Vade retro! Vade retro!

(from the inimitable Fr. Bryce.)

I am cautious about explaining poetry, even my own, but I'll give you at least a bit of a clue here: the italicized portions are in part adapted from a sequentia of St. Hildegard in which she describes a vision she had of St. Maximinus celebrating mass. The rest is a mixture of reading Dante in class and Hildegard on my own and putting them, perhaps somewhat superficially, in dialogue, as well as noticing a plainly-dressed, striking, though not conventionally beautiful, middle-aged woman wandering the halls of the Chicago Art Institute during a visit last summer. I find it helpful to be on the lookout for unusual faces when I am out and about--often one can invent a whole fictional family that way. You may also find references to St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs, which I was also (somewhat unsuccessfully) trying to tackle at the time. I started it then, finished it later, and have only gotten around to posting it just now.

The Dove Looked In

by Matthew Alderman

Vita Nuova, xxvi

I saw faded beauty once
Pass me by in a gallery of stippled Seurats:
Maybe she was an English teacher,
A soccer mom in homely new white sneakers,
A nurse in jade-green scrubs.
You would have never called her pretty,
Nor stopped, admiringly at a distance,
Draping a chaste lechery in classical garb with the wan
Affectations of swooning lovers,
And bothered to notice her.

The dove looked in
Through the latticed grate:
And behold:
There sweetest balm rained down on her face,
Sweated from the bright priest-bridegroom.

I might have noticed her on purpose
Rather than accidentally
Had I been an artist: a painter, a Giotto di Bondone,
An Angelico in fluttering fluted black and white,
If I had been searching not for perfection,
But for the subtle twist,
Wrong going right,
Right going wrong,
That felix culpa, that perfect flaw,
Armless de Milo,
That makes a masterpiece.

It was a face made for halos and heavens,
The face of the dove.

The heat of the sun blazed out
And gilded the dark around him at his Mass:
A bud split open, jewel-like,
In the temple of his heart:
Most pure and kind his heart
As he cried out from the altar,
O Beatrice!

Maybe, just maybe, as a girl
The luminous plainness of her features might
Have been transformed by the glow
Of dewy Youth, giving bloom to the endless
Fascination of her visage,
As satisfyingly sharp-cut as a Shaker chair
With that one humble sharp cut that made it imperfect
That one sharp rent that made her human, like the rent
In the gaudy golden curtain that hid the Ark.

A high tower of cypress is he,
Dark turret to her purest white,
Counterweight and mirror
To the Tower of David.
O thou who mirrorest the Great High Priest:
O thou who mirrorest God to my Church,
O thou,
O thou who are callèd to be the ikon
Of Ageless Wisdom,
And yet like I am not worthy of it:
The ikon
Of the Key of David,
Of the Son of Mary,
O thou,
Wrought of Lebanon's cedars—
Sardis and hyacinth stones frame your turrets--
And thou, vicar of the king of heaven,
Art a city surpassing the arts
Of all other artisans.

And I looked upon this Tabernacle,
This still-slim Mater Dolorosa on vacation
In Nikes and a clean sweatshirt,
This woman who issuèd forth from the wound in
Adam’s side, drawn out
By the supreme command of the Architect
Of the Universe.

And I
Looked at her bobbed inky hair just starting to
Streak silver,
Looked at her straight, plain Roman nose,
Looked at her straight, plain Roman mouth,
Looked at the upward, tragicomic slant of
Her slender black brows
Perpetually knit into a question of humility
Or doubt.

Among ye this builder shines,
A rampart of the temple,
He who longed for the wings of an eagle
As he kissed—

Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth
Let me kiss him on foot, hand, and upon
The mouth, for I, Beatrice, I glow with
The crackle of lighting and my womb is a chamber of thunder,
And I, I am terrible
As an army with banners—

As he kissed
His wet-nurse Wisdom
In the glorious gardens of Mother Church.

O ikon of the bridegroom:
On Thy towering height
The mountain goat leapt
With the oliphaunt,
And Wisdom (O Sapientia!) was in rapture.

She had kind, ordinary eyes,
(I forget their color: gray or green?
A color to pierce the sky in any other face)
In sockets just beginning to gather
A pocket of pale wrinkles like
The trickling capillaries of a river:
And they looked up from her
Strange and tragically equivocal
Eyebrows with oblivion as she chatted
With someone on her left:
Her husband, her daughter,
Her sorority pal from college
On some mundane errand of joy.
They blended back into the pixilated
Background as static as post-Impressionist
Sculpture, like the ethereal crudities of Duccio,
Netted over with gilt linear shadows,
Or like the Egyptian mummies
That range over the noonday grass of
La Grand Jatte.

