the case of this essay, merely the declarations in the form of negative prohibitions) about the matters of this world have a precursor of revealed truth about that world which gives this world material form: the spiritual world, which is continually intersecting and penetrating this world. And she announces again and again, much to the chagrin of others who want their quietism: "There is a mighty war going on between the angels of heaven and the demons of hell; but be assured hell will not prevail". And in the words of Pope John Paul II:

I would like to remind everyone of a basic principle of faith: prior to and beyond our projects there is a mystery of love which surrounds and guides us: the mystery of God’s love. If we want to give good direction to our life, we must learn to discern its plan, by reading the mysterious "road signs" God puts in our daily history. For this purpose neither horoscopes nor fortune-telling is useful. What is needed is prayer, authentic prayer, which should always accompany a life decision made in conformity with God’s law. (Angelus address, Sept. 6, 1998)

There we come to what was also addressed in the sections from the Catechism: the mystery of God's love. Again, from section 2116, after listing all those 'divination' things (like horoscopes) we ought not to do, says: They contradict the honour, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.

This is the most important in understanding the prohibition of horoscopes, and all the Church's prohibitions for that matter. Why do these things contradict the mystery of God's love? Or to put it another way: why do they have to contradict God's love? Why can't one read horoscopes and still not contradict God's love? Precisely because God's love has already given us the ways and means of attaining what we wish to attain when we read horoscopes.

The ways and means God has provided cost Him nothing less than His life - His only begotten Son. And His Son, being our very life, is intent upon and fascinated (in the most disinterested way) with the details of our very life - more than we typically are ourselves. No dichotomy.

Yet we act as though this uncomprehended Love was a mere matter of opinion or some kind of political difference and go ahead and do foolish things like read horoscopes or have our palms read or worse things, as though it were more conducive to who we are as human persons, who go about as people asleep in the depths of salvific history.

What an insult to the exposed, sacred heart of God. Do we understand that Christ makes Himself vulnerable in the Blessed Sacrament? Yet this is His power over our hearts: His practically imperceptible tenderness. When you see how masterfully Jesus abides in us when we receive the Blessed Sacrament, how he masters someone by making Himself dependent on that one, you see that when you stray away from this, it is a sin against Love itself. It is also an ugly expression of ingratitude. Compounded on this after a little time there rises fear. Fear that God is some bully wanting to nearly crush us like some overbearing and rigid father; one who wants to take away our fun and pastime comforts and our shelter.

Of course, in reading horoscopes the way most do, for 'entertainment', one doesn't commit an extremely grave offence on par with those committed by Satanists, who steal the Blessed Sacrament and desecrate it in their rituals. But make no mistake: it is a transgression; one that needs to be obliterated and washed away in the sacrament of confession - along with all our other offences.

I was working at a lawn and garden equipment store (a job which I quit after around two months) and one day the wife of my boss, who was also my boss, asked for my driver's license before I went with their truck to deliver an order to another equipment store, since it was my first time doing delivery. When I showed her my driver's license, she became interested in my birth date. I believe she said her birthday was October 27 or something, two days after mine, and with an interested bantering that I could tell was yet serious, she said with a kind of intentness, "So, you’re a scorpio too. That's good; you also bite." ("Bite" here was intended as the synonym for "sting", and not "bite" in its derogatory slang sense)

I could tell she put stock into such things, though it was fun-seeming. The thing is, though it was just a passing incident, it was quite an enormous temptation. A temptation to what, one might ask. Well, a temptation to pride. To selfishness. To vanity. Maybe we've heard these words too much before. Maybe try something else: To an untested, hermetically sealed complacency. Let's try another. To gazing into the mirror of the false self and glorying in one's own "personality". Let's try yet another. To conciliating 'oneself' through a manner that will never give it to one, while ignoring the undeserved and freely given manner in which one can conciliate oneself (confession). In other words, to things that lead one away from the cross. (This by no means is intended to mean that I live my life in full accord consistently with the cross; but, well, one is either being led closer to the cross, or away from it)

Pride? We picture pride in phantasmagoric shapes, overthrowing us like it does some guy climbing the echelons of privileged society in some mob movie. Where does pride occur but during such mundane seconds of everyday life and, in consistency with those everyday mundane seconds, in a form quite subtle, even homely, even passing? Such temptations can come about in the span of a few words. And they are indeed spiritual. All that old "monkish" talk of past saints, mystics, hermits and the like, about avoiding the ways of the world have something very vital to tell us. There is too often an artillery of flaying knives, flying spears and arrows in the everyday gabbing between folks.

