The Pious Sodality of Church Ladies has announced its annual offering of patron saints for the coming year.

The custom, I think French in origin, involves the assigning of a particular saint--and prayer intention--to accompany you through the new year. The saints are assigned by being drawn at random.

Want one? Visit the Church Ladies: Click here.

From the webcomic XCKD. (Alpine-hat-with-shaving-brush-on-the-side-tip to NNLP):

Evelyn Waugh used to end his letters, for a time, with a cheerily valedictory "Death to Picasso!" Another great epistolary flourish was brought to my attention by good friend and alert reader Nathaniel P. Teddy Roosevelt closed one of his letters with "P.S. I have just killed a bear." Bully! (Source).

A friend relays this anecdote unearthed by an academical acquaintence of his:

A 13th century debate among Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists among the Mongols: "Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent mediation."

Speaking of theological noise pollution, is anyone else worried about the commanding lead the Hare Krishnas have over us in the budding field of Religious Street Annoyance?

Matthew Alderman. The Servant of God Frederic Ireneus Baraga, First Bishop of Sault Saint Marie. October 2009. Private Collection, Michigan.

Friderik Irenej Baraga (1797-1868), a Slovene aristocrat-turned-missionary, was educated in Vienna and ordained in Ljubljana and some years later, volunteered to serve as a priest to the fledgeling diocese of Cincinnati with its vast swath of Indian mission territory. A gifted linguist, he mastered the Ottawa and Ojibway languages and authored or translated theological texts (including the first book written in Ottawa and the first Biblical translation into Ojibway) in both tongues. Known as the "snowshoe priest" for his work during the harsh winters of Wisconsin and Michigan, he also worked hard to save his Indian charges from being relocated. In 1853, he was consecrated bishop and became the first bishop of Sault Saint Marie, now the diocese of Marquette. He continued to travel via snowshoe well into his sixties, and letters of his exploits may have inspired St. John Neumann to come to the fertile mission territory of the United States. He died January 19, 1868, and his body is buried in the crypt of his cathedral. A state park, a village, a township, and a county have all been named in his honor.

This image is owned by a young priest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and was commissioned as a gift by his seminarian friends. During the patron's time in the seminary, he did a great deal of missionary work among the Indians of Central America, hence the intrusion of the Guatemalan [correction: actually it is the national bird of El Salvador] torogoz bird (at lower left) into the snowscape. The diocesan arms are shown next to the torogoz, while the Bishop is shown holding his snowshoe (which is swiftly becoming his hagiographic attribute) and holding a copy of his translation of the Scriptures into Ojibway. The rustic framework is inspired by local vernacular architecture. A small figure in the distance, following the bishop's footsteps, shows the many priests who followed in the path of this trailblazing missionary of the north woods.

You can find out more about Bishop Baraga's cause for canonization here.

I'm going up to Stillwater, Minnesota, this weekend, to attend a launch party for the newest department of Loome Theological Booksellers, which will be devoted to quality sacred art and gifts, this Sunday, from 2 to 4 PM at their store 320 North Fourth Street. It should be quite an impressive occasion, and I am told the St. Agnes Chamber Choir from St. Paul will be performing at one point during the proceedings.

My friend Mr. Andrew Poole, who, with his wife Mara, is raising a growing Catholic family, is one of the two new part-owners of the place. He has been working hard to make this a great event, and to stock quality art and goods, rather than the usual glow-in-the-dark rosaries and the like. I admit that I have more than a little bias as I am one of the artists who he will be giving gallery space to in the store. He and I have also set up an arrangement to sell holy cards and prints of my work as well, which I am very excited about. He hopes in time to offer hand-made letter-press editions of my art. From that, you can tell Andrew has a real eye for detail and a grassroots concern for craft: you can tell the difference between letterpress and digital easily, down to the feel of the paper and the imprint of the images and text.

In an age dominated by big-box retail in books as well as everything else, it is refreshing to see that such a dominating institution as Loome's is still in many respects a local, mom-and-pop sort of place, and that the man behind the cash register believes in the truths that are stacked up high on his shelves.