I took her from that realm,
Sent her to college: sent her to a lecture hall
(Ekklesia: assembly)
And imagined her a great and aging scholar of letters,
Putting Dante’s world behind her eyes:
I saw her pacing the floor in a vast tiered
Acoustic-tile arena with precise, cocked steps,
One foot behind the other, weight shifting,
Weight shifting, balletic, animal, graceful,
Deliberate, and yet unknowing.
She sketched great arcs and tiny circles
With her hands, clasped into fists
Or open, fingertip to thumb
Like a priest at mass
(like Christ the priest at mass,
Who I am a mere copy,
Weighed down with the
Dignity and burden
Of God’s image),
Drawing
Cosmologies and symbols I thought she might decode
By her very existence: my agèd Muse.

And I heard her cry aloud
(Or imagined I did, I’m not sure)
That she had lost her soul in the dark, dark wood
Under the dying orange sun of Hell
Until I had found it for her,
(And she mine)
Until together we
Had chased, like Christina the Astonishing, through
The wheelwork of the Universe,
On a cosmic road-trip with some dead Mantuan dude
To find it, to behold
The multifoliate rose of Dante and Prufrock
Perhaps strained through the fine scientific sieve
Of fish-eyed pointillism: or
Watching Satan æviternally munch Judas
Like guacamole-flavored tortilla chips.

But she slipped from my sight, my middle-aged muse:
For she had another master, another purpose,
This dripping honeycomb
Longing for a Lamb,
Longing for milk and honey beneath her tongue,
And she flew skywards to home.

And I sang to her, now invisible, from the back row
Of ugly plastic chairs,
As if on the step of the altar,
Mode Five, with melismatic drama:

Thy flowering
God forsaw on the first Day of creation:
O golden matrix of the Word,
Miracle of God’s hand,
O laudable Virgin, He made Thee thus!

O how great is Man’s side, how strong,
From which Woman didst God draw forth
And who He made the mirror of all His ornament,
The embrace of all creation,
The door from which came forth
The light and glory of the whole world’s frame.

But I saw her not, and she was taken
Into the desert, and given the wings of an eagle,
And, for all her homely beauty,
Her unexceptional face
And sweet greying eyes
She was set in the heavens as a crown of twelve stars,
And without losing her
Sweet tired face
Became incomparably beautiful,
White-hot as the sun and wreathed
Round with sweetest roses:
This blessed damozel,
And she sang aloud to me, and me alone—

Strong and sweet
In the sacred rites and
In the shimmer
Of the altar, where
Thou dost rise like incense
To the pillar of praise—
Pleading for Thy people,
Who strive toward Light’s mirror
To that goodly Light be praise and glory in the highest!

Gloria. Sicut.

And I, a man like any other, could have seen this all
In any face,
In any curl of lip,
In eyes blue and green and grey and brownest hazel,
In gleaming locks of black and golden brown,
Or dullest grey, or purest white,
In the polished calypygian gleam of a Canova Venus
Or a wizened Bosch bacchante:
In any blessed damozel,
All who are called Beatrice, the image of Mary,
All who, like sweetest Ekklesia, came forth from the darkness
Of Christ’s heart on Calvary
As water and blood,
Passing in the squalor of the bus station,
Pregnant in the produce aisle,
Or amid the elegance of forgotten masters and musæums.
Blessed art they amongst all women for their womanhood;
To all these maidens, O greenest branch, O most purple of crowns,
Be praise and glory in the highest.

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

--T.S. Eliot, from Ash-Wednesday

"Advocata Nostra Vivat!"

Or so our dear friend Andrew Cusack is fond of saying. Who, incidentally, is quoted in our latest issue. So, have a look, before the hard copies even start rolling out.

In this issue: The Duke Comes to Campus, The Maria Goretti Project, and a 4-page Right to Life Special Report.

Enjoy!

New Webpage

For the first time in... 5 years... Children of Mary has a new, functional, updated website.

www.nd.edu/~mary

Please visit and give suggestions for improvement. I pounded it out in 3 hours' time, so I'm open to criticism.

Current voting stats:

The Whapping is ahead in Best Presentation, 58-51, against the Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club blog. (Sorry, folks. But we did meet His Eminence and got him to sign you guys' tee shirt.)

