As a survivor of full-blown depression, I thought I should write something in relation to the death of actor Robin Williams. My first brother and I are old enough to have watched "Mork and Mindy" as kids, and my brother, were he still a kid, would have taken news of his death really hard.
I don't know how it was for Robin Williams, but depression has never removed my ability to make serious moral decisions. It has made me cry a lot, and feel like a huge failure, and to suddenly escape conversations at parties to fall dead asleep on the hostess's bed. It prevents me from bouncing back from disappointments all that easily, and it urges me to quit just about any difficult endeavour. And like tens of thousands of people, I take prescription anti-depressants. But the one and only time I ever said anything remotely suicidey--and it was at a really bad time--it was to my best friend who indirectly, and in the nicest way possible, i.e. by talking about another friend, told me she would never, ever forgive me or anyone she loved who did that. And I'm glad she did. It was the spine-stiffener I needed at a moment of moral weakness.
Depression is not an excuse for suicide, although suicide may come to look like the only way out if the depressed person isn't careful with their thoughts. Perhaps in some people's case depression so interferes with their moral freedom that they really aren't culpable of their self-murder. But I am not aware of myself ever being THAT sick, even at my loopiest. I have always known (A) that sudden death of a family member is absolute hell on the rest of the family and (B) that one suicide can lead to other suicides and (C) that things ALWAYS get better eventually and (D) that suicide is a mortal sin.
Now Father Ron Rolheiser writes in his syndicated column once a year every year to say that suicide is not necessarily a mortal sin, and we should not put away the photographs of our loved one's who commit suicide, but accept their suicide as the sad result of a bout of depression and celebrate their lives. I think the idea is that suicides have "lost their battle" with depression the same way cancer victims "lose their battle" with cancer. Instead of being shunned as murderers, as they once were, suicides are bathed in a heroic glow. And I can most definitely see the appeal of that, especially as someone who "battles depression" myself.
However, whenever I read Father R's annual suicide piece, I get the impression he is writing to us merely as family members and friends of suicides, not as potential suicides ourselves. In fact, I often wonder what the cumulative effect of Father R's suicide column might be, not on a grieving family member, but on an unhappy and trusting mind in a very bad moment. One way to read Father R is that he thinks we can just jump from this world straight into the arms of Jesus, for Jesus will never, ever let us fall. So why not jump?
I believe it is salutary to hope and pray that God forgives the serious sins of others while never assuming that he will forgive one's own serious sins without contrition, confession and penance. And I certainly hope that God will forgive the serious sins of Robin Williams (as I hope he will forgive the serious sins of Auntie Seraphic), particularly this shocking last one. Poor man. There may indeed have been a staggering lack of moral freedom in his case. Certainly he seems not to have taken comfort in the thought that at the age of 63 he had amassed an impressive catalog of life's work, had sired three children, had proven himself to be a great comedian and a good actor, and had touched the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
So there you have it. Like many other people, I am saddened that Robin Williams is dead, particularly because he killed himself. And as a fellow sufferer of depression, I understand that depression is a physical condition, not a moral failing, that attacks your grip on reality. But at the same time, I feel it necessary to state, for the sake of readers tempted to do what he did, and for their families, that suicide is a sin, and although we can hope and pray that God will forgive it in another, we can never assume God will forgive it in us. Although depression is not a moral failing in itself, and it may attack one's freedom to make moral decisions, one is not morally off the hook. You can say "No" to evil and "Yes" to good: it's just harder.
Update: I've just been talking with someone whose life was saved by some very tough talk from a dear friend. It really costs a lot for someone to tell someone they deeply love, "If you commit suicide, you will go to hell" and mean it. It is an incredibly compassionate thing to do, especially as it leaves the poor Christian vulnerable to accusations that he/she WANTS his/her beloved friend to go to hell. And thus the compassionate person is labelled a "judgemental" and "hateful" person--and he or she doesn't care, just so long as his or her beloved friend doesn't kill him or herself.
When someone commits suicide, they are sinning against everyone who loves them. How culpable they are when they do that can only be determined by their therapist, or the courts, or God. Those sinned against may do some serious mental gymnastics to excuse the person who hurt them for their sin. "I forgive you, I forgive you, may God forgive you," seems to me the most natural reaction of a panicked, grief-stricken Christian who still loves his or her loved one and hopes against hope the loved one is okay. The thought of a loved one being in hell is awful--intolerable! Indeed, there are people tortured by the idea of anyone at all in hell, and they find the easiest way to cope is to turn off their brain and pretend there isn't a hell after all. However, the authentic Catholic response is to pray for the dead, to do penance on their behalf and to hope, not assume, that God will have mercy on them. Turning off our brains and parroting "He's looking down from heaven smiling" and "He's at peace now" is a sin against reason, however comforting it might sound.
I don't think I am a cruel or insensitive person, and like anyone who suffers from depression, I think about depression and how to cure it a lot. It takes prevention, medication, all kinds of effort usually invisible to others. Depression is a common complaint; apparently one in four American women in their 40s and 50s take anti-depressants. Imagine if they all just ended it. What a bloodbath! Imagine if I just ended it. You regular readers would feel unsettled, hurt, angry, disappointed, betrayed. "How DARE she call herself Auntie Seraphic," you would harrumph, and rightly so. Let's not even imagine what my family would think, especially the little ones. I would rather suffer from a painful disease for forty years than hurt my little loved ones like that. My uncle's (natural if too-young) death when I was nine hurt my brother and me terribly, and I will never, ever forget my grandmother weeping through Mass that Christmas.
The fact is that "mental illness" does not necessarily make us adults as incapable of sin as three year old children. It's not a comfy moral place where we can do whatever we want, safe in the knowledge that our self-appointed nannies will scold anyone with the brass to "judge" us. Those of us who are catatonic or living in heightened states of irrational terror or anger, okay. Those of us who know what we are SUPPOSED to do to live normal, rational lives but from laziness or whatever do not do it are, however, culpable of sins of imprudence or whatever else. (That reminds me; I must take my pill. Gulp. Okay.)
Today I am annoyed not at suicides but at people who are getting high from their public expressions of compassion and approval for people who commit suicide and their scoldings of those who think suicide is a rotten thing to do. These nanny-types seem to think we are adding to the suffering of the suicide's loved ones, but if anything we are pointing out the real harm done to these loved ones and dreading any future suffering of the suicide. ("To die, to sleep - To sleep, perchance to dream," said Hamlet. "Ay, there's the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come...') Really, the only thing anyone can say to the loved ones without sounding like a twit is "I'm so sorry for your loss." But when talking generally about suicide, and its implications, I think it is best to use our reasoning faculties.
The whole world seems to be talking about the Robin Williams suicide (probably because suicide is such a contrast to his funny, life-giving persona), so the forces of intellect and truth are being forced once again to engage the army of cheap sentiment and woolly thinking.
Showing posts with label Travails. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travails. Show all posts
Tuesday, 12 August 2014
Thursday, 7 August 2014
Two Young Men
It is a bright and sunny day here in Edinburgh, and next up on my housekeeping schedule is the guest room. However here am I blogging again, to link to this sobering article that rather calls the importance of social media into question. In short, a young man dies due to medical negligence, and an expert witness, whose nom-de-plume is Theodore Dalrymple, decides to learn something about him.
After the case was over, I looked up the deceased on the Internet and though, as I have said, he was not in any way remarkable or extraordinary, I found quite a lot about him and by him, most notably a video that he had made about himself and the kind of shoes that he wore. Even here, as far as his taste in shoes was concerned, he was not at all extraordinary: I think he wore the kind of shoes that everyone, or at least everyone of his age like him, wore. The film lasted more than five minutes, and consisted of him putting on and taking off various of his shoes and holding them up to the camera. This was done to a background of rock music, which I muted as quickly as I could.
The banality of this surprises Dr. Dalrymple, who thought he was too old to be surprised, and he seems to suggest that the more trivial stuff about you on the internet, the more trivial you may be.
Well, it is fun to poke fun at the over-fed masses and their low-brow tastes, I guess. After all, I live in the UK where people make snap judgments about you based on your accent and no, I'm not American, and no, I'm not offended. I take a bus where tattoos pulsate like open wounds yet feathery hats get me strange looks, so I might enjoy giving the lumpen proletarian a going over from the safety of the internet from time to time.
However, this morning I also read the story of another trivial-seeming young man, one who very likely may not live very long either, but in his case, he took real action in his life by embracing the seventh century.
Hipster Jihadi seems to be having oh, what a lovely war, inviting his mother to come and live in a nice flat near the Euphrates river.
"My son," she said, "what would happen if the owners of the flat came back? What will you do then?'
"I told her not to worry", he said, "They are dead and gone."
So although growing a beard and cheering the slaughter one's enemies and taking their homes and perhaps raping their mothers, wives, and/or daughters may seem like more meaningful activities than making videos about one's stupid shoes, I am tempted to think it is a shame that the first young man died of a treatable disease, not the second.
After the case was over, I looked up the deceased on the Internet and though, as I have said, he was not in any way remarkable or extraordinary, I found quite a lot about him and by him, most notably a video that he had made about himself and the kind of shoes that he wore. Even here, as far as his taste in shoes was concerned, he was not at all extraordinary: I think he wore the kind of shoes that everyone, or at least everyone of his age like him, wore. The film lasted more than five minutes, and consisted of him putting on and taking off various of his shoes and holding them up to the camera. This was done to a background of rock music, which I muted as quickly as I could.
The banality of this surprises Dr. Dalrymple, who thought he was too old to be surprised, and he seems to suggest that the more trivial stuff about you on the internet, the more trivial you may be.
Well, it is fun to poke fun at the over-fed masses and their low-brow tastes, I guess. After all, I live in the UK where people make snap judgments about you based on your accent and no, I'm not American, and no, I'm not offended. I take a bus where tattoos pulsate like open wounds yet feathery hats get me strange looks, so I might enjoy giving the lumpen proletarian a going over from the safety of the internet from time to time.