Anyway, please come, tell your friends, have a drink, scope the place out, ogle the stacks of Roman Missals and arcane theological works that weigh down the shelves, and enjoy some convivial conversation and Catholic culture. I'll be there, and in addition to my ink illustrations, I will also have on display some images from some church design projects that I have worked on (or, in one case, am currently working on!), due to Andrew's generosity. I am sure, in any case, a good time will be had by all.

Some laypeople, when they read of what they perceive as the strictures of monastic life, are often puzzled or even shocked. It’s a defense mechanism, I believe, to prevent us from examining our own messy lifestyles. This is not to say that monks don’t have their own personal interior messes, but, when the world is stripped away and you’re left with just yourself, they’re very hard to avoid. I was reading recently about the world of the medieval Cistercian monastery, and I was struck at how beautifully deliberate it all is. Nothing is left to chance.

Just one example—and I suspect this has changed in the past seven or eight centuries—but I was very struck how there was even a proper way to lay down on your bed. Sit down and swing your legs into it, don’t just flop down like a kid. That can seem quaint and even silly at first glance, but you realize that it’s one less thing to think about, and more time to focus on bigger and better things. I am reminded of the scholastic definition of curiosity as the vice opposed to studiousness—mere inquiry is useless unless directed towards a point.

And the motion itself has a reason behind it—it is simple, dignified, neither sloppy nor showy, but getting the job done in the most logical and sensible way. It is the proper gesture for a human being, not an animal or a puffed-up king. It seems to me a perfect encapsulation of the entire Cistercian worldview.

We have liturgical rubrics for the same reason. First and foremost, they get the job done and save dithering that could be spent on prayer and reflection. They teach obedience, both to external authorities, and within yourself. And they have, laid on top of this from centuries of observation and thinking, a discrete symbolic component. This sensibility—this practical simplicity that leads to a sort of beauty—runs throughout the entire Cistercian monastic tradition; work becomes prayer, prayer becomes work. Liturgy—like life—is hard work. It is not merely a series of rituals for their own sake, but a streamlined program that gives you the tools, conscious and subsconscious, to pray for grace and sanctification. Which, rather than a sort of Zen-like emptiness for its own sake, is the point of life, after all. Many admirers of western monasticism, who might come from a pop-eastern mystical perspective, don’t realize that the Christian empties himself not so he might remain an empty vessel, but so God can have room to come in.

The Emperor Justinian is said to have cried (sounding a bit like the ecclesial equivalent of a superpowered comic-book villain) "Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" upon beholding the interior of Hagia Sophia, which he paid for, but did not actually design. I feel a bit like Solomon right now: I acknowledge a sound defeat in the realm of Catholic nerdry upon beholding the Hallowe'en photo posted by the Sober Sophomore showing some of our successors in Catholic mayhem at Notre Dame, dressed as the pope and four Swiss guards, complete with halberds. The best I could manage was the time I went to a costume party as a Knight of Malta.* Oh, for the days of college-student free time. (Which, being an arkie, somehow I missed.) I bow to the masters.

*More on that later, sometime. It involves a Methodist cassock saleswoman. Really.

Matthew Alderman. St. Vincent of Saragossa, Deacon and Martyr. Ink. Private Collection, England.

It would be interesting to see how many different details--both of the saint's rather complex legend and those of liturgical interest--our readers could pick out of this particular image. I will restrict myself to saying that the client instructed me to make sure the saint was shown in traditional vestments, an instruction I took as far as I possibly could--down to the Spanish collar on his dalmatic, the biretta, and the maniple. Certainly the real Vincent never wore these, but it is a testament to the Communion of Saints that stands outside of time, and reminds us that Christian iconography and Christian archaeology are two rather different things.

It occurred to me recently during a Solemn Mass what a wonderful symbol (however unintended and Rorschach-like it might be) the humeral veil is as a representation of God's mercy. The subdeacon, not being ordained in the way that priest or deacon is, is not worthy to touch even the paten, yet he is entrusted with it, and even, hiding behind his upturned, muffled hands, plays the part of the veiled seraph, because God has given him the veil to cover his sinful self--the grace, the strength, the means to be found worthy of transcending the old Adam entering into the sacred mysteries. God does all the hard work in changing our hearts if we just say the word, down to giving us His Son as the perfect sacrifice to give back to Him as thanksgiving.