The Whapping is ahead in Best Group Blog, 63-62, against Catholic Ragemonkey. (We should also start a category for strangest name, since I think we're both very good contenders...)

The Whapping is in second place, 54-69, against the Curt Jester, for Most Creative. (If we do not get more votes in this particular race, I may be forced to do something truly horrible and inflict some more of my poetry on you all...do you really want that?)

The Whapping is in (somewhat more distant) second place, 48-85, against Fr. Bryce in Most Bizarre. (As I have said before, I think we present a much more...er...sophisticated sort of weirdness, sorry, Father).

The Whapping is in (very distant) third place for Most Humorous after Fr. Bryce and the Curt Jester, who are neck and neck, and also in Best Overall after Fr. Bryce and Amy Welborn. (No way we can compete here against the titans of the Blogosphere...but we can dream...)

Also, I must put in a request for all and sundry to vote for cnytr in the Best Blog by a Woman category. Lauren B. is up against Amy Welborn here, and come on, Amy's bound to win something anyway, so why not cast your vote for this most Dominican of blogs?

Em has already given you the voting schpiel, I would particularly appreciate if you remembered us when considering the Most Bizarre category. Lest you forget, rememver where you read about St. Christopher-of-the-Dog's-Head, maraca-playing Swiss Guardsmen, Catholic maenads, drunk fresco artists, Father Ted, flounder-shaped churches, the Modern Vicar-General, a comparison between Semi-Arianism and chocolate chip cookies, the sacred chin of St. Anthony, the Popesicle, the Seminarian-of-the-Month calendar, and much much more. Also, let's not forget, when you're considering Most Creative, what other blog has its own order of Mass? Vote today! Or to paraphrase Mr. Liebchen from The Producers, "Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Whapping party!"

I have nothing to leave or give but my life and this I have consecrated to the Sacred Heart to be used as he wills. I have offered my all for the conversion of non-Catholics in Virginia. This is what I live for and in case of death what I die for ... Since my childhood, I have wanted to die for God and my neighbor. Shall I have this grace? I do not know, but if I go on living, I live for this same purpose; every action of my life here is offered to God for the spread and success of the Catholic Church in Virginia ... I shall be of more service to my diocese in heaven than I can ever be on earth.

--Frank Parater, December 5, 1919


My Virginian friend Lynn wrote last night to remind me that today is the eighty-fifth anniversary of the death of the Servant of God Francis "Frank" Parater, a North American College seminarian and Eagle Scout who died young after dedicating his sufferings to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the salvation of his home of Virginia. Frank Parater's causus was opened only in 2002, and as a Servant of God, is only on the lowest rung of the sanctoral ladder. (However, he doesn't have to remain so). He is the first former boy scout to be considered for sainthood, and also the first Virginian. Frank's prayer--a last will and testament of sorts--is still published in the North American College's manual of prayers, as George Weigel notes here. Pray for his canonization and ask for his intercession in a special way today!

Vote early and often!

SHW is up for 6 categories in The 2005 Catholic Blog Awards, so head on over and vote!

The Pirates... er, friars... Who Don't Do Anything
(Note, this has nothing to do with any real Carmelites, Franciscans, Augustinians, or Dominicans whom we have ever encountered, and everything to do with VeggieTales)

We are the friars who don't do anything
We just stay home and lie around
And if you ask us to do anything
We'll just tell you, we don't do anything

Well, I've never been Lourdes and I've never been to Fatima
And I've never kissed a relic of St. Louis or St. Paul
And I've never been to Rome and I've never been to Turin
And I've never been to ND in the fall

'Cause we're... {Refrain}

And I never light the incense and I never clean the thurible
And I never rush the homily 'cause I never preach at all
And I never chant the Sanctus and I've never owned a missal
And I've never been to ND in the fall

'Cause we're... {Refrain}

Well, I've never said the office and I'm not too good counsel
And I've never walked the cloister in contemplative prayer
And I've never read the rule and I've never had a vision
And I've never been to ND in the fall

{Refrain}

How do you think St. Joseph died? Vote here!

State of the Union Address


... he took the trapper into his Presidential hands, and looking up to heaven, to you, almighty Father, he gave you thanks and praise...

Canada

Where even the Muslims promote gay marriage...?

"Rizwana Jafri, president of the MCC said Muslim Canadians have experienced life as a marginalized minority and have relied on the Canadian Charter to fight for their right to be treated as equal citizens. "It is incumbent upon us, as a minority, to stand up in solidarity with Canada’s gays and lesbians despite the fact that many in our community believe our religion does not condone homosexuality," she added."

