Can you tell the difference?

Take a look at this photo:


Is she a nun or is she old order Menonite?

Can't tell can you?

Nice modified habit there "sister".

Obscure Saint of the Week

The Anglican Breviary really is a treasurehouse, not only of beautiful English, beautiful translations and lovely enduring liturgy, but of English Catholic history. In the back there is a second Kalendar specializing in saints and blesseds who are associated in some way with Ye Merrie Oldie.

"Supplement of Feasts for Certain Places"

In keeping with the generally backward-looking point of this work, I offer a L'EG file: Obscure English Saint of the Week (worth the trouble for the neat names alone).

April 27th
St. Egbert, C. (stands for 'confessor')

Collect
O God, who didst inspire thy blessed Saint Egbert in such a wise to thirst for salvation, that he sent forth many heralds for the preaching of the Gospel: grant, we pray thee, by the intercession of his merits, so to direct the hearts of thy servants unto thee; that being filled with the fervour of thy Spirit, they may be made stedfast in faith, and effectually given to all good works.
Through...in the unity of the same...

For the Legend
Egbert was an Englishman [in other words, an Anglo Saxon] who became a monk at Lindisfarne, and then crossed the sea to obtain learning and sanctity in Ireland, for in those days Ireland was known as the Island of the Saints.

And a pestilence raged, which carried off many of his companions in the monastery whither he had gone, and he himself fell sick thereof. Whereupon he turned to God with all his heart and besought him for a longer life, that he might correct his lukewarmness, and exercise himself more abundantly in good works. And he vowed that, if his prayer were heard, he would live as a pilgrim in this world, and never again seek his own country.

Whereupon he was cured, and became a priest, and conceived in his heart a desire to proclaim the word of God to the Germanic peoples, who were of the same blood as his own Anglo-Saxon folk. But even though he was able to have a ship equipped with all the necessaries of his missionary enterprise, he was hindered from going, and warned of God that another mission awaited him. Wherefore he sent Saint Wigbert and others of his disciples to Germany in his stead.

And when some of these returned in discouragement, he sent Saint Willibrord [not a typo], with other monks to the apostolic number of twelve, which same were able to do that which God had held him back from doing. Then he was moved to go to the holy Isle of Iona, if so be he might turn the monks therein to unity of observance with the rest of Western Christendom in certain matters of custom and Canon Law, but specially as to the tonsure and the keeping of Easter.

And his patience, learning, and holiness prevailed, and on the day that he went to God, to wit, a the age of ninety, on April 24th, 729, the bretheren of Iona were keeping for the first time the paschal feast on the same day as the rest of Wetern Christendom.

The Lake District

Fr. Sean took his holidays in the Lake District.





(Once again? Why do I live in this stupid country?...can't quite remember...)

A Cartoon Vocation for a Cartoon Religion

(Faceplant ... banging head on the table...tearing hair...)

Why oh why, O Lord, are thy servants so very dumb?

So very, very dumb?

Cartoon to tempt teenagers into priesthood

The Church hopes that its manga comic, with pictures of nuns and monks playing pool and surfing the internet, will help to improve the image of the vocation, which leaders believe is seen as "monotonous and boring".

The minimum age to enter a seminary is 18, but children as young as 10 are being targeted by the recruitment drive, which is encouraging them to consider life as a parish priest or in a religious order.

Aaughh!!

OK, I'm going to tell you poor halfwits once and I'm going to use small words so you can turn them into txtmsging more easily.

Let me tell you why the cartoon "campaign" isn't going to work. For the same reason the guitars and tambourines and PeterPauln'Mary music ended up with a stampede of Catholics out of the Church and into evangelical churches and the New Age movement:

BECAUSE IT'S STUPID.

It's stupid, it's silly, it trivializes not only the ancient Faith, but the lives and problems and sufferings of the people who are actually seeking God.

Oh crumbs. Why can't they get it?

Fr Paul Embery, the Church's Director of Vocations, admitted that persuading
teenagers to commit to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience was not an easy
sell, but said that the Church was desperate to reach younger candidates for
ordination.

"The Church was desperate to reach younger candidates"...

Then give them the Faith. Can't be all that desperate can ye? Can't be so desperate that you would actually stoop to trying the religious approach?

It's very simple really. The Catholics don't have the Faith. Tough to get vocations out of them when they're not Catholic in any way but a name on a baptismal register.

For forty years, you've given them warm blacmange, Hallmark greeting card mottoes and hugs instead of the answers they wanted. Why is this so very difficult for them to understand? Do they really expect to get vocations to the priesthood and religious life from people who don't know why they ought to believe in God? What sort of people are they trying to attract?

oh. wait. I get it.

People like themselves.

"We realise that this kind of commitment is counter-cultural. It requires great
sacrifice, and a lot of people see it as monotonous and boring, but actually it
is an extremely fulfilling job," he said.

"an extremely fulfilling job."

Ok. I've got it.

Of course. We dumped the icky and offputting religious part of Catholicism. That sort of stuff was a downer man. The kids don't groove to it. You gotta meet them where they are, man. You gotta talk to them about fulfillment.

Ugh.

Fine.

Fine.

A Note For Broad Publication

I wanted everyone who has prayed for or offered Masses for my mum to know that prayer works. When I put the notes up on Devout Life, I had heard that she was more or less comatose and was likely to die within days, or possibly hours.