However, this morning I also read the story of another trivial-seeming young man, one who very likely may not live very long either, but in his case, he took real action in his life by embracing the seventh century.
His page on the social media site VK suggest a young man apparently obsessed with his body - it is dominated by a series of pictures of him in a gym, showing off his toned physique.
Now he uses Twitter to glorify the "Caliphate" of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, and to post gory pictures including one of two heads in a basket, which he compares to the heads of sheep that can be ordered for the table in specialist Egyptian restaurants.
Hipster Jihadi seems to be having oh, what a lovely war, inviting his mother to come and live in a nice flat near the Euphrates river.
"My son," she said, "what would happen if the owners of the flat came back? What will you do then?'
"I told her not to worry", he said, "They are dead and gone."
So although growing a beard and cheering the slaughter one's enemies and taking their homes and perhaps raping their mothers, wives, and/or daughters may seem like more meaningful activities than making videos about one's stupid shoes, I am tempted to think it is a shame that the first young man died of a treatable disease, not the second.
Friday, 1 August 2014
Day of Solidarity with the Christians of the Middle East
For seven centuries, the Near East was home to Christians, Jews and followers of other religions, excluding Islam, which had not yet come into being. And over the centuries, although some ancient Christian and Jewish communities were wiped out by the violent spread of various sects called Islamic, indigenous Christians and Jews continued to flourish in the Near East, and even northern Africa. However, for the past hundred years, Christians and Jews (except in what is now called Israel) have been ethnically cleansed from these regions to such an extent that they now have what is, unthinkably, more or less a token presence (if that) in their own ancestral lands.
This is not a part of Christian history--and Christian current events--we can forget. And these are not Christians we should forget. We especially cannot forget them if we belong to Catholic or Eastern Orthodox traditions. Anglo-Saxon Protestants may be forgiven for their ignorance of these communities, but no-one who loves the Holy Mother of God, so revered in the East, has an excuse.
We are women, very often poor women: students, Singles, young mothers, artists. As we watch and--I hope--spread the news, we may feel helpless. We want to help. But what can we do? We can pray, fast, go to Mass and, very importantly, give alms today. It doesn't matter if what we give is akin to the widow's mite. If all we Christian women--women rich and poor--gave just the cost of what today's food would cost us--that would be a tremendous sum. If you eat nothing today, offering your hunger pangs and headache for our suffering brothers and sisters, how much will you save? Five dollars? Ten pounds? Send it to CNEWA, choosing the country where you wish the money to be sent, e.g. Iraq. Let lazy armchair warriors snarl on the internet about bombs and Obama and whatnot. We women will send bread.
Earlier it troubled me that Christians' donations were being used not solely to help penniless Christians but also their poor Muslim neighbours. This made me cross because my first feeling is that Muslims have their own charities to help Muslims, and nobody but Christians seems to care about Christians, and even then, we privileged Western Christians are very neglectful of our own, or think only of central and south Africa and Latin America. (My amazement when I discovered there is a fund in Germany to help the poor of the former DDR and other former Iron Bloc countries!) However, then I heard of how grateful and amazed the poor Muslims are that the Christian aid groups feed them too, and I realized that this can help create love and respect in the now-majority Muslims for the now-few Christians in their midst. And changing hearts is just as important as feeding empty Christian tummies and giving shelter to Christian heads.
If you have an affinity for the Society of Jesus, Mike Swan at the Toronto Catholic Register tells me that the Jesuit Refugee Service is a very experienced and effective provider of aid. And in the UK, it may be most natural to give money to Aid to the Church in Need UK.
At 6:15 PM British Summer Time, I will be praying at Mass in Edinburgh's St. Cuthbert's Chapel.* If all "Seraphic Singles" readers would join me in prayer at the same time for the Middle Eastern Christians, that would be truly awesome: a real prayer storm. I will be praying especially for the safety of the girls, young women and nuns. (CNEWA Canada has a special fund for a orphanage for Iraqi Christian girls run by nuns.)
Update: Okay, done it: put our money where my mouth is. I'm sorry it's not more, but on the Day of Judgement, I will be able to raise my head for at least a moment.
*Note to Scots: It is unclear if Mass will begin at 6 or 6:15, so I recommend coming for 6.
UPDATE: Mass is indeed at 6
This is not a part of Christian history--and Christian current events--we can forget. And these are not Christians we should forget. We especially cannot forget them if we belong to Catholic or Eastern Orthodox traditions. Anglo-Saxon Protestants may be forgiven for their ignorance of these communities, but no-one who loves the Holy Mother of God, so revered in the East, has an excuse.
We are women, very often poor women: students, Singles, young mothers, artists. As we watch and--I hope--spread the news, we may feel helpless. We want to help. But what can we do? We can pray, fast, go to Mass and, very importantly, give alms today. It doesn't matter if what we give is akin to the widow's mite. If all we Christian women--women rich and poor--gave just the cost of what today's food would cost us--that would be a tremendous sum. If you eat nothing today, offering your hunger pangs and headache for our suffering brothers and sisters, how much will you save? Five dollars? Ten pounds? Send it to CNEWA, choosing the country where you wish the money to be sent, e.g. Iraq. Let lazy armchair warriors snarl on the internet about bombs and Obama and whatnot. We women will send bread.
Earlier it troubled me that Christians' donations were being used not solely to help penniless Christians but also their poor Muslim neighbours. This made me cross because my first feeling is that Muslims have their own charities to help Muslims, and nobody but Christians seems to care about Christians, and even then, we privileged Western Christians are very neglectful of our own, or think only of central and south Africa and Latin America. (My amazement when I discovered there is a fund in Germany to help the poor of the former DDR and other former Iron Bloc countries!) However, then I heard of how grateful and amazed the poor Muslims are that the Christian aid groups feed them too, and I realized that this can help create love and respect in the now-majority Muslims for the now-few Christians in their midst. And changing hearts is just as important as feeding empty Christian tummies and giving shelter to Christian heads.
If you have an affinity for the Society of Jesus, Mike Swan at the Toronto Catholic Register tells me that the Jesuit Refugee Service is a very experienced and effective provider of aid. And in the UK, it may be most natural to give money to Aid to the Church in Need UK.
At 6:15 PM British Summer Time, I will be praying at Mass in Edinburgh's St. Cuthbert's Chapel.* If all "Seraphic Singles" readers would join me in prayer at the same time for the Middle Eastern Christians, that would be truly awesome: a real prayer storm. I will be praying especially for the safety of the girls, young women and nuns. (CNEWA Canada has a special fund for a orphanage for Iraqi Christian girls run by nuns.)
Update: Okay, done it: put our money where my mouth is. I'm sorry it's not more, but on the Day of Judgement, I will be able to raise my head for at least a moment.
*Note to Scots: It is unclear if Mass will begin at 6 or 6:15, so I recommend coming for 6.
UPDATE: Mass is indeed at 6
Saturday, 26 July 2014
Custody of the Eyes
I don't know if I am being terrible romantic about my youth, but I don't remember being particularly attracted to men just because they had no shirts on. For one thing, men didn't go around without shirts a lot, except at the beach or by the swimming pool, or when mowing their lawns, and no-one looks his best mowing a lawn. Equally, I thought young women who squealed, "Look at his a**!", were not merely crude but weird. I mean, what is the symbolic value of buttocks for young women? Honestly. For older women, I suppose they might be an indicator of virile youth versus flat or saggy old age. As a young women, I personally was all about clothes and animated faces. [Long and embarrassing reminiscence edited.] Where was I?
Oh yes. Shirtlessness. So the other day I was walking along the beach with my friend and her new baby. It was a warm, windy day, one of those rare warm Edinburgh days when the beach is crowded with families and naked white babies and fourteen year olds in bikinis and gangs of youths. Almost nobody ventures into the actual Forth to swim because no matter how warm the sand is, the Forth is COLD. And often dirty. So I was surprised to see a gang of shirtless youths in bathing trunks swaggering towards us. Were they perhaps going to the swimming baths?
And then a funny thing happened. The swaggering youths no longer had heads. They were all naked chests. A vast magnetic smorgasbord of naked human torsos, without personality. In a panic, I forced my eyes away, and the torsos sauntered by. I looked back and they had their heads again. Goodness knows how old they were. Nineteen? I hope nineteen. They were pretty hairless.
It was a bit unnerving, but I put it out of my head until the next day when I was on the Rough Bus and teenage girls in incredibly skimpy clothing got on at the suburban shopping mall. The coltish girl in front was wearing a tiny halter shop and short snorts and actually looked very good in her outfit, if also seriously unsupervised, unlike her chubbier (but not actually fat) friends. I gloomy composed the aphorism "If you look great in a bikini, you're probably too young to wear it."
Then it occurred to me that the contrast of my reaction to mostly naked boy teengers was completely different from my reaction to these mostly naked girl teenagers: grudging admiration and pity for the later, and I don't know WHAT for the former. Feeling attracted, completely against my will, to multiple bare chested swaggering guys who could have been anybody felt super-creepy, and I didn't like it. So I told B.A. all about it.
B.A. was sitting under the portico of the Historical House with a beer and the Times Literary Supplement. He was wearing a shirt.
"Yes, well, now you know what men go through," said B.A. cheerfully. "We get used to it."
"UGH!" I said. "BLAH! I don't like it. Maybe it's because I'm growing old. Testosterone is kicking in! WAAAAHHHH!"
Oh yes. Shirtlessness. So the other day I was walking along the beach with my friend and her new baby. It was a warm, windy day, one of those rare warm Edinburgh days when the beach is crowded with families and naked white babies and fourteen year olds in bikinis and gangs of youths. Almost nobody ventures into the actual Forth to swim because no matter how warm the sand is, the Forth is COLD. And often dirty. So I was surprised to see a gang of shirtless youths in bathing trunks swaggering towards us. Were they perhaps going to the swimming baths?