Presenting the Emperor Norton the First Memorial Bridge!

Of Mary, Nothing is Sufficient!
or, "If St. Louis Monfort and I had 'restored' the Roman Calendar"

My roommate and I were talking about good choirs and when it was important to have them. I opined that they are most important for Christmas and Marian feast days... to which he responded, "Easter?"

The following is my solution:

What was... -----> Is now....
Easter ----------> Feast of Our Lady of the Resurrection
Christ the King --> Mary, the Mother of Christ the King
------------------> (Or, Mary, the Queen-Mother)
Lateran Basilica --> Mary Major Basilica
Chair of Peter ----> Chair of the Prince of Our Lady's Son's Apostles
Corpus Christi ---->Still Corpus Christi, but with lots of Mary statues
Holy Thursday ---> Our Lady of the Eucharist
Trinity Sunday ---> Mary, Tabernacle of the Trinity Sunday
Pentecost --------> Mary, Spouse of the Spirit Descendant
Ascension --------> Feast of the Event-People-Confuse-with-the-Assumption Thursday

Note to Fr. Pusey & fellow alarmists: Don't take this too seriously...

Pray for the Pope

He was just taken to the hospital, after earlier catching the flu and cancelling his audiences for the week.

I recently received a very polite email from Gemma, the coordinator of the Society of Our Lady of the Cloister: and I have to admit I unintentionally sold them a little short in the earlier version of my post below talking about their website. Actually, I think their project sounds pretty cool--using the internet to bring up new vocations and new charisms. Anyway, I figure my readers ought to hear the details from the source, so here is an excerpt of what Gemma wrote:

You were very perceptive to pick up on the fact that very 21st century needs are to be met by [indult] Tridentine Mass communities. That's the beauty of it all. [...]

All of those proposed communities have a purpose in life. All are being started out of compassion. Did you read Karin Yarosh's story? Ten years of no companionship save that of God and her family after her racing accident? Women are still being treated as second class citizens on the backstretch. Some female owners aren't even allowed onto the backstretch to visit their own horses. Women can work as grooms, yes, but the owners can't visit. The Jockeys' Guild has also stated that most of their funds, if not used for medical expenses, go for groceries for the poorer jockeys. So the women won't be the only beneficiaries of the Sisters of St. Joan of Arc and Karin Yarosh.

[The late Karin Yarosh sounds kinda cool--nice to hear about a devout laywoman who wasn't just your ordinary parish Church Lady, not that I don't like Church Ladies. I shall have to ask for her intercession.]

One reason why we're founding the Entourage of the Divine Bridegroom is to supply our foundations with priests. [...]

Many of the discerners who have written in have told me that the communities they have seen "are all doing the same thing" (teaching and nursing). They see our foundations as at least something different--new opportunties to serve God--while worshipping Him with the Tridentine Mass.

A lovely idea, really: the old and the new wonderfully linked together. I hear that the good ladies have even got a few responses from the public about prospective vocations, especially in their Holy Innocents sisterhood. Exciting!

Also, if anyone ever founds a society of clerical architects and artists (Priestly Fraternity of St. Denys the Araeopagite? Guarini Fathers? Angelicani?), I'd love to be a lay associate.

You can tell you're really a Catholic Nerd when you imagine religious orders that don't exist yet. As a writer and a former dabbler in what the hoity-toity academics call "counterfactual history" (e.g., "what if George Washington had joined the British navy?"--which actually might have happened, given Mount Vernon is named after an admiral) I've invented a few groups of nuns and monks that could only exist in a parallel universe. For example, in a world where the Papal States still exist and the Austrians thwarted Italian unification, there were the Albertines, dedicated to scientific study, and the blue-and-white habited Brotherhood of Zion, ministering to Jewish converts and writing elaborate polyphonic motets in Hebrew.

However, it seems that I'm not the only one interested in hypothetical orders, though perhaps with an interest which extends to more practical concerns than my own armchair fantasizing. I came across this rather enjoyable website, the Society of Our Lady of the Cloister, through Fr. Bryce's comments box. It's a list of orders that ought to be founded and may well be but haven't yet (all of them, rather pleasingly, adhering to the Ecclesia Dei Tridentine indult, and looking for potential vocations) and ministering to an unusually varied kaleidoscope of distinctly twenty-first century needs.