You will notice the cross comes between things. One fellow in the Epiphany Sacred Arts Guild, who is an experienced calligrapher and illuminator, and who funnily enough, made his past living as an enamel sign-maker, recounted an episode where he was involved for a day or so with some prison ministry. He was repulsed by the insincerity of the prisoners' feigning interest in being evangelized. They were all big smiles and enthusiasm, but retaining the full con-man awareness of the hardened inmate. And so, he was telling how much he wanted to get out of there, naturally being disgusted. It is of course necessary that prison ministry still do what they do, in spite of such things, because you never know, and besides, the ministry is not to be curtailed or shaped by immediate response. Anyhow, he strolled outside after some session to where the inmates were, who just a minute ago were 'being evangelized', and they were talking full tilt amongst themselves about their 'signs'. When he came in contact with their group they asked him what his 'sign' was. His initial disgust not yet being quelled, he said back in his Swiss accent, not without some indignation: "The sign of the cross!"

And that pretty much says it. Because that is our true sign. Not only that but it is the sign that preserves for us the very reality and nature of signs. Signs and symbols have a peculiar way of aggregating what they signify. Then there are the ultimate signs, the sacraments of the Church. They are signs that literally impart the reality they signify. Signs that are what they signify. There are seven of them:

Baptism

Confession

Eucharist

Confirmation

Marriage

Holy Orders

Anointing of the sick/dying

The cross before the riches; the riches through the cross; the cross opens the floodgates of riches; and the riches are made all the more rich through the fact that the cruciformed soul, being both enriched and crucified, does not hoard the riches lavished on it. The soul's partaking of those riches becomes of such a delicate, exquisite partaking, that the soul desires more and more this being cruciformed. It can take delight in the smallest of things, for the soul's ultimate desire is set in order: the desire for God. The soul desires a certain obliteration which is the opposite of suicidal nihilism, or quashing of the self; it is the desire of being fully small as one is and being lost in the depths of God. It is a desire of proportion taken to its ultimate end; the desire of the proper proportion of the creature in relation to God. This lived proportion is endless.

The beginning of this lived proportion cannot begin anywhere but where you are the worst, right in the concrete details of your life. For there lies our assurance that we will not try and set bounds to God's love, which is boundless. And the fact is that every one of us has in the depths of his or her heart, the seed of rebellion - the seed of rebellion which we, because of our fallibility and fallen state, inherently take to be normal, and which we normalize and rationalize. It doesn't matter that you’re a nice person. Niceness never has and never will be the final test of human behaviour. Plenty of nice people are nasty. Some will say that peoples' niceness is precisely where they are most nasty.

A person who guffaws the Church's statements on these matters most likely does not realize that the Church takes these signs, like horoscopes, more seriously than those who read them. Not only seriously as in the Church regards them as something that will draw people away from the truth, but seriously as in the Church regards them as an objective reality, as consequential and real as fire. If you are ever in doubt about one or other of the Church's teachings, remember this: at that very moment of your doubting, the Church believes more the reality of Satan than you do.

So, there are three basic things here: the Church in condemning the reading of horoscopes and other forms of divinization typically takes more seriously and objectively those things than does the sinner mired in them. Secondly, the really important thing to remember about the efficacy of such prohibitions is the Love of God, and that it is His love which offers us more than we can imagine, and being fully open to us, is open to offence, which is what we often commit against His Love. Thirdly, signs aggregate realities; some totally (sacraments), some in lesser but still significant manners, and our true sign is the sign of the cross; the sign of the cross contains God's Love (of the aforementioned second point), and renders real and readable all other signs placed in our way, as opposed to not seeing objectively their reality as mentioned in the above-mentioned first point.

Being in this way entails humility towards signs and their real significances. This gives way to a humble approach to the deepness of reality, an approach imbued with awe. We take care then, in our contact with seemingly insignificant signs; we will be that much more unclouded in our perceptions.

A Chesterton Ballad

Picture found at Philadelphia Roamin' Catholic


"There was an end to Ilium; and an end came to Rome;
And a man plays on a painted stage in the land that he calls home;
Arch after arch of triumph, but floor beyond falling floor,
That lead to a low door at last; and beyond that is no door."

I've held off posting what is perhaps my favourite Chesterton poem, but today feel I should. It is The Ballad of St. Barbara.

I had the mysterious fortune of encountering G.K. Chesterton without secondary reference. Perhaps I should thank my parents that they had a few of his books lying around the house, which I started reading somewhere around mid high school - as I thought, merely through a kind of curiosity. I think the first book was a compilation of essays entitled, by the editor, Brave New Family. That was in mid high school and I did not largely know what Chesterton was talking about in these essays, but what did register was his tone, his voice. I loved it immediately.