And then a funny thing happened. The swaggering youths no longer had heads. They were all naked chests. A vast magnetic smorgasbord of naked human torsos, without personality. In a panic, I forced my eyes away, and the torsos sauntered by. I looked back and they had their heads again. Goodness knows how old they were. Nineteen? I hope nineteen. They were pretty hairless.
It was a bit unnerving, but I put it out of my head until the next day when I was on the Rough Bus and teenage girls in incredibly skimpy clothing got on at the suburban shopping mall. The coltish girl in front was wearing a tiny halter shop and short snorts and actually looked very good in her outfit, if also seriously unsupervised, unlike her chubbier (but not actually fat) friends. I gloomy composed the aphorism "If you look great in a bikini, you're probably too young to wear it."
Then it occurred to me that the contrast of my reaction to mostly naked boy teengers was completely different from my reaction to these mostly naked girl teenagers: grudging admiration and pity for the later, and I don't know WHAT for the former. Feeling attracted, completely against my will, to multiple bare chested swaggering guys who could have been anybody felt super-creepy, and I didn't like it. So I told B.A. all about it.
B.A. was sitting under the portico of the Historical House with a beer and the Times Literary Supplement. He was wearing a shirt.
"Yes, well, now you know what men go through," said B.A. cheerfully. "We get used to it."
"UGH!" I said. "BLAH! I don't like it. Maybe it's because I'm growing old. Testosterone is kicking in! WAAAAHHHH!"
Wednesday, 23 July 2014
The War on Christians
B.A. and I watched the BBC News channel at 11 PM to see the latest updates on the genocidal Islamist persecution of our brothers and sisters in Iraq and Syria. We watched in vain. Not a mention. When I was a child I wondered what had happened to the first Churches--you know, the Corinthians, the Galatians, the Colossians. The only ancient churches we ever heard about outside St. Paul's and St. Peter's Letters were Rome and Jerusalem, and Jerusalem (confusingly) was very rarely mentioned by the media as a city of Christians. A kindly adult--probably my mother--kindly informed me that they had been destroyed by Muslim invaders. Many of those countries we think of as Muslim or Islamic were once Christian. Within living memory, Syria and Lebanon were Christian countries. The indigenous people of Egypt, the descendants of those who worshipped pharaohs, are the Coptic Christians.
And so today. The Church of Mosul has been destroyed. Our churches are burning. Our brothers and sisters have been told by a raggle-taggle band of Islamist marauders to convert, pay a punitive tax or die. Monks are being driven from ancient monasteries; Christians girls and women are being gang-raped. And this means Christ is being driven from His home; Christ is being raped. Christ is being told to convert to a false religion. Christ is being told to cough up money He doesn't have. Christ is being murdered.
I know we have clicked our tongues and shaken our heads over the horrors of the modern world, and felt awful for Hindu girls gang-raped by other Hindus, and for African Muslim (or African Traditional Religion) girls mutilated by African Muslim (or ATR) women. We have been justly furious at those soi-disant Christians in former Yugoslavia who raped other Christian and Muslim women and had the nerve to ask why the Christian West did not take their side. We wring our hands over Israel, and are shocked by the virulent ant-Jewish hatred of what is now called "the Muslim world". We have been told many horrors, but rarely advised what we can actually do about them. So helpless we have been made to feel that it may come as a surprise that British activists actually drove to former Yugoslavia during its civil wars to personally pick up refugees and bring them to safety.
I wish I could drive to Syria. Indeed, I wish I could drive! Because this time it's not about "them"--foreigners, even if foreigners for whom we feel deep sympathy, as Canadians and Europeans felt for Americans on 9/11. It's about us Christians, us Catholics, even. The Chaldean Christians of Iraq are in communion with Rome; they are ours; they are us. So what are we going to do?
I will tell you what I have done so far, not to toot my own horn (which would be disgusting under these circumstances) but to help inspire you to do something yourselves.
So far I have contacted a friend in the media office of the (self-defined as Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, and an acquaintance in media office of the Catholic Church in Scotland. I have written to a Canadian Catholic journalist who has reported on the sufferings of Middle Eastern Christians, and himself been to Syria to speak with Christian refugees, for advice as to what Christians might do in the UK. I have sent a note to my fellow novelist, Fiorella de Maria, who has connections with refugee aid in the UK. I have sent comments of support to Tim Stanley for his excellent op ed in the UK Telegraph. I have changed my Facebook photo to the "Nazarene" symbol being spray-painted on the houses of Christians in Iraq. And I have spread news of a rally to be held in London, England, outside the Parliament buildings, this Saturday.
All that without leaving the house.
Today I will leave the house to meet with a Scottish journalist whose politics are normally the exact opposite of mine. Although he is not a church-attending Christian, he has great sympathy for the Christians of the Middle East, perhaps because he is a true liberal, and objects to any minority being destroyed by religious fanatics--even if that minority is Christian and even if those religious fanatics are a branch of Islam*.
So if this agnostic, left-wing journalist is willing to do something for our brothers and sisters, i.e. us, then what are you willing to do? What can you do?
If you really cannot do anything else, you could go to Mass on August 1. But please thing of something else as well. Talk to your friends. Organize a protest. Write emails to journalists and newspapers. Ask an expert to come to a public meeting in your church hall and then paper the neighbourhood with flyers.
*It appears that what is or is not Islamic is purely subjective and depends entirely upon the person claiming to speak for Islam. And thus there are very nice Muslims who don't see much of a difference between just being a good neighbour and being Muslim, just as there are very nice Christians who also don't see much of a difference between just being a good neighbour and being Christian.
Only if millions of Christians outside the Middle East come together and scream and work on behalf of those of us being persecuted in the Middle East will anything be done. The BBC is too fixated on Palestine, Putin and pedophilia to pay attention to anything else. To get the attention of the non-Christian establishment, we will have to shout together.
Update: I'm reliably informed that the Jesuit Refugee Service makes very good use of donations, and has tons of expertise in helping refugees.
Monday, 26 May 2014
Still Reading about Psycho Single
Oh dear. I have been reading and writing about Psycho Single's autobiography. The blasted thing is that he was a good writer. The Psycho Single of the health club was not. I am left thinking, "You are a shameless, selfish whiner now"---I'm up to his 20th birthday--"and you'll be a cold-blooded killer in two years, but you can write, you little bast*rd."
He certainly has a phenomenal memory for names, games, places, dates, and his foreshadowing actually works. It's a moral struggle determining if it works because it works or because he stabbed or shot two dozen people. It's like the "Can I watch a Polanski film knowing what I know" issue on a GRAND SCALE.
I'm not saying the kid was a Polanski. (He's a good writer, not great. He definitely needed an editor and to drop some cliches, plus the manosphere garbage, but he had serious potential.) I'm saying that he could write, which is a rarer skill than you might think. The horrible and damnable irony is that the devil (my word, not his) told him the only way he could have value was to get a lot of money so as to attract girls If only he had stopped thinking about sex, money or himself for a moment to enjoy writing. He was good at it.
When bad people have talent, how do you talk about it? For this was a bad kid. This was a kid who cried to get what he wanted from his mother when he was seventeen years old and got it. And saw no shame in it when he wrote his autobiography.
This was a writer who could unstintingly admit that he was envious as a child, envious as a teen, envious as a young adult. He could admit that he was afraid of the dark. He could write about every time he cried, and that he cried every time a joyful time came to an end, and that visiting an even richer boy in France made him cry out against the injustice of the world, because this boy was so much richer than he, and had such cool friends, and so much sex. (But there would not have been any point sending him to El Salvador to count his blessings, for he was taken or sent to Morocco on occasion, and he despised it as a backwater instead of feeling fortunate not to be a poor kid there.)
But I will tell you what I hate even more than feeling conflicted over Psycho Killer's autobiography. It's seeing newspapers refer to him as "the virgin killer" as if they were making fun of him, not for being a killer but for being a virgin. This was the exact kind of anti-virgin sniggering that fuelled his hatred of the women who wouldn't give him sex and the men who "got" sex.
He was a spoiled selfish young man who wickedly stoked his hatred of the world until he was ready to begin killing as much of it as he could. He is not a poster child for modesty, to say the least. But since there is a major push against teenagers bullying teenagers with homosexual inclinations, how about a major push against anyone bullying people who are suspected of not having yet had sex? Bulling people because of their lack of sexual experience is a form of sexual harassment, and I'd like to see that written about more often!
Update: I am at the point where he is whining that HE is the half-white descendant of British aristocracy and this black guy he has met is the descendant of slaves, so he, not the black guy, deserved to lose his virginity to a white blonde girl. On the one hand, I want to throw up. On the other hand, this is the kind of honesty that makes for good writing. Damn it!
Update 2: I have finished reading the whole thing. He concludes that he is "the true victim in this" and "the good guy". Meanwhile, I have just noticed that my baby toe is cut and my foot is stained with blood. How did that happen without me noticing? That's how compelling the whole horrible story is.
Someone needs to write a Catholic blog for Single men. There has got to be someone to tell men like Psycho Single that the be-all and end-all of life is not attracting women.
He certainly has a phenomenal memory for names, games, places, dates, and his foreshadowing actually works. It's a moral struggle determining if it works because it works or because he stabbed or shot two dozen people. It's like the "Can I watch a Polanski film knowing what I know" issue on a GRAND SCALE.
I'm not saying the kid was a Polanski. (He's a good writer, not great. He definitely needed an editor and to drop some cliches, plus the manosphere garbage, but he had serious potential.) I'm saying that he could write, which is a rarer skill than you might think. The horrible and damnable irony is that the devil (my word, not his) told him the only way he could have value was to get a lot of money so as to attract girls If only he had stopped thinking about sex, money or himself for a moment to enjoy writing. He was good at it.