The names alone are poetic and delightful, such as the Handmaids and Manservants of St. Dymphna (with their red cappas and blue tunics), St. John Vianney's Company of Nurses, or The Ministry of Our Lord's Sorrowful Grandmother. Some of their charisms seem much-needed--assisting rocky marriages, patients in comatose states, or using the teachings of St. Maximilian Kolbe to help the the morbidly obese. The last idea is particularly interesting: gluttony and the opposite extreme of "dieting" have become so unmoored from the Christian ideas of temperance and fasting, such a sisterhood would seem rather timely. Others have unexpected and surprising charisms, such the Sisters of St. Joan of Arc and Karin Yarosh, named after a devout and deceased female Catholic jockey (of whom I wish I could find out more, and if her causus has been opened) and dedicated to, among other things, ministering to women in the racetrack industry.

At first glance, it seemed an odd and specific area to focus on, but I suppose ministering to lepers sounded odd back in the days of St. Francis, and you can't get more oddly specific than many great orders still extant today, like the Mercedarians with their mission of ransoming Christian captives or the Tuscan Order of St. Stephen with its history of glorious naval campaigns against piracy. I also have to admit that their proposal for an "Entourage of the Divine Bridegroom" sounds like a cool idea: a group of priests who would, in addition to many other duties, would lead retreats and give convent road tours to aspiring postulants--you know, that wonderful staple of Catholic nerddom, the nun run! Neat idea, really. So many young ladies are looking for orders these days, after all.

I appreciate these imaginative ladies for sharing their ideas with all of us. Perhaps some day I'll run across some red-tunicked Sisters of the Holy Innocents and St. Gianna Molla at the March for Life.

An exhaustive list of the all-too-numerous historical, architectural, theological, scientific, astronomical, artistic and topographical errors in Dan Brown's monumentally stupid (but "well-researched"!) novel Angels and Demons. Since Danny Boy could never make a mistake, obviously the Albino must be to blame.

To whoever found the Shrine via the web-search "What part of the body does a zucchetto adorn?" I must compliment you on your impeccable phraseology...though I must also caution you, once again, to not buy any zuchetti with rhinestones attached via hot glue.

Is it just me, or does this animation of a horrid modern church building project (shaped, oddly, like a flounder) resemble something Powered By The Cheat?

I'm not really sure what to say about this.

(via Open Book).

Quotes from Father Ted:

DOUGAL: Wow, Ted, it's like a big tide of jam comin' towards us, except its a big jam made out of old women.

****

TED: Once again, you've made me look like a complete idiot in front of real people. Thank you so much.

****

TED: (After singing My Lovely Horse) So what did you think about it in general, then? (Father Jack pulls out a shotgun and shoots Ted's guitar.) Right.

****

DOUGAL: I know! Well lure them into a giant bingo game!
TED: And how are we going to do that?
DOUGAL: We'll print up some bingo cards on our printing press and...oh.
TED: Yes, it's the lack of a printing press that lets us down there. Or bingo balls. Or a PA system. Or in fact, any bingo paraphernalia at all.
DOUGAL: Darn. So near, yet so far.

****

MRS. DOYLE: Are you looking forward to your lunch tomorrow, Father?
TED: Hmmm? I suppose so.
MRS. DOYLE: You do like pheasant, don't you Father?
TED:Pheasant? I love pheasant.
MRS. DOYLE: Well there's a little clue. The thing you'll be eating likes pheasant as well.

****

TED: Dougal, how did you get into the Church in the first place? Was it like "Collect 12 crisp packets and become a priest?"

****

TED: (on phone) Hello, is that the Yin dynasty? Family, sorry, the Yin family.

****

JACK: I LOVE MY BRICK!

****

It's nice to have a nun around. Gives the place a bit of glamour.

****

DOUGHAL: As if magic, I can create a crowd of invisible ducks.

****

TED: It's banned in most European countries, which means it's good.

The hoopla of the 2005 St. Blog's Awards is about to begin. Not that I'm suggesting your choice should be the Shrine, but go and nominate your favorites (insert subliminal Whapster message) at this address. Our chances are good this year--I'm just concerned we might lose points in the swimsuit competition.

It's so easy!

"Your life has a special purpose, even if that purpose and a plan to achieve it are not yet clear to you."

"In Pray and Be Rich, Dr. Briley unlocks the Bible’s secrets about wealth, its use and abuse."

"Pray and Be Rich is based on years of Dr. Briley’s research and life experiences. Within the Bible he discovered a pattern of distinctive principles about success – found in the Bible and nowhere else."