So, some years later, out of secondary school I was well immersed in Chesterton, and getting more and more immersed with all of his works. I was in a book store and came across a cheap new paperback of his entire collection of poems. I remember the cost was below five dollars, as it was also put on a bargain sale. One of the best things I ever bought. (Anyone could say that of any of Chesterton's works of course)

The cover of the book had that detail from Sir James Gunn's realistic painting of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring around the table. I remember being surprised at how fat G.K. Chesterton was. I had been picturing him the whole time as a debonair thin guy.

Anyhow, I still have that book, and it is wonderfully tattered and well-worn. Because it was well read. The Ballad of the White Horse and Lepanto were of course poems I returned to often. But The Ballad of St. Barbara really, really spoke to me. Dale Ahlquist has a good review of it here.

Here's the poem (found here):

The Ballad of St. Barbara
By G.K. Chesterton


(St Barbara is the patron saint of gunners, and those in danger of sudden death.)

When the long grey lines came flooding upon Paris in the plain,
We stood and drank of the last free air we never could taste again:
They had led us back from the lost battle, to halt we knew not where
And stilled us: and our gaping guns were dumb with our despair.
The grey tribes flowed for ever from the infinite lifeless lands
And a Norman to a Breton spoke, his chin upon his hands.

"There was an end to Ilium; and an end came to Rome;
And a man plays on a painted stage in the land that he calls home;
Arch after arch of triumph, but floor beyond falling floor,
That lead to a low door at last; and beyond that is no door."

And the Breton to the Norman spoke, like a small child spoke he,
And his sea-blue eyes were empty as his home beside the sea:
"There are more windows in one house than there are eyes to see,
There are more doors in a man's house, but God has hid the key:
Ruin is a builder of windows; her legend witnesseth
Barbara, the saint of gunners, and a stay in sudden death."

It seemed the wheel of the world stood still an instant in its turning,
More than the kings of the earth that turned with the turning of Valmy mill:
While trickled the idle tale and the sea-blue eyes were burning,
Still as the heart of a whirlwind the heart of the world stood still.

"Barbara the beautiful
Had praise of tongue and pen:
Her hair was like a summer night
Dark and desired of men.

Her feet like birds from far away
That linger and light in doubt;
And her face was like a window
Where a man's first love looked out.

Her sire was master of many slaves,
A hard man of his hands;
They built a tower about her
In the desolate golden lands,

Sealed as the tyrants sealed their tombs,
Planned with an ancient plan,
And set two windows in the tower
Like the two eyes of a man."

Our guns were set towards the foe; we had no word for firing.
Grey in the gateway of St Gond the Guard of the tyrant shone;
Dark with the fate of a falling star, retiring and retiring,
The Breton line went backward and the Breton tale went on.

"Her father had sailed across the sea
For the harbour of Africa
When all the slaves took up their tools
For the bidding of Barbara.

She smote the bare wall with her hand
And bade them smite again;
She poured them wealth of wine and meat
To stay them in their pain.

And cried through the lifted thunder
Of thronging hammer and hod
"Throw open the third window
In the third name of God."

Then the hearts failed and the tools fell,
And far towards the foam,
Men saw a shadow on the sands
And her father coming home."

Speak low and low, along the line the whispered word is flying,
Before the touch, before the time, we may not loose a breath:
Their guns must mash us to the mire and there be no replying,
Till the hand is raised to fling us for the final dice to death.

""There were two windows in your tower,
Barbara, Barbara,
For all between the sun and moon
In the lands of Africa.

Hath a man three eyes, Barbara,
A bird three wings,
That you have riven roof and wall
To look upon vain things?"

Her voice was like a wandering thing
That falters yet is free,
Whose soul has drunk in a distant land
Of the rivers of liberty.

"There are more wings than the wind knows
Or eyes that see the sun
In the light of the lost window
And the wind of the doors undone.

For out of the first lattice
Are the red lands that break
And out of the second lattice
Sea like a green snake,

But out of the third lattice
Under low eaves like wings
Is a new corner of the sky
And the other side of things."

It opened in the inmost place an instant beyond uttering,
A casement and a chasm and a thunder of doors undone,
A seraph's strong wing shaken out the shock of its unshuttering,
That split the shattered sunlight from a light beyond the sun.

"Then he drew sword and drave her
Where the judges sat and said,
"Caesar sits above the gods,
Barbara the maid.

Caesar hath made a treaty
With the moon and with the sun,
All the gods that men can praise
Praise him every one.