A few days ago, I received the following note from my friend in Vancouver who is looking after my mum's affairs.:

Hi Hilary,

I've just gotten back from two days in Vancouver and Judy has revived
remarkably. She went from being unable to talk or take any liquids to
drinking water and having short conversations. Apart from activating
my power of attorney to deal with banking issues, we just spent a bunch of
time sitting together and watching her favourite TV show on DVD.

By the end of Friday, she even said she felt a bit hungry. If she manages to
get some soup to stay down, it would be the first food she's had in
almost three weeks. [Her brother] Robert is in town for the weekend and will see her Saturday.

I was out of email contact, so I just saw your email. I'm also replacing her computer, which has chosen now to fail irrepairably.

All the best,

T.

Prayer works. I would be very grateful if those of ye who have blogs would publish this information and thank everyone very kindly for their prayers.

"I'm not really religious; I'm more spiritual..."

What's the difference?

I'm reading John Senior who is quoting Thomas Carlyle:

One of the most powerful attractions in Oriental doctrines is something we
have as well at home [in the Christian West] but too quickly grow out of and
repress - the reality of spiritual presences. Carlyle described it
trenchantly:

To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have forgotten God'; - in the most
modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we have taken up the Fact of this
Universe as it is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal substance
of things, and opened them only to the Shows and Shams of things. We quietly
believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great, unintelligble 'Perhaps.'

Contrasting this with real religion, he said:

Religion [to the monks of St. Edmundsbury] is not a diseased
self-introspectino, an agonising inquiry; their duties are clear to them, the
way of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they are traveling on it. Religion
lies over them like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and
life-element, which is not spoken of, which in all things is presupposed without
speech.

* ~ *
Among ordinary working Christians, the spiritual element is inconspicuous
by its presence. Nowadays we get self-consciously and deliberately "unreal"
every once in a while in the hope that thereby we become more "spiritual." We do
not see one and the same event as bathed in the natural and the supernatural
at once.

I noted that Dale was talking about the difference between "cradle" Catholics and converts. I wonder if this is not a false distinction. Perhaps we are all required to sink ourselves as deeply as we may into the mindset of the Faith, to have it imbue every aspect of our daily thoughts and actions. There should be no separation between the supernatural and the natural any more than there can be a separation between the Logos and the Man Christ.

Or as Reepicheep said, "Go further in and higher up."

What I would have said...

if I'd thought of it.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge
which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

Become the book

A few weeks ago, a friend was sent an email from an earnest young chap who asked, "What can young people do who want to restore the Before Time? It was all stolen from us and for the most part, we have only the barest glimmer of what it was all like and hardly know what it is that we have lost."

My friend wrote a lengthy reply that I thought was rather beside the point and failed to give the poor chap a straightforward answer. But I thought of one instantly: Become the living embodiment of the thing you are trying to restore.

I thought of a scientifiction novel by the great Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451 about a future society in which books, other than girlie magazines, are entirely banned, everyone is addicted to television and sports and is more or less incapable of reasoned criticism. The main character meets a pretty girl who is a clandestine reader/book-owner, and when she is killed, flees to the fringes of society where he finds her book-loving friends engaged in archiving the literature, history and philosophy of the past.

Their method, knowing that the books themselves could all be destroyed, is to become the books. Each picks one and memorizes it, the entire thing, calling on memory skills that are latent in the human mind, even the mind of distracted Westerners. Each becomes a living archive of the past.

I gave the following response to my friend who forwarded the poor young chap's email:

Step one: become a traditional Christian. Practice that faith in as muscular a way as you can manage. Learn everything there is to know about the Christian traditions. Be Christian on purpose and as forcefullly and energetically as you can.

Step two: forcefully purge all modernist and postmodern ideas from your mental landscape. (This may take many years, but is a most enjoyable exercise.)

Step three: Quit University immediately if you are in. Run! If not yet in, abandon any idea of going to University. (If you have already gone to University, go to confession and forget all about it.)

Step four: begin to read the Classics of Western Civilization in philosophy and literature, starting with the Greeks and working your way up through the late antiquity guys, into Augustine then on to the Scholastics. When you get to the end of the 15th century, stop. Skip on to Newman. Stop. Skip again to Chesterton and Dawson. Stop again. Skip to Mortimer Adler and Gilson.

Step five: Stop reading and learn to sing, play an instrument, paint or do calligraphy (only one of these, not all at once.)

Step six: Get married to a practising member of your church.

Step seven: Have a lot of children.

Step eight: Teach them all that stuff you've just learned.

Step nine: Make sure you go to heaven and take as many others with you as you can.

Thats it.

* ~ * ~ *

I might add another, lesser step. Become ordinately attached to the things of the past. The material objects, that is. They are almost always more beautiful, more representative of The Good than anything made after 1960, and more solidly built. We are physical beings, sacramentality is important, and if the things we see every day, the things we wear, eat and use are material contradictions to the things you are trying to force into your brain, you are at a disadvantage.

Such attachments, however, can lead to small confusions. I still sometimes unconsciously reach for the carriage handle to push it back when the cursor reaches the right edge of the screen, and occasionally try to flip over a CD when it comes to the end.

As I was saying...

I read the other day that a certain famous theologian teaching in a Roman university, was arrested by the Inquisition whilst giving a lecture. He was detained four years and exonerated upon examination. When he was released he calmly returned to his lectern and began, "As I was saying yesterday..."