I'm at a loss as to what to call this. Gnostic materialism? It has all the earthly short-sightedness of Liberation Theology, but none of the Marxist concern for others -- all the predestination of Calvinism without any of its level-headed gloominess. It turns out the purpose of life is to be happy forever in this life, I guess. Poor monastics.

"In frequent prayer, visualize yourself as a success, enjoying the substance of things hoped for and reaping the rewards of *****your work*****. Do NOT, as many mistakenly do, picture yourself doing the work itself. Focus on the end, not the process. See the result, not the routine, or you may discourage yourself by making the effort seem tiresome."

Apparently, monetary salvation is not by faith ALONE....

The current rubrics in church design suggest pursuing noble beauty and avoiding ostentatious display. I agree, though my definition of "ostentatious" may be different from, say, Richard Vosko's. That being said, I think I have found the one liturgical appurtenance which he and I would both agree doesn't qualify as noble simplicity. Behold, in all its hideous glory, the diamond-studded not-quite-papal zucchetto.

Reader Poll

Flannery O'Connor is one of those great Catholic writers I have never gotten around to reading. Whenever I mention her name I get an interesting response--not necessarily a pleased response, but certainly an interesting one. Either she's really, really great, or just downright weird, or possibly both. As a Southerner (more-or-less), I could see how she could be both, as in Dixie, the two are not always mutually exclusive. Incidentally, the Midwest is far weirder than anyone immediately presupposes: the place is just crying out for someone to either pull a Lovecraft on it and turn it into a creepy American Gothic horror-movie set filled with sinister Amish and bare skeletal tree-branches, or perhaps instead something Faulkneresque-by-way-of-Bergmann, with lots of decaying emigrant churches and Lutherans in Volvos. The place could easily get a mythology on par with southern belles, cowboys, and pitchfork-wielding Puritans, in the right hands. But I digress: what do my Learned Dear Readers think of Flannery? So good or no good?

Anti-nekkid-art-people activist and general PBS doofus Bill Moyers named fifteenth most annoying liberal of the year by Rightwingnews.com. (Terehhhhhzaaa is #7, incidentally). Life is good.

'...it's that I grew increasingly determined to understand the phenomenology of papayas in New York. How did a tropical fruit come to be so prominent in a temperate-zone city. Why were there so many papaya stores? Why did all of them sell frankfurters, too? (I mean, were they health food stores or junk food stores?) Why did so many papaya stores include references to royalty in their names? [Papayas Kingdom, King, Prince, Princess, &c.] Why were all of them decorated with signs using stilted, hyperbolic descriptions of papayas, like THE ARISTOCRATIC MELON OF THE TROPICS, THE FAMOUS MAGICAL PAPAYA MELON, and GOD'S GIFT TO MANKIND IS OUR PAPAYA DRINK? That nobody could answer these questions, or had even considered them, came as no particular surprise; one characteristic of the New York personality I had noticed right away was an ability to overlook prevailing conditions, such as high taxes and sidewalk bridges. Papayas seemed to be just another prevailing condition.

'I did what I could to get answers. I put questions to countermen at various papaya outposts and got strangely specific but unsubstantiated reactions, among them "Eighty-five percent of all the people in the world love papaya" (the bun man at Papaya Kingdom) and "The relationship between the hot dog and the papaya is very good" (the juice man at Gray's). I also talked to Peter Poulos, the owner of Papaya King, which, I learned, was the original papaya store in New York. He said that his father had traveled to Florida decades earlier and had come back fired up with the idea of introducing New Yorkers to the tropical delights of papaya juice. The outbreak of other papaya stores, he said, was an attempt to copy Papaya King's success. The romantic paens to the papaya were his father's own words and cadence, and the other stores duplicated them. The other stores' references to royalty were meant to fool customers into thinking all the papaya stores were affiliated, like some tropical fruit juice House of Hapsburg.'

--Susan Orlean, "Royalty," in My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere, 2004

More Queen Christina: Funny, I just discovered Greta ("I vonn to be alone") Garbo was in a 1933 movie called Queen Christina directed by a chap named Rouben Mamoulian. Naturally, it's about everyone's favorite uppity woman of baroque Rome, though, sadly, the whole thing deals with her Swedish period. The plot looks like utter historical rubbish and the whole Catholicism thing seems to have fallen through a crack in the floorboards (she abdicates to marry the Spanish ambassador!), but, then, given that poor Chris looked more like Max Klinger than a thirties starlet (mascara being scarce in 1620s Stockholm), one can't expect too much from Mamoulian and co. Also, the flea cannon is conspicuous by its absence.