When bad people have talent, how do you talk about it? For this was a bad kid. This was a kid who cried to get what he wanted from his mother when he was seventeen years old and got it. And saw no shame in it when he wrote his autobiography.
This was a writer who could unstintingly admit that he was envious as a child, envious as a teen, envious as a young adult. He could admit that he was afraid of the dark. He could write about every time he cried, and that he cried every time a joyful time came to an end, and that visiting an even richer boy in France made him cry out against the injustice of the world, because this boy was so much richer than he, and had such cool friends, and so much sex. (But there would not have been any point sending him to El Salvador to count his blessings, for he was taken or sent to Morocco on occasion, and he despised it as a backwater instead of feeling fortunate not to be a poor kid there.)
But I will tell you what I hate even more than feeling conflicted over Psycho Killer's autobiography. It's seeing newspapers refer to him as "the virgin killer" as if they were making fun of him, not for being a killer but for being a virgin. This was the exact kind of anti-virgin sniggering that fuelled his hatred of the women who wouldn't give him sex and the men who "got" sex.
He was a spoiled selfish young man who wickedly stoked his hatred of the world until he was ready to begin killing as much of it as he could. He is not a poster child for modesty, to say the least. But since there is a major push against teenagers bullying teenagers with homosexual inclinations, how about a major push against anyone bullying people who are suspected of not having yet had sex? Bulling people because of their lack of sexual experience is a form of sexual harassment, and I'd like to see that written about more often!
Update: I am at the point where he is whining that HE is the half-white descendant of British aristocracy and this black guy he has met is the descendant of slaves, so he, not the black guy, deserved to lose his virginity to a white blonde girl. On the one hand, I want to throw up. On the other hand, this is the kind of honesty that makes for good writing. Damn it!
Update 2: I have finished reading the whole thing. He concludes that he is "the true victim in this" and "the good guy". Meanwhile, I have just noticed that my baby toe is cut and my foot is stained with blood. How did that happen without me noticing? That's how compelling the whole horrible story is.
Someone needs to write a Catholic blog for Single men. There has got to be someone to tell men like Psycho Single that the be-all and end-all of life is not attracting women.
Sunday, 25 May 2014
Psycho Single Redux
What has happened in Santa Barbara California is horrible, and I feel terrible for the victims, their families and friends.
I suppose the first thing to say is that shootings by Single men motivated by frustration that they can't get girlfriends are rare. The last one I wrote about was the Health Club Shooter. And although the manosphere drips with bile, of course, I have very rarely been attacked online by bitter Single men. The only one I remember was Catholic and had decided I was a massive crypto-feminist man-hater, or something like that.
That said, the next time a somewhat bitter Single man tells me that the problem with women today is that we feel so ENTITLED, I may direct their attention to the latest Psycho Single. (I never name serial killers, and I wish nobody else did. That would remove one of their motives. The latest Psycho Single quite obviously planned out his posthumous fame.) Psycho Single felt so entitled, he described himself as the perfect guy. And, mixed-race himself, he went mad with envy and spite when he saw a dark-hued man with a pale-skinned woman.
Psycho Single read the manosphere, which sometimes encouraged him in his mingled desire for and hatred for women, but sometimes tried to slap him upside the head. Psycho Single was under the impression that since his looks, rich daddy and fancy car weren't enough, he would somehow have to make millions of dollars to get female attention. I wonder WHERE he got THIS idea.
I will not be put off with "he was just crazy" because I don't believe there is any such thing as "just crazy". Mental illness may interfere with freedom to make ethical choices, but it is not a free pass to hurt people. Anyway, if Psycho Single were that crazy, the phalanx of shrinks his parents hired would have caught it. And I'm assuming he would not have been legally able to purchase guns. Meanwhile, the vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. As I myself was a virgin at 22, I feel perfectly sanguine about describing Psycho Single as not only a cold-blooded murderer but an outrageously selfish, self-obsessed whiner. Lots of people are virgins at 22, you jerk.
I am a relatively cynical married lady of 39++ who lives in Europe, and so although I myself am a practicing Catholic, I at first wondered why this rich youth did not just drive his fancy car to Santa Barbara's highest class version of the House of the Rising Sun. But my question was answered when I read that he did not want another female psychotherapist when his first moved away because paying a woman to listen to him "felt like prostitution." What unmitigated crap. What Psycho Single wanted was a woman who would listen to him for free, and sleep with him for free, and tell him he was marvelous for free. Paying professionals for help was not what he deserved.
There is also the irony that he looked down on prostitution but was quite okay with watching scenes of, and documentaries about, torture and then killing his roommates and random strangers. But I digress. This was not about sex but about wanting attention. Lots of attention. Lots and lots and lots of attention. And he thought girls OWED him attention because he was handsome (he thought) and had a rich father.
My guess is that there have always been men like this. The whole disgusting idea of doit de signeur comes to mind. Also coming to mind, as we have been talking about St. Maria Goretti recently, is the fact that Maria's mother was working for her attacker's father. Some boys just grow up thinking that they are better than others and therefore deserve more free stuff. And if they really don't get that women are people, people rather like themselves, they are going to see women (young, beautiful women, anyway) as free stuff they deserve, that the world owes them.
St. Maria's attacker was called Alessandro Serenelli, whom I do name, as Maria forgave him and after he got out of prison, he spent the rest of his life as a servant to the Capuchins. He wrote a testimony before he died. Here it is. Note my emphasis.
I suppose the first thing to say is that shootings by Single men motivated by frustration that they can't get girlfriends are rare. The last one I wrote about was the Health Club Shooter. And although the manosphere drips with bile, of course, I have very rarely been attacked online by bitter Single men. The only one I remember was Catholic and had decided I was a massive crypto-feminist man-hater, or something like that.
That said, the next time a somewhat bitter Single man tells me that the problem with women today is that we feel so ENTITLED, I may direct their attention to the latest Psycho Single. (I never name serial killers, and I wish nobody else did. That would remove one of their motives. The latest Psycho Single quite obviously planned out his posthumous fame.) Psycho Single felt so entitled, he described himself as the perfect guy. And, mixed-race himself, he went mad with envy and spite when he saw a dark-hued man with a pale-skinned woman.
Psycho Single read the manosphere, which sometimes encouraged him in his mingled desire for and hatred for women, but sometimes tried to slap him upside the head. Psycho Single was under the impression that since his looks, rich daddy and fancy car weren't enough, he would somehow have to make millions of dollars to get female attention. I wonder WHERE he got THIS idea.
I will not be put off with "he was just crazy" because I don't believe there is any such thing as "just crazy". Mental illness may interfere with freedom to make ethical choices, but it is not a free pass to hurt people. Anyway, if Psycho Single were that crazy, the phalanx of shrinks his parents hired would have caught it. And I'm assuming he would not have been legally able to purchase guns. Meanwhile, the vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. As I myself was a virgin at 22, I feel perfectly sanguine about describing Psycho Single as not only a cold-blooded murderer but an outrageously selfish, self-obsessed whiner. Lots of people are virgins at 22, you jerk.
I am a relatively cynical married lady of 39++ who lives in Europe, and so although I myself am a practicing Catholic, I at first wondered why this rich youth did not just drive his fancy car to Santa Barbara's highest class version of the House of the Rising Sun. But my question was answered when I read that he did not want another female psychotherapist when his first moved away because paying a woman to listen to him "felt like prostitution." What unmitigated crap. What Psycho Single wanted was a woman who would listen to him for free, and sleep with him for free, and tell him he was marvelous for free. Paying professionals for help was not what he deserved.
There is also the irony that he looked down on prostitution but was quite okay with watching scenes of, and documentaries about, torture and then killing his roommates and random strangers. But I digress. This was not about sex but about wanting attention. Lots of attention. Lots and lots and lots of attention. And he thought girls OWED him attention because he was handsome (he thought) and had a rich father.
My guess is that there have always been men like this. The whole disgusting idea of doit de signeur comes to mind. Also coming to mind, as we have been talking about St. Maria Goretti recently, is the fact that Maria's mother was working for her attacker's father. Some boys just grow up thinking that they are better than others and therefore deserve more free stuff. And if they really don't get that women are people, people rather like themselves, they are going to see women (young, beautiful women, anyway) as free stuff they deserve, that the world owes them.
St. Maria's attacker was called Alessandro Serenelli, whom I do name, as Maria forgave him and after he got out of prison, he spent the rest of his life as a servant to the Capuchins. He wrote a testimony before he died. Here it is. Note my emphasis.
"I'm nearly 80 years old. I'm about to depart.
"Looking back at my past, I can see that in my early youth, I chose a bad path which led me to ruin myself.
"My behavior was influenced by print, mass-media and bad examples which are followed by the majority of young people without even thinking. And I did the same. I was not worried.
"There were a lot of generous and devoted people who surrounded me, but I paid no attention to them because a violent force blinded me and pushed me toward a wrong way of life.
"When I was 20 years-old, I committed a crime of passion. Now, that memory represents something horrible for me. Maria Goretti, now a Saint, was my good Angel, sent to me through Providence to guide and save me. I still have impressed upon my heart her words of rebuke and of pardon. She prayed for me, she interceded for her murderer. Thirty years of prison followed.
"If I had been of age, I would have spent all my life in prison. I accepted to be condemned because it was my own fault.
"Little Maria was really my light, my protectress; with her help, I behaved well during the 27 years of prison and tried to live honestly when I was again accepted among the members of society. The Brothers of St. Francis, Capuchins from Marche, welcomed me with angelic charity into their monastery as a brother, not as a servant. I've been living with their community for 24 years, and now I am serenely waiting to witness the vision of God, to hug my loved ones again, and to be next to my Guardian Angel and her dear mother, Assunta.