There is peace with the anointed
Of the scarlet oils of Bel,
With the Fish God, where the whirlpool
Is a winding stair to hell,

With the pathless pyramids of slime,
Where the mitred negro lifts
To his black cherub in the cloud
Abominable gifts,

With the leprous silver cities
Where the dumb priests dance and nod,
But not with the three windows
And the last name of God.""

They are firing, we are falling, and the red skies rend and shiver us,
Barbara, Barbara, we may not loose a breath -
Be at the bursting doors of doom, and in the dark deliver us,
Who loosen the last window on the sun of sudden death.

"Barbara the beautiful
Stood up as queen set free,
Whose mouth is set to a terrible cup
And the trumpet of liberty.

"I have looked forth from a window
That no man now shall bar,
Caesar's toppling battle-towers
Shall never stretch so far.

The slaves are dancing in their chains,
The child laughs at the rod,
Because of the bird of the three wings,
And the third face of God."

The sword upon his shoulder
Shifted and shone and fell,
And Barbara lay very small
And crumpled like a shell."

What wall upon what hinges turned stands open like a door?
Too simple for the sight of faith, too huge for human eyes,
What light upon what ancient way shines to a far-off floor.
The line of the lost land of France or the plains of Paradise?

"Caesar smiled above the gods
His lip of stone was curled,
His iron armies wound like chains
Round and round the world,

And the strong slayer of his own
That cut down flesh for grass,
Smiled too, and went to his own tower
Like a walking tower of brass,

And the songs ceased and the slaves were dumb;
And far towards the foam
Men saw a shadow on the sands;
And her father coming home...

Blood of his blood upon the sword
Stood red but never dry.
He wiped it slowly, till the blade
Was blue as the blue sky.

But the blue sky split with a thunder-crack,
Spat down a blinding brand,
And all of him lay black and flat
As his shadow on the sand."

The touch and the tornado; all our guns give tongue together,
St Barbara for the gunnery and God defend the right,
They are stopped and gapped and battered as we blast away the weather,
Building window upon window to our lady of the light.

For the light is come on Liberty, her foes are falling, falling,
They are reeling, they are running, as the shameful years have run,
She is risen for all the humble, she has heard the conquered calling,
St Barbara of the Gunners, with her hand upon the gun.

They are burst asunder in the midst that eat of their own flatteries,
Whose lip is curled to order as its barbered hair is curled...
Blast of the beauty of sudden death, St Barbara of the batteries!
That blow the new white window in the wall of all the world.

For the hand is raised behind us, and the bolt smites hard
Through the rending of the doorways, through the death-gap of the Guard,
For the cry of the Three Colours is in Conde and beyond
And the Guard is flung for carrion in the graveyard of St Gond,

Through Mondemont and out of it, through Morin marsh and on
With earthquake of salutation the impossible thing is gone,
Gaul, charioted and charging, great Gaul upon a gun,
Tip-toe on all her thousand years and trumpeting to the sun:

As day returns, as death returns, swung backwards and swung home,
Back on the barbarous reign returns the battering-ram of Rome.
While that the east held hard and hot like pincers in a forge,
Came like the west wind roaring up the cannon of St George,

When the hunt is up and racing over stream and swamp and tarn
And their batteries, black with battle, hold the bridgeheads of the Marne,
And across the carnage of the Guard, by Paris in the plain,
The Normans to the Bretons cried and the Bretons cheered again...

But he that told the tale went home to his house beside the sea
And burned before St Barbara, the light of the windows three,
Three candles for an unknown thing, never to come again,
That opened like the eye of God on Paris in the plain.

No whistling past the graveyard; nor worshipping the grave

We tarnish our own hallows. For we possess our own hallows, even though they are hallows as potentiality, within time. Their particular colour is yet hidden from us, but what we become goes into making that colour. This is, as far as I can see, the reason for the languishing of Halloween, All Hallows Eve, in the merely ghoulish. All Saints Day necessarily points to our own predestined hallows. (We can say we are predestined for Heaven because God has made every soul for Heaven. It is our bad choices through our own free will that break that predestiny, which is why hell is so hellish)



Surely there was a time when All Hallows Eve began to take up the notion of ghosts and ghouls, of bats and flighty cats driven by dark portents, dashing from the seething underbrush, and low orange moons feathered with the passing of rattling leaves, and yet it remained holy.

Indeed, such things would be expected of All Hallows Eve. For it is about all souls, and if it is about all souls, and their hopeful salvation, and the prayerful recognition of and for the dead which is what we too become, then surely this would include the sudden sight of the ghoulish happenings in one's periphery as one heads forward on his journey. This journey which opens before one like the stripping of the boughs. The onward and upward movement where we realize a quickening sense of the battle we are in, the dangers of the pilgrimage.