And...Garbo? Huh? Why couldn't they have cast Ingrid? She's Swedish, isn't she?

On Kissing Bishops' Rings and Women's Hands

O how strong is Man's side,
from which God pulled forth Woman,
whom He made the the mirror of all His beauty
and the embrace of all His creation.

And so the organs of heaven do play,
And all the earth wonders at Thee,
O Mary most prais'd,
whom God has loved so deeply.

--St. Hildegard, O virga ac diadema purpurae Regis

Our age suffers, I believe, from a surfeit of misplaced humility. This comes as no surprise--I believe it was Chesterton who said that in the end most vices are merely virtues run riot, divorced from the intricate web of checks and balances which governs Christian morality. The modern vestment industry banks on it as a clear-cut fact. Priests are too timid to wear the gorgeous pomp of their office. They end up grab the closest Star Trek-looking polyester chausuble within reach rather than make a fuss over mere clothes. Or risk looking like a clerical fancy-pants in the gleaming purple garb of monsignori and canons. They're just regular guys, and want us to feel comfy around them. The fact that they put their pants on one leg at a time seems to automatically disbar the cassock. Most bishops think you're going to bite them when you go for the pontifical ring, and probably they'd prefer the bite. It's understandable, but unfortunate.

I appreciate their pursuit of modesty, but I'm reminded of the jokey saying, "Don't be so humble; you're not that great." You can pick your jaw off the floor now: I'm kidding--but the essence of the statement points to a little bit of truth about the way ceremonial works. The beauty of vesture, of ceremonial and ritual, of hierarchy and splendor, isn't really about the folks at the top, whether it's deacon or bishop, exarch or archpriest. It's about us, and it's for us, to remind us there's more out there in the great universe God created than being just a regular guy in polyester. God doesn't get any holier when I sing magnificat anima mea Dominum, but maybe I do. Or I've got a shot at it, anyway, if God comes through with the grace.

People tend to assume that it's more fun for the priest than the people when a priest processes down the aisle in gold and scarlet--but it's more a millstone than a halo. I've seen cloth-of-gold copes from the Bad Old Days that weighed upwards of forty pounds. Talk about bearing your cross. The alter Christus going to the altar is not bejeweled like a king--or a monstrance--just to show how he's going to lord it over you from the pulpit. Or he ought not, anyway. Sometimes theory and praxis diverge, of course, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Part of it is America never had much for monarchs and gems: maybe we'd be more comfortable with the Solemnity of Christ the President than Christ the King, but however bad earthly kings were, it doesn't tarnish God's absolute heavenly monarchy. The truth is, despite the stereotype of the little cue-balled Monopoly millionaire in his top-hat and silken cravat, the stereotyped plutocratic and aristocratic targets of such plebeian hatred don't exist today. We don't see Bill Gates going around in a coach-and-six with a crown on his head, or President Bush in the gilded robes of the Most Serene Doge. Maybe their power and wealth might be more bearable to the little people if they did. Maybe.

St. Thomas a Becket would say mass with a hair shirt on the inside and silk on the outside: he had the benefit of the hair shirt, and the rude faithful had the benefit of the silk. While kings and dukes might not have worn the hair shirt, at least had the gleam of satin to give back to their subjects.

With today's American aristocracy, we have the hair shirt (or the Ralph Lauren polo) on the outside and the hard plastic gleam of electronic toys on the inside that nobody will ever see. The aristocracy, for all its decadence, at least had the charity to enact their splendid private lives in public in the grand national drama of coronations and parliaments and even such wonderful absurdities as Louis XIV putting on his pants in the morning with twenty courtiers looking on. Somehow I find it somewhat easier to forgive him for Versailles knowing he allowed himself to become a public symbol, a peripatetic work of art. The overweening vanity of the Medicis gave us San Marco, and even pig-faced Henry the Eighth bequeathed the future a monstrous yet remarkable Holbein of himself. Will Steve Jobs be hanging in a portrait gallery some day? Somehow I doubt it.

Once in the depths of high school, I had a little crush on a pale girl with green-grey eyes, and made an idiot of myself opening doors for her. I never think she quite understood the point of such a gesture, but no matter. And I was pretty annoying, anyway. We all are, us males, at that age. But the point remains the same. When one gets down to it, there's cosmically very little difference between kissing the ring of a bishop and the hand of a woman--for the woman's body, the temple of life, is the sign of her office and dignity just as the jewels of a pontiff. The same goes for all those masculine gallantries that today's woman seem to have so little time for. Perhaps it's more humble, not more grand, more puffed-up pompous, to let him carry your bags for you, to let go for a few moments of your life and let him do something for you.