"I hope this letter that I wrote can teach others the happy lesson of avoiding evil and of always following the right path, like little children. I feel that religion with its precepts is not something we can live without, but rather it is the real comfort, the real strength in life and the only safe way in every circumstance, even the most painful ones of life."
Signature, Alessandro Serenelli
Saturday, 24 May 2014
My Cure for a Broken Heart
I got an email the other day that I am not at liberty to post. In short, it was by a brokenhearted woman who is dating again and thinks that in order to have a relationship with a new man, she must make herself "vulnerable." Now, "vulnus" means wound, and it strikes me that this woman needs to heal the wounds so recently inflicted on her heart before she does any such thing. And I am deeply suspicious of any view of male-female romance relationship that talks about a need to accept wounds anyway. The essence of trusting a guy with your heart is a deeply informed and correct opinion, formed over time, that the guy isn't going to reject you
If anything, the male-female romance relationship is the LAST relationship where you need to court vulnerability. Vulnerability is for mentors and protegees, bosses and employees, teachers and students, editors and the edited. When you hand over your intellectual work, or your creative work, or your paid work, to someone for evaluation, you are pretty darn vulnerable. And you have to take whatever is said by mentor, boss, teacher or editor on the chin. And mentor, boss, teacher or editor will have to field your reaction. It used to be said that men could accept that their work was something separate from themselves, but women took criticism of their work personally. I don't believe that: I think we ALL take it personally, and most of us have to work to A) become detached B) accept justifiable criticism.
"Don't despair when you see all the red," said Polish Pretend Son last night, as he prepared to embrace the beckoning Edinburgh night. He was talking about his correction of my "Teolgia Kobietości" essay, and since I have corrected the English in any number of essays, I thought, "Hey! That's my line!" I was highly amused, and this morning I am even more amused to read Polish Pretend Son's comments. The reasons for my wondeful detachment are that I completely trust Polish Pretend Son's opinions regarding Polish style, and at this point I have few expectations of my Polish prose. As Polish Pretend Son pointed out, there's quite a distance between reading Julek i Julka and translating theology into Polish.
But imagine if I were a great Polish stylist, and my ego was wrapped up in my ability to turn out Polish prose. Perhaps I had won a gold medal in university for it, or something. And, flushed with the compliments of my teachers and professors, I wrote a masterful book about the Polish countryside, and all over Poland, critics tore it to bits. My professors backtracked. My friends who said they liked my book were obviously lying. Would I, heartbroken, be handing over my essay to Polish Pretend Son within six months and snickering at the sea of red and the snarky remarks about my alleged linguistic feminism? No. I would be weeping in my coffee.
In short, if you get your heart smashed, the last thing you want to do is make it "vulnerable" to some man again. And you shouldn't want to. Your heart needs a good healing, it needs to be as detached from the opinions of strangers as I am from my Polish prose, and you need to get your equilibrium back before you pop back out into the world with an eye to attracting suitors. It takes as long as it takes. However, I think there is one way to speed things up.
Travel across a body of water, preferably an ocean. There are study programs and work programs for foreigners under 30, and if you are over 30, well, a ten day holiday in Tuscany, religiously saved for out of your earnings, can work wonders. Oh, and go alone. I forgot to mention that part. If going alone is too scary, sign up with a tour group you'll meet up with when you get there, wherever there is. The idea is to go away from the scene of your heartbreak into a totally new place, a place with no memories of the ex, and ample opportunities to put your adult skills of self-reliance to the test. (If you go with a female friend. you will talk to her about the ex, which defeats the purpose of this exercise.) If you are forced to speak another language, so much the better. Reading maps, asking strangers questions, finding food, finding shelter--your brain will be too crowded to contemplate your aching heart and every time you achieve something, you will feel like you have scored a goal.
"I have fallen in the shower, and I need some ice," said Seraphic, age 27, in Italian to a hotel receptionist over the phone somewhere outside Venice, and not only did the ice ease my aching limb, it soothed my wounded heart. Look what I can do!
If you really, really, cannot leave home now or within any imaginable length of time (but if in England, why not France? If in New England, why not Quebec?), then I recommend you find something new to do. Take a night school class, particularly in a language. Take a second job, part-time, somewhere you think is cool--cafe in an art gallery, office in a charity. Do something that speaks to your sense of adventure to remind it that romance is not the only adventure.
And I think this really goes to the heart of what was wrong with my attitude to romance when I was growing up. For a long time, romance was the only adventure for most women. If one doesn't work out, well then, start another. And another. And another. And unsurprisingly, this gets old. It gets boring. Serial monogamy, even if completely chaste, gets to be a drag. And if you are now shouting "Yes!" at the computer, then why not get off the old treadmill of romance? Find another adventure. Get out of Dodge. Take a night class. Get a second job. Try a martial art. Challenge yourself to something utterly new and absorbing. Not only will you heal, you'll grow.
If anything, the male-female romance relationship is the LAST relationship where you need to court vulnerability. Vulnerability is for mentors and protegees, bosses and employees, teachers and students, editors and the edited. When you hand over your intellectual work, or your creative work, or your paid work, to someone for evaluation, you are pretty darn vulnerable. And you have to take whatever is said by mentor, boss, teacher or editor on the chin. And mentor, boss, teacher or editor will have to field your reaction. It used to be said that men could accept that their work was something separate from themselves, but women took criticism of their work personally. I don't believe that: I think we ALL take it personally, and most of us have to work to A) become detached B) accept justifiable criticism.
"Don't despair when you see all the red," said Polish Pretend Son last night, as he prepared to embrace the beckoning Edinburgh night. He was talking about his correction of my "Teolgia Kobietości" essay, and since I have corrected the English in any number of essays, I thought, "Hey! That's my line!" I was highly amused, and this morning I am even more amused to read Polish Pretend Son's comments. The reasons for my wondeful detachment are that I completely trust Polish Pretend Son's opinions regarding Polish style, and at this point I have few expectations of my Polish prose. As Polish Pretend Son pointed out, there's quite a distance between reading Julek i Julka and translating theology into Polish.
But imagine if I were a great Polish stylist, and my ego was wrapped up in my ability to turn out Polish prose. Perhaps I had won a gold medal in university for it, or something. And, flushed with the compliments of my teachers and professors, I wrote a masterful book about the Polish countryside, and all over Poland, critics tore it to bits. My professors backtracked. My friends who said they liked my book were obviously lying. Would I, heartbroken, be handing over my essay to Polish Pretend Son within six months and snickering at the sea of red and the snarky remarks about my alleged linguistic feminism? No. I would be weeping in my coffee.
In short, if you get your heart smashed, the last thing you want to do is make it "vulnerable" to some man again. And you shouldn't want to. Your heart needs a good healing, it needs to be as detached from the opinions of strangers as I am from my Polish prose, and you need to get your equilibrium back before you pop back out into the world with an eye to attracting suitors. It takes as long as it takes. However, I think there is one way to speed things up.
Travel across a body of water, preferably an ocean. There are study programs and work programs for foreigners under 30, and if you are over 30, well, a ten day holiday in Tuscany, religiously saved for out of your earnings, can work wonders. Oh, and go alone. I forgot to mention that part. If going alone is too scary, sign up with a tour group you'll meet up with when you get there, wherever there is. The idea is to go away from the scene of your heartbreak into a totally new place, a place with no memories of the ex, and ample opportunities to put your adult skills of self-reliance to the test. (If you go with a female friend. you will talk to her about the ex, which defeats the purpose of this exercise.) If you are forced to speak another language, so much the better. Reading maps, asking strangers questions, finding food, finding shelter--your brain will be too crowded to contemplate your aching heart and every time you achieve something, you will feel like you have scored a goal.
"I have fallen in the shower, and I need some ice," said Seraphic, age 27, in Italian to a hotel receptionist over the phone somewhere outside Venice, and not only did the ice ease my aching limb, it soothed my wounded heart. Look what I can do!
If you really, really, cannot leave home now or within any imaginable length of time (but if in England, why not France? If in New England, why not Quebec?), then I recommend you find something new to do. Take a night school class, particularly in a language. Take a second job, part-time, somewhere you think is cool--cafe in an art gallery, office in a charity. Do something that speaks to your sense of adventure to remind it that romance is not the only adventure.
And I think this really goes to the heart of what was wrong with my attitude to romance when I was growing up. For a long time, romance was the only adventure for most women. If one doesn't work out, well then, start another. And another. And another. And unsurprisingly, this gets old. It gets boring. Serial monogamy, even if completely chaste, gets to be a drag. And if you are now shouting "Yes!" at the computer, then why not get off the old treadmill of romance? Find another adventure. Get out of Dodge. Take a night class. Get a second job. Try a martial art. Challenge yourself to something utterly new and absorbing. Not only will you heal, you'll grow.
Thursday, 15 May 2014
Sharing Public Spaces
Yesterday we got into a bit of a debate in the combox over what is a compliment and what constitutes an attack.
And this is good debate to have. Let's thrash it out.
Before we do, though, I want to underscore that this is about public spaces, like the bus or the main street. Somewhere where there are other people around. This is not about parties or or empty classrooms or elevators or an alley. When you are alone in a small enclosed space with a strange man--or a potentially violent woman--you need to be.... Actually, I don't recommend ever being alone behind closed doors with a strange man or a potentially violent woman.
I used to be very frightened of strangers, especially male strangers. This did not show on my face, for from an early age I schooled it into a mask of confidence, and it could look cheerful or sardonic, depending on the circumstance. As a child I was frightened of dogs, too, but learned that the safest thing to do was not run away or smell afraid. Looking confident is a survival skill, and etched on my memory is the episode in which I gazed at a streetkid between me and the kitchen door and said in a steady voice, "That's a very big knife you have there."