The sight of the monsters should give us courage. Our journey then sheds its illusions. The boogies and banshees are no longer hidden, as the propelling of our souls towards our homeland gets kicked up a few notches - or twenty - like the sudden racing of the severed leaves.



But the gargoyles must remain the hunched and burdened rainspouts of the architecture, not the feature of the pinnacle.

Have you read G.K. Chesterton's wonderful essay, The Nightmare? By all means, read it, right here. I read this essay quite a while ago, and have returned to it often, even though it is a short and simple one. I cannot recommend it enough. Read it.

Look, I'll even give you a taster:

"Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that they will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained to the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the brink of the lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when you look up at hell that a serious miscalculation has probably been made."

Now go and read it.

There is also this very interesting article about the Christian origins of Halloween, found here.

Father Dwight Longenecker also has a good post on the subject, here.

Sky High

I'm not entirely convinced that eating dinner around a long-table hoisted 50 meters (164.04 feet) in the air by a crane (mechanized, not the bird) with chefs serving in the middle of it, would be fun, novel, adventurous, or anything more than merely putting food in your mouth (probably expensively lame food) with no ground immediately below you.

How bored and boring do you have to be to get excited over such a thing? Because it seems exactly one of those things the bored and boringly affluent would do. Why not hoist a platform of slot machines into the air? Like the law in the Old Testament that says the gatherers of wheat and barley had to leave leftover gleanings in the field for the poorer folk, any coins that fell could, by law, be collected by homeless people. "I sometimes let a few slip on purpose", says one boring rich guy to news camera, "You know, it's a new thing, this. It's a lot of fun".

What if someone desperately has to urinate? Do they then lower the crane's arm for a short span, much to the chagrin of all the other rich boring folk? "I wanted full air time, damn it! I didn't get my money's worth!" says one rich boring guy to camera.

I don't take it as a virtue that I have a very poor interest in novelty. When the novelty is real, and not false and boring like dinner in the sky, it is to be sort of admired when someone takes an innocent interest in it, without losing their self-possession and composure, or depth of character.

I know G.K. Chesterton had an innocent, unending interest in novelty. Though of course it seems he never let it take over the vastly more important realization that he was alive; the realization of being alive, unabated, and not aided by consumption, but only by awe. And that for me cuts the difference: novelty that springs as an offshoot from the very abundance of being fully alive, which doesn't dissipate; and the "novelty" that is pursued, through more and more labyrinthine ways, from the fact of one being stultifyingly dead. It would look to an outside superficial observer that there was no difference between the two, that is, until he joined one sort one day, and then joined the other the next.

G.K.C. had a natural suspicion of those sophisticated ones of his day who proclaimed themselves above the pursuit of material pleasure, those teetotalers, sometimes millionares, who said they lived "the simple life" and who thought "the higher thought".

Much has changed, in a sense, since Chesterton's days. First, mediocrity is everywhere practically enforced (something he prophesied); the pursuit of pleasure is frightfully frought with a more and more complex "higher thought", quite the opposite of the usual non-thinking of pleasure-seeking pigs. A veritable tower of Babel is being erected of ever stranger novelty that ends up as a kind of twilight zone where no moral bounds, no sense of beauty, truth or goodness gets to have any say, or have any standard at all.

Look at the "higher thought" of pro-choicers. Look at the "higher thought" of Peter Singer. The evil that is brought on by university professors, the academia and scientists through their ideas is becoming more and more shared by their pleasure-seeking counterparts, who more than likely have never heard of Peter Singer and don't care. What does it mean?

It means the pleasure-seeking of today's materialists (while evil, it is not the more abominable evil) is the unmarked door through which the "higher thought", of the likes of Peter Singer, is silently and unnoticeably getting into their minds and taking root. For everything we do and pursue there is an underlying stance of principle that we concede to. The question is, what is happening in peoples' souls and minds, what are they consecrating their minds to, while they go after ever newer, more novel pleasure?

In the past, say, in G.K.C's day, they were conceding to a quickly-materializing corruption and emptiness. Many repented. Today, the pleasure-seeking has been built up and extended into a kind of virtual reality and sustained fantasy that has never been done before in the past. But it is matched and paralleled with an equally hitherto unseen and underheard of replication of the constructs of life itself. And it is to this "replication" which increasingly immoral pleasure-seeking people are conceding to.

G.K.C. Conference

The 27th. annual Chesterton Conference will be in St. Paul, Minnesota, June 12-14. If you're close by or have the means, it's recommended. Great people, great talks, great food. I haven't been to one yet, but understand these conferences are quite a good time.

Here is more information.