When I take my cap off to a woman, it is a gallantry, yes, but I can't help thinking of a priest doffing his biretta at the start of mass. At least that's what I tell myself when they don't notice it. It hardly matters if they see it--the fact is, the acknowledgment is there for God, and Mary, the ornament of the world, to see.

There's always the danger of pedestals. Woman have been perched atop quite a few in their time against their will, and it's a lonely anchorite life up there for sure. But there's a difference between a pedestal and a step, of artificial exaltation and natural hierarchy, of an idol on a pillar and the divine ladder of seraph and cherub, throne and domination.

And anyway, nobody's on the top rung in this case--the sexes are complementary. Neither one would work without the other, and I mean this in life and culture, not just in terms of the basic mechanics of bringing a child into the world.

We are told it's a matter of power, that men have all the power, and women get it by being men. The Church has had both abbot and abbess, monk and nun, both worthy and powerful in their own way--when will our secular age come to recognize the virtues of a uniquely feminine species of authority, terrible as an army with banners? I suppose the skeptic will say the Church doesn't have it in Her to permit it. But some of those medieval abbesses were truly terrifying creatures--and glorious, still. And it's not just abbesses--it was a skinny little twentysomething girl in a black-and-white habit who bossed the Pope back to Rome, wasn't it?

The dignity and genius of women of which the Christian faith speaks is not a pedestal, but a broad and glorious plane. It may grow gloriouser still as feminine strength and intelligence continues to spread from the microcosm of the domestic into the macrocosm of the world at large. Women acting as men in politics and science and the arts, as in the derelict feminism of the 1970s, will do nothing for the world--it just means more men, rather than bringing the complementary and receptive balance of the domestic family to the world at large. But women being women out there in all those varied fields will bring something both new and very old into the bloodstream of civilization.

How's that for a broader pedestal?

If man can be said to have a headship of the family (and St. Paul says he does), it is the headship of Christ washing the feet of the apostles and dying on the cross rather than Archie Bunker with his beer and his dingbat. The little ceremonials of day-to-day homage that once marked the public life of the two sexes are the cultic acts of his unique dignity, and hers. Ladies, I kindly ask you, help him fulfil his mission. It's a small humility to suffer, isn't it?

'That's right. I was not one of those children who love dinosaurs. To me they always seemed a crashing bore compared with the medieval dragons, whose images were accompanied by wonderful romantic stories of courageous knights and beautiful ladies. My first introduction to dinosaurs was accompanied by a stern admonition: no stories, no fantasies; this is science. These creatures are (were) real. They existed a long time ago, so long ago that there were no people around to have any adventures with them, much less make up stories about them. So I tuned out of the dionosaur lessons, concentrated on King Arthur, and grew up to be an iconologist, a historian of cultural images, instead of a paleontologist.'

--W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book, 1998.

Queen Christina's Amazing Flea-Be-Gone Miniature Cannon, sandal-wearing Anglican vicars on horseback, and more courtesy of Zadok the Roman. The frisky old girl (above) seemed to have a thing about firearms--after all, who in Rome has never seen the fountain in front of the Villa Medici, supposedly made out of a gunstone she shot off of Castel Sant' Angelo across town on a whim. No wonder the Pope had her temporary apartments put in the Tower of the Winds--as far away from his quarters in the Vatican as humanly possible. He probably didn't want to get beaned crossing the courtyard...

...a dwarf and a dullard...

'Certainly, some Saturday-night programs were pitched so low that they even shamed the rest of the marginally intelligent television schedule and made anyone watching feel even more pained by their lack of social alternatives, adding insult to injury: it's bad enough having nothing to do, but you feel even worse when you find yourselve spending Saturday night watching something as asinine as "Holmes and Yo-Yo." [...] But real marketing genius showed itself in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when ABC scheduled two hours that made up perhaps the ultimate Saturday-night schedule: "The Love Boat," followed by "Fantasy Island." [...T]he first [show was] a series of fey paens to romance on a cruise vessel, and the second a run of baroque [?] morality plays staged by a dwarf and a dullard on a deserted sandbar [...]. It was like having a nationally-broadcast consolation prize for having no such love or social intercourse of one's own to propel one out of the house.'

--Susan Orlean, Saturday Night, 1990.