My soul is weary of my life,
I will let go my speech against myself,
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say to God: Do not condemn me:
Tell me why thou judgest me so.
Doth it seem good to thee that Thou shouldst calumniate me,
And oppress me, the work of thy own hands,
And help the counsel of the wicked?
Hast thou eyes of flesh: or,
Shalt thou see as man seeth?
Are thy days as the days of man,
And are thy years as the times of men:
That thou shouldst inquire after my iniquity, and search after my sin?
And shouldst know that I have done no wicked thing,
Whereas there is no man that can deliver out of Thy hand.

--Job 10:1-7

Unusually bleak and accusatory it may be, but this text and setting has always haunted me. May we never be so quick to rush to judgment--unless we are as holy as Job was. Especially since once God responds to old Job, He gets...well...sarcastic, for want of a better word. And I'm not sure any of us poor mortals could handle that. Still, such passages are in Scripture (and read out during the liturgy) good reason, and it is worth considering that even Holy Mother Church admits there are times where we want to cry out and ask "Why?" in the face of our own suffering.

Mercifully, this is not one of those times for me, and instead this All Souls' Day I am grateful for the opportunity to add my prayers to those of the other faithful in freeing souls from the halfway-house of Purgatory.

Mom: (Over phone) So do you have anything fun planned for this week?
Me: Well, we're having a sung Requiem tomorrow...

Advertised on a church signboard downtown: "9:30 AM - CAPPUCINO SERVICE." Presumably they use the Missale Romano-Seraphicum. And Low Mass is Espresso. Elsewhere, at another church, this one Catholic, the notation: "All Souls' Day Mass: Saturday, October 31 5 PM." Hmmm. If they didn't wear black, then they're really just not trying.

*

Halloween was once again at our throats this last week. (Mwaha.) They were advertising a showing of the film (which I was only vaguely aware of) The Haunting in Connecticut in the lounge of my apartment complex next week. Mercifully, I will be out of town anyway, but what struck me was that not only had the poster advertising the event reiterated virtually the entire plot in small type at the bottom (why?) but it had been lifted wholesale from Wikipedia, with the link underlines and even the footnote superscripts (lacking the actual footnotes) intact. This is beyond the increasingly-quixotic demand for good grammar and spelling, it's just a total failure of common sense.

*

There is an image of Our Lady in the stained glass at Holy Hill that looks uncannily like Maggie Gyllenhaal, despite predating her (the actress's, not the Great Mother of God's) birth by at least half-a-century. I'm afraid to ask what this means about my subconscious, but now when someone complains my drawing of St. Agnes looks too much like Ellen Page (who does look rather like a Murillo painting, if, say, Murillo knew what a Hamburgerphone looked like), I have an excuse. Not a very good one, but still.

*

It occurs to me that one of the real wonders of the Trinity is that it shows how utterly perfect God is. C.S. Lewis once made the point that you cannot demand God do the impossible (in the sense of a logical contradiction, not in the sense of moving mountains or eating six whole elephants before breakfast), because the logical contradiction simply does not have an independent existence. Though it also seems one of the more clumsy atheistic taunts of this sort--"If God is so amazing, why can't He make another one of Himself?"--is neatly solved by the Trinity. God cannot make another god, as God is supreme, and two gods would negate that. So would a created god, since God has no beginning or end. But the eternal generation of the Son from the Father and the Holy Ghost from both (i.e., God is love) is the only way one could have multiple beings that were uncreated and still were one God in three persons, with each equally divine. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. But they are not three gods but one God.

We cannot, of course, say that the Trinity is quite properly God the Father "copying" or "reproducing" Himself, but it seems to me that He has done about as close as He could through the elegant framework of the Trinity without negating those very things that make God God. This may well be very bad theology, but the thought came to me Sunday up in the choirloft during the Creed, and it seemed at least worth repeating.

*

The other truly wonderful thing about the Trinity is that it means God is a society. One person would leave us with the perfect, eternally self-interested God described by Aristotle, or the various versions of indulgent grandfather, divine despot or watchmaker envisioned by various heresies over the centuries. And two would destroy the equilibrium of the thing. With three...well, there is a good reason that the triangle is the strongest shape. A Trinity explains not only love and marriage and children, but the desire of Man to seek out his own kind, and thrive, and, to paraphrase Chesterton, even when Christians seek to be alone, as with monks, they do it together. Two people are a duo. Three people are a culture.