The streetkid's name was Stretch, and he was not a kid, really, but a twenty-something who had been brought home by my flatmate because she had (and has) a good and generous heart and was naive about the destitute. The destitute community, like any other community, has its sinners and its saints, its villains and its victims. The destitute, as Servant of God Dorothy Day could have told you, are not lovable ragamuffins out of a Dickens' novel. The destitute person I liked best, when I worked for the Ontario government, was really very dangerous when off his meds.
Well, anyway, my flatmate invited dear old Stretch home, thinking to give him a bed, only it became clear Stretch thought she meant her bed, and before long I received a frightened phone call at my then-fiancé's from my friend trying to explain the situation while Stretch listened in. Neither she nor I knew Stretch had a knife strapped around his leg, or I would not have gone home alone.
So flashforward to the kitchen, and Stretch casually unwinding the wrappings from his leg to reveal his shiny knife, and I remarking on the size of the knife, and also saying I hoped Stretch never had cause to use it.
"Don't worry," said Stretch. "I only use it when I feel threatened."
Great, I thought as my heart pounded like feet down a staircase. And here I am trying to throw you out.
This story seems to be running away with my post. To make the scary story short, it was made clear to Stretch that he wasn't getting any, and he left. My then-flatmate and I were 24 years old. She burst into tears.
The moral of the story is not to bring a male stranger into your home, or to find yourself alone with a male stranger behind closed doors, no matter how sorry you feel for him, no matter how much privilege you think you have compared to him, no matter how pale you are or how dark he is, or how native you are or how foreign he is. If inspired to give a homeless man a meal, invite him to McDonald's, or volunteer at a shelter.
Now back to public spaces.
There's an Ontario woman named Gwen Jac*bs who got mad because men were allowed to mow their lawns shirtless, but women weren't. Women were, of course, allowed to mow their lawn in a bikini top, but that wasn't enough for Gwen. Gwen organized a rally in which Ontario women marched down a main street topless to show... Well, I am not sure what. Aggression towards the law against women going topless in public, I guess.
Men lined the road with video cameras. Ick! I was disgusted. The men seemed disgusting. The whole thing was disgusting. The women were... Well, not disgusting, but possibly stupid. Or not stupid and merely fighting a battle for the Great Lie that gender is merely a social construct and that, given enough "education", there will no longer be gender at all.
And I wonder if the men weren't fighting a battle, too--a battle against the over-sexualization of public spaces. We see film clips of men driving into lampposts with the introduction of the miniskirt. Absolutely hilarious, unless you're the men who have driven their cars into lamp posts, or their wives, or their frightened children. Sure, women could tell men, "Stop being so distracted by naked breasts!" And men could tell us, in return, "Stop menstruating."
I bring this up to point out that public space belongs to both men and women and that men, too, can suffer from the opposite sex behaving aggressively.
Of course, men can be unpleasantly chippy about it, too. For example, if I wear a vintage hat, I am not aggressively trying to assert that I am socially a cut above the residents of Roughmillar or Roughbrae. However, this is indeed how wearing a vintage hat can be understood. I think it sucks that I have to tailor what I wear to the boring, tasteless and conformist community standard of the Rough Bus, but there you go. I don't want to look aggressive. A vintage hat on the Rough Bus is aggressive, smelling of Tories and Margaret Thatcher.
In Toronto the community standard for buses is quite different. It isn't about what you wear but about how loud or talkative you are. We don't like loud or talkative people on the bus or train, especially early in the morning. Women dread some man just starting a conversation on the bus. What the heck is wrong with him!? Why is he talkingggg???? And why to meeeeeee????
In Edinburgh, however, it is perfectly normal for strangers to chat with each other. I have had to get over my Toronto dread of talking to strangers on the bus, so as to be a good citizen of Edinburgh. And so I ended up having a conversation on the bus on Tuesday with man who got on at Rough Towers. He had a very small head, and I thought he might not be "all there", but he observed that I was reading a Polish dictionary, and I admitted I was learning Polish, and he told me he had a 15 hour shift, and I said that was a pity on such a sunny day, and that there was an Italian proverb that if you want to be happy for life, become a gardener. "I like a bit of gardening," he said, wistfully, and not surprisingly, as British men garden in their millions. We blethered on in this neighbourly fashion until I said "Here's me" and we wished each other a nice day.
I would have been amazed, at 24, to see my 40-something self chatting away like an Edinburgh wifie to a man with a very small head. But this is merely because at 24 I had not yet figured out that the great majority of men, of every intelligence and condition, are decent chaps who would do anything for a quiet life, and that the yahoos and fiends, some of whom have graduate educations, are a decided minority.
Of course there are yahoos and probably fiends on Edinburgh streets. A gang of passing foreign men (probably Polish, alas) made a snatch at my friend and shoved my head as we walked passed them one evening. My friend evaded them, an I shouted "Hey!", but there as no policeman about, so what could be do? Our boundaries had most definitely been violated, but short of learning how to say "God will punish you" in Polish for the next time this happens, there was nothing we could do. Gangs of drunken young men are dangerous, have been dangerous, and always will be dangerous. Avoid them at all costs.
And then there were the toads who shouted at me from a speeding panel van, so helpfully emblazoned with the names of their employers. They needed a rap over the knuckles, and they got it.
But these are just yahoos. The fiends are sneakier and rarer.
I agree absolutely, and I will always maintain, that women need to assess every social situation with a stranger, be he a man or be she a woman who seems "off". Worries that he/she will think you're a racist or a snob or a phobe of some sort or another should not factor hugely in your assessment. If you get weird vibes from a guy in an elevator, get off, and if you stay on anyway just because he's from a different race from you, don't give yourself a pat on the back afterwards. If you think no man harbours racist beliefs against women of your race, you're incredibly sheltered and one day your luck may run out.
However, an elevator has closed doors. It is an uncomfortable space on the border of public and private. In public space, in daylight, I maintain that there is more room to relax and, to be frank, for charity. If I hear "Hey! Nice hair!" I say "Thank you", even if there was a chance the guy was being ironic. If he was, I'm throwing his irony in his face. If he meant me to feel insulted, I chose to feel flattered instead. And meanwhile, he is probably so dumb that before the power of the female smile he will forget that he was being ironic and feel a boost to his mood. I know I am wonderful and unique, dear neighbour. Have a nice day!
And this is good debate to have. Let's thrash it out.
Before we do, though, I want to underscore that this is about public spaces, like the bus or the main street. Somewhere where there are other people around. This is not about parties or or empty classrooms or elevators or an alley. When you are alone in a small enclosed space with a strange man--or a potentially violent woman--you need to be.... Actually, I don't recommend ever being alone behind closed doors with a strange man or a potentially violent woman.
I used to be very frightened of strangers, especially male strangers. This did not show on my face, for from an early age I schooled it into a mask of confidence, and it could look cheerful or sardonic, depending on the circumstance. As a child I was frightened of dogs, too, but learned that the safest thing to do was not run away or smell afraid. Looking confident is a survival skill, and etched on my memory is the episode in which I gazed at a streetkid between me and the kitchen door and said in a steady voice, "That's a very big knife you have there."
The streetkid's name was Stretch, and he was not a kid, really, but a twenty-something who had been brought home by my flatmate because she had (and has) a good and generous heart and was naive about the destitute. The destitute community, like any other community, has its sinners and its saints, its villains and its victims. The destitute, as Servant of God Dorothy Day could have told you, are not lovable ragamuffins out of a Dickens' novel. The destitute person I liked best, when I worked for the Ontario government, was really very dangerous when off his meds.
Well, anyway, my flatmate invited dear old Stretch home, thinking to give him a bed, only it became clear Stretch thought she meant her bed, and before long I received a frightened phone call at my then-fiancé's from my friend trying to explain the situation while Stretch listened in. Neither she nor I knew Stretch had a knife strapped around his leg, or I would not have gone home alone.
So flashforward to the kitchen, and Stretch casually unwinding the wrappings from his leg to reveal his shiny knife, and I remarking on the size of the knife, and also saying I hoped Stretch never had cause to use it.
"Don't worry," said Stretch. "I only use it when I feel threatened."
Great, I thought as my heart pounded like feet down a staircase. And here I am trying to throw you out.
This story seems to be running away with my post. To make the scary story short, it was made clear to Stretch that he wasn't getting any, and he left. My then-flatmate and I were 24 years old. She burst into tears.
The moral of the story is not to bring a male stranger into your home, or to find yourself alone with a male stranger behind closed doors, no matter how sorry you feel for him, no matter how much privilege you think you have compared to him, no matter how pale you are or how dark he is, or how native you are or how foreign he is. If inspired to give a homeless man a meal, invite him to McDonald's, or volunteer at a shelter.
Now back to public spaces.
There's an Ontario woman named Gwen Jac*bs who got mad because men were allowed to mow their lawns shirtless, but women weren't. Women were, of course, allowed to mow their lawn in a bikini top, but that wasn't enough for Gwen. Gwen organized a rally in which Ontario women marched down a main street topless to show... Well, I am not sure what. Aggression towards the law against women going topless in public, I guess.
Men lined the road with video cameras. Ick! I was disgusted. The men seemed disgusting. The whole thing was disgusting. The women were... Well, not disgusting, but possibly stupid. Or not stupid and merely fighting a battle for the Great Lie that gender is merely a social construct and that, given enough "education", there will no longer be gender at all.
And I wonder if the men weren't fighting a battle, too--a battle against the over-sexualization of public spaces. We see film clips of men driving into lampposts with the introduction of the miniskirt. Absolutely hilarious, unless you're the men who have driven their cars into lamp posts, or their wives, or their frightened children. Sure, women could tell men, "Stop being so distracted by naked breasts!" And men could tell us, in return, "Stop menstruating."
I bring this up to point out that public space belongs to both men and women and that men, too, can suffer from the opposite sex behaving aggressively.
