The Virtual Oratory

NOTES are part of Fr. Hal Weidner's reading notebook. It will be regularly updated.

Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking, has a light, very light, satire on politics called Supreme Courtship. The idea is that a cornered president who has had two Supreme Court nominees turned down(insufficient sniffles while finishing To Kill a Mockingbird), nominates a TV judge, a real judge but who has gone on TV and is extremely popular and because she is very bright and verbal out fences all the opposition and gets the job. I suppose an insider will pick up all the references but it is intelligent comedy made funnier by the actual plausibility, cf. governors of California and presidents. 

 Marilynne Robinson,an esteemed novelist wrote this in a book of essays that would make good Lenten reading:

"So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.

What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct. So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative -- event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement.

A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation." -- Marilynne Robinson, "Psalm 8", from "The Death of Adam"

+++

 BORN CATHOLICS "assembled" by Frank Sheed was a great comfort as I sat in a large room with only a fridge, an easy chair and unwatchable old television set in a wreck of what was once a grand old rectory in a parish that had seen better days but had once done everything just right but nevertheless suffered big losses. Here are some insights by a few of the authors of these short essays: Jean Charlot the Mexican French artist who came to live in Hawaii which he loved and where he was loved is featured and he strikes home with a penetrating, short analysis of the priests, the purple faced, sweaty alcoholic priest in a run down village church in France, the Indian, black blue skinned priest in a Mexican village, and the American priests who love to look and sound like American businessmen but who are really miserably paid and living (like me!) in rather sad and sorry places. Only their suits looked good (and I don't have even that.).

Then there is Maisie Ward talking about the Latin Mass when it was said facing the people and in dialogue form...the people making the responses...remember the Mass in those days was not only in Latin but silent...saying that it became something more than "machinery for producing Communion."

And for those who romanticize a non-existent time when religious education produced Catholics who "knew" their faith there are a number of essays about the poor religious instruction that produced truncated, dried out, misapplied bits and pieces of medieval thought mixed with devotional oddities.

These writers  were not grinding axes, trying to "get" their old teachers. Instead, we see that Catholicism has a been a visual, emotional affair too often and the grand vision left unassimilated. Nevertheless, despite inept authority even then, poor teachers, there were grand moments when the great vision of Catholicism challenged even the best and the brightest...and the most articulate. Certainly those are the kind of Catholics who wrote these essays. 

..

 Sheed and Ward are the two to the left. I think that the bottom left is Hilaire Belloc. I have no idea who the top left is! 

 *******