Of course, men can be unpleasantly chippy about it, too. For example, if I wear a vintage hat, I am not aggressively trying to assert that I am socially a cut above the residents of Roughmillar or Roughbrae. However, this is indeed how wearing a vintage hat can be understood. I think it sucks that I have to tailor what I wear to the boring, tasteless and conformist community standard of the Rough Bus, but there you go. I don't want to look aggressive. A vintage hat on the Rough Bus is aggressive, smelling of Tories and Margaret Thatcher.
In Toronto the community standard for buses is quite different. It isn't about what you wear but about how loud or talkative you are. We don't like loud or talkative people on the bus or train, especially early in the morning. Women dread some man just starting a conversation on the bus. What the heck is wrong with him!? Why is he talkingggg???? And why to meeeeeee????
In Edinburgh, however, it is perfectly normal for strangers to chat with each other. I have had to get over my Toronto dread of talking to strangers on the bus, so as to be a good citizen of Edinburgh. And so I ended up having a conversation on the bus on Tuesday with man who got on at Rough Towers. He had a very small head, and I thought he might not be "all there", but he observed that I was reading a Polish dictionary, and I admitted I was learning Polish, and he told me he had a 15 hour shift, and I said that was a pity on such a sunny day, and that there was an Italian proverb that if you want to be happy for life, become a gardener. "I like a bit of gardening," he said, wistfully, and not surprisingly, as British men garden in their millions. We blethered on in this neighbourly fashion until I said "Here's me" and we wished each other a nice day.
I would have been amazed, at 24, to see my 40-something self chatting away like an Edinburgh wifie to a man with a very small head. But this is merely because at 24 I had not yet figured out that the great majority of men, of every intelligence and condition, are decent chaps who would do anything for a quiet life, and that the yahoos and fiends, some of whom have graduate educations, are a decided minority.
Of course there are yahoos and probably fiends on Edinburgh streets. A gang of passing foreign men (probably Polish, alas) made a snatch at my friend and shoved my head as we walked passed them one evening. My friend evaded them, an I shouted "Hey!", but there as no policeman about, so what could be do? Our boundaries had most definitely been violated, but short of learning how to say "God will punish you" in Polish for the next time this happens, there was nothing we could do. Gangs of drunken young men are dangerous, have been dangerous, and always will be dangerous. Avoid them at all costs.
And then there were the toads who shouted at me from a speeding panel van, so helpfully emblazoned with the names of their employers. They needed a rap over the knuckles, and they got it.
But these are just yahoos. The fiends are sneakier and rarer.
I agree absolutely, and I will always maintain, that women need to assess every social situation with a stranger, be he a man or be she a woman who seems "off". Worries that he/she will think you're a racist or a snob or a phobe of some sort or another should not factor hugely in your assessment. If you get weird vibes from a guy in an elevator, get off, and if you stay on anyway just because he's from a different race from you, don't give yourself a pat on the back afterwards. If you think no man harbours racist beliefs against women of your race, you're incredibly sheltered and one day your luck may run out.
However, an elevator has closed doors. It is an uncomfortable space on the border of public and private. In public space, in daylight, I maintain that there is more room to relax and, to be frank, for charity. If I hear "Hey! Nice hair!" I say "Thank you", even if there was a chance the guy was being ironic. If he was, I'm throwing his irony in his face. If he meant me to feel insulted, I chose to feel flattered instead. And meanwhile, he is probably so dumb that before the power of the female smile he will forget that he was being ironic and feel a boost to his mood. I know I am wonderful and unique, dear neighbour. Have a nice day!
Wednesday, 16 April 2014
Making a Mess
Oh, deary dear. I reviewed A. N. Wilson's Unguarded Hours for Ignatius Press Novels, as it is the only religion-themed novel I have had time to read lately, and the fact I reviewed it has caused consternation among IP fans. It's not that I endorse the novel--I state clearly that it is not for the young or the sensitive--it's that I mention it AT ALL. And yet my Facebook critic would not have known that it was unsavoury in any way unless I had explicitly condemned it as such.
Wilson is rather Waughian in his tone, although (as I mention in the review), he picks not on modern society as much as on the clerical wing of the then-modern (1978) Church of England, which was full of atheist-socialist posturing and, not to put too fine a point on it, gay camp. The novel is devoid of faith in Christ, and the spiritual underpinning of the book is merely a fear that Christianity is all a crock, and all there is under Christian words and ritual is a bottomless nothingness.
I find that very interesting. I'd be wincing in humiliation if a disgruntled Catholic ex-seminarian exposed unsavoury elements in his training in that very British, mocking way. Catholics in Britain seem to think that would be dirty pool, though, and confine themselves to dinner party anecdotes. What I have heard about one Scottish prelate I would not care to repeat--although it would make a very funny... No.
Anyway, poor old Ig Pr is getting yelled at because of me, so would you all be angels and go here to respond intelligently to the review? I mean it. Two minutes out of your day to gladden the hearts of some good people. Before I got chucked out of a certain stuck-in-the-1970s Catholic newspaper, the editor suffered very greatly on my behalf, thanks to its "retired" editor, her mentor, who had kittens at such words and phrases as "Benediction" and "Sacrifice of the Mass." Oh, and while you are at it, browse the Ignatius Press catalogue and see if there's anything you'd like to give someone (including yourself) for Easter.
The critique is on the Ignatius Press Facebook page. If you feel like weighing in there, be nice to the weaker brethren.
Wilson is rather Waughian in his tone, although (as I mention in the review), he picks not on modern society as much as on the clerical wing of the then-modern (1978) Church of England, which was full of atheist-socialist posturing and, not to put too fine a point on it, gay camp. The novel is devoid of faith in Christ, and the spiritual underpinning of the book is merely a fear that Christianity is all a crock, and all there is under Christian words and ritual is a bottomless nothingness.
I find that very interesting. I'd be wincing in humiliation if a disgruntled Catholic ex-seminarian exposed unsavoury elements in his training in that very British, mocking way. Catholics in Britain seem to think that would be dirty pool, though, and confine themselves to dinner party anecdotes. What I have heard about one Scottish prelate I would not care to repeat--although it would make a very funny... No.
Anyway, poor old Ig Pr is getting yelled at because of me, so would you all be angels and go here to respond intelligently to the review? I mean it. Two minutes out of your day to gladden the hearts of some good people. Before I got chucked out of a certain stuck-in-the-1970s Catholic newspaper, the editor suffered very greatly on my behalf, thanks to its "retired" editor, her mentor, who had kittens at such words and phrases as "Benediction" and "Sacrifice of the Mass." Oh, and while you are at it, browse the Ignatius Press catalogue and see if there's anything you'd like to give someone (including yourself) for Easter.
The critique is on the Ignatius Press Facebook page. If you feel like weighing in there, be nice to the weaker brethren.
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
Loves to Travel
The idea that men see "loves to travel" on dating websites and makes unpleasant assumptions about the girl who does has popped up in an earlier combox. So let's continue the discussion here. Respectfully, keeping in mind that men are Readers now.
Personally, I love to travel to other cities. (This usually means Toronto, Rome or Krakow.) Generally our travel money comes out of my earnings. Basically, that's where my writing money goes: Polish class and travel. Sometimes I travel with my husband. Sometimes I travel on my own. I am much better at travelling on my own because there is no-one for me to snarl at. I'm not a fantastic travel companion; nobody should ever have to fly with me. I'm okay in trains, though. Cars, ditto. There's just something about airplanes. Oh, and on holiday snoring turns me into a homicidal maniac.
I have never had a holiday romance in my--- I never had a holiday romance that did not result in me marrying the guy. Occasionally I have been hit on by locals, or by recent immigrants, while on holiday, and I have just ignored them, mostly. I did get a terrible reputation on my Contiki tour by chatting with a couple of cops from Napoli one evening. My Italian was very good then. Sigh. I do recall saying "Non piace alla mamma" (My mum wouldn't like it) a few times. ("Then don't tell her." "I tell my mother EVERYTHING!" When under pressure in Italy, invoke your mother a lot.)
Anyway, I have googled about looking for unpleasant associations with "loves to travel" and found this. Man, I wish men weren't so obsessed with money. Too many seem to have this idea that women are out for all the money we can get. But like the manicurist who had already paid $9000 towards her wedding to the guy who gave her that $50,000 engagement ring, most of us are employed and have our OWN money.
Update: This is rather amusing. Okay, apparently I don't love to travel. I travel three or four times a year, unless you count going south of Prestonpans to fall into rivers on hikes.
Update 2: Jeepers. Another guy who worries "loves to travel" = "I want a guy with money."
Update Three: The BBC suggests that "I love to travel" is a cliché, and you should leave it out of dating profiles.
Personally, I love to travel to other cities. (This usually means Toronto, Rome or Krakow.) Generally our travel money comes out of my earnings. Basically, that's where my writing money goes: Polish class and travel. Sometimes I travel with my husband. Sometimes I travel on my own. I am much better at travelling on my own because there is no-one for me to snarl at. I'm not a fantastic travel companion; nobody should ever have to fly with me. I'm okay in trains, though. Cars, ditto. There's just something about airplanes. Oh, and on holiday snoring turns me into a homicidal maniac.
I have never had a holiday romance in my--- I never had a holiday romance that did not result in me marrying the guy. Occasionally I have been hit on by locals, or by recent immigrants, while on holiday, and I have just ignored them, mostly. I did get a terrible reputation on my Contiki tour by chatting with a couple of cops from Napoli one evening. My Italian was very good then. Sigh. I do recall saying "Non piace alla mamma" (My mum wouldn't like it) a few times. ("Then don't tell her." "I tell my mother EVERYTHING!" When under pressure in Italy, invoke your mother a lot.)
Anyway, I have googled about looking for unpleasant associations with "loves to travel" and found this. Man, I wish men weren't so obsessed with money. Too many seem to have this idea that women are out for all the money we can get. But like the manicurist who had already paid $9000 towards her wedding to the guy who gave her that $50,000 engagement ring, most of us are employed and have our OWN money.
Update: This is rather amusing. Okay, apparently I don't love to travel. I travel three or four times a year, unless you count going south of Prestonpans to fall into rivers on hikes.
Update 2: Jeepers. Another guy who worries "loves to travel" = "I want a guy with money."
Update Three: The BBC suggests that "I love to travel" is a cliché, and you should leave it out of dating profiles.
Friday, 4 April 2014
Everybody Loves B.A.
SCENE OF DOMESTIC LIFE IN THE HISTORICAL HOUSE
Seraphic (standing on toes): This is what I would look like if I were 5'4".
B.A.: You're fine at 5'2". Why do you want to be 5'4"?
Seraphic: I don't really. But I would like to decompress my spine. Apparently all you need is five minutes a day on an inversion table.
B.A.: What is an inversion table?
Seraphic: Oh, it's really neat. It's a sort of board and you strap yourself into it and then you flip it over and hang upside down by your ankles.
B.A. (seeing where this is going, i.e. wallet): We don't need an inversion table.
Seraphic: Wah! But I want to decompress my spine!
B.A.: Well, what else can you do to decompress your spine?
Seraphic: Well, I suppose you could hold me upside down by my ankles. Let's try!
B.A.: You're mental. I can't hold you upside down by your ankles.
Seraphic: Why not? I weigh only one-hundred-and-thirty-three pounds.
B.A. Because it is physically impossible.
Seraphic: But you're a MAN. A big, strong MAN.
B.A.: Yes, but I would have to hold my arms up HERE. I could only hold a sack of potatoes from up HERE. And I would hurt my back.
Seraphic (abashed) : Oh! I don't want you to hurt your back. Maybe I could do a headstand or a handstand?
B.A.: But that wouldn't decompress your spine. Gravity would just compress your spine into your neck.
Seraphic: So hanging from my ankles is the only way?
B.A.: Yes.
Seraphic (dubiously): I wonder if I can even do a handstand.
(Seraphic turns her back on B.A. and attempts to do a handstand. Without warning, B.A. grabs her flailing ankles and pulls upward.)
Seraphic: AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
(B.A. drops Seraphic. Seraphic giggles uncontrollably.)
B.A.: I really don't understand why you want to be taller.
Seraphic: I don't want to be taller. I want to decompress my SPIIIIIINE!
***
My column responding to the deacon who wrote a letter saying I put down the "new Mass" and suggesting I want it banned has appeared online for free. (I guess it's my week for the free-view column.) Here it is.
I suppose the only thing to add is that he was responding to my column (behind a firewall, alas) about how the most beautiful Mass in Toronto is Solemn High Mass at Holy Family Church on Sunday mornings. The point of that column was to alert people who long for beauty at Mass to this Mass, so they would know where to go. As in Toronto you can go to German Mass, Polish Mass, Italian Mass, Chinese Mass, Vietnamese Mass--all kinds of Masses catering to your preferred language or ethnic group--and even a Praise and Worship Music Mass, it seemed fair to me to publicize a Mass that is characterized by the highest possible beauty and solemnity.
I made no claims that it was anyone's dearest Mass, using the analogy of a mother. When you are five, you are convinced that your own mother is the best and most beautiful mother in the world, and so I suppose many, many Catholics feel the same about their own parish mass, and that is good. But naturally Zhang Ziyi and Aishwaryi Rai Bachchan beat old Mum hollow when it comes to objective feminine beauty, as you realize when you grow up. Not that you care. You love your mother because she is your mother while cheerfully acknowledging that she's not as stunning as the brightest stars of the silver screen, and feeling no guilt when you revel in their beauty.
To tell the truth about the Extraordinary Form is not to trash the Ordinary Form any more than to say that my Temporary Pretend Polish Daughter is the reigning beauty of the Historical House is to say I'm a wrinkled old hag. (And, indeed, I said the Holy Family EF is more beautiful than the Edinburgh EF, though naturally I am fonder of the Edinburgh EF.) I know that some liturgists have serious theological objections to the Ordinary Form, but I am not yet convinced this means the N.O. must go. (Can you imagine the confusion and dismay if it did?!) Cardinal Stickler wrote about the "Latin language [acting] like a reverent curtain against profanation" and I find that German, Italian and Polish work like that for me. And Cardinal Stickler points out that when the Novus Ordo is said by the book--he cites the Novus Ordo as said by popes--there is nothing amiss.
***
There are still many copies of Seraphic Singles available for sale, as my Canadian publisher informs me. If you have not read my first book, why not buy a copy and gladden hearts at Novalis? If you want to buy a copy for a Polish friend, the edition you want is the rather more celebrated Anielskie Single.
***
If you live in Canada (especially Toronto), why not get a copy of Catholic Insight magazine and read my latest interview about Ceremony of Innocence? Apparently there's a review, too, which I am dying to read.
Seraphic (standing on toes): This is what I would look like if I were 5'4".
B.A.: You're fine at 5'2". Why do you want to be 5'4"?
Seraphic: I don't really. But I would like to decompress my spine. Apparently all you need is five minutes a day on an inversion table.
B.A.: What is an inversion table?
Seraphic: Oh, it's really neat. It's a sort of board and you strap yourself into it and then you flip it over and hang upside down by your ankles.
B.A. (seeing where this is going, i.e. wallet): We don't need an inversion table.
Seraphic: Wah! But I want to decompress my spine!
B.A.: Well, what else can you do to decompress your spine?
Seraphic: Well, I suppose you could hold me upside down by my ankles. Let's try!
B.A.: You're mental. I can't hold you upside down by your ankles.
Seraphic: Why not? I weigh only one-hundred-and-thirty-three pounds.
B.A. Because it is physically impossible.
Seraphic: But you're a MAN. A big, strong MAN.
B.A.: Yes, but I would have to hold my arms up HERE. I could only hold a sack of potatoes from up HERE. And I would hurt my back.
Seraphic (abashed) : Oh! I don't want you to hurt your back. Maybe I could do a headstand or a handstand?
B.A.: But that wouldn't decompress your spine. Gravity would just compress your spine into your neck.
Seraphic: So hanging from my ankles is the only way?
B.A.: Yes.
Seraphic (dubiously): I wonder if I can even do a handstand.
(Seraphic turns her back on B.A. and attempts to do a handstand. Without warning, B.A. grabs her flailing ankles and pulls upward.)
Seraphic: AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
(B.A. drops Seraphic. Seraphic giggles uncontrollably.)
B.A.: I really don't understand why you want to be taller.
Seraphic: I don't want to be taller. I want to decompress my SPIIIIIINE!
***
My column responding to the deacon who wrote a letter saying I put down the "new Mass" and suggesting I want it banned has appeared online for free. (I guess it's my week for the free-view column.) Here it is.
I suppose the only thing to add is that he was responding to my column (behind a firewall, alas) about how the most beautiful Mass in Toronto is Solemn High Mass at Holy Family Church on Sunday mornings. The point of that column was to alert people who long for beauty at Mass to this Mass, so they would know where to go. As in Toronto you can go to German Mass, Polish Mass, Italian Mass, Chinese Mass, Vietnamese Mass--all kinds of Masses catering to your preferred language or ethnic group--and even a Praise and Worship Music Mass, it seemed fair to me to publicize a Mass that is characterized by the highest possible beauty and solemnity.
I made no claims that it was anyone's dearest Mass, using the analogy of a mother. When you are five, you are convinced that your own mother is the best and most beautiful mother in the world, and so I suppose many, many Catholics feel the same about their own parish mass, and that is good. But naturally Zhang Ziyi and Aishwaryi Rai Bachchan beat old Mum hollow when it comes to objective feminine beauty, as you realize when you grow up. Not that you care. You love your mother because she is your mother while cheerfully acknowledging that she's not as stunning as the brightest stars of the silver screen, and feeling no guilt when you revel in their beauty.
To tell the truth about the Extraordinary Form is not to trash the Ordinary Form any more than to say that my Temporary Pretend Polish Daughter is the reigning beauty of the Historical House is to say I'm a wrinkled old hag. (And, indeed, I said the Holy Family EF is more beautiful than the Edinburgh EF, though naturally I am fonder of the Edinburgh EF.) I know that some liturgists have serious theological objections to the Ordinary Form, but I am not yet convinced this means the N.O. must go. (Can you imagine the confusion and dismay if it did?!) Cardinal Stickler wrote about the "Latin language [acting] like a reverent curtain against profanation" and I find that German, Italian and Polish work like that for me. And Cardinal Stickler points out that when the Novus Ordo is said by the book--he cites the Novus Ordo as said by popes--there is nothing amiss.
***
There are still many copies of Seraphic Singles available for sale, as my Canadian publisher informs me. If you have not read my first book, why not buy a copy and gladden hearts at Novalis? If you want to buy a copy for a Polish friend, the edition you want is the rather more celebrated Anielskie Single.
***
If you live in Canada (especially Toronto), why not get a copy of Catholic Insight magazine and read my latest interview about Ceremony of Innocence? Apparently there's a review, too, which I am dying to read.
Wednesday, 26 March 2014
The Prince, the Fogeys and the Sartorial Police
What was very funny about this scene was that the prince was surrounded by much plumper, much shorter young men all turned out like Evelyn Waugh: loud tweeds, red cords, shiny shoes. It was not a Young Fogey hour of glory. Compared to the prince, they looked like they were trying too hard. The word middle-class comes to mind, spoken like an insult (B.A. will cringe at reading this, head disappearing into shoulders) and I am middle-class---that is, I acknowledge that this is where I fit on the British class system chart, which vaguely reminds me of apartheid-era South Africa.
It is considered very rude and outré and possibly middle-class-as-a-bad-thing to ponder the British class system when one lives in Britain, and of course it has changed very much although I know elderly semi-aristos and public school men who still think they can get away with being simply disgustingly rude (they can't), and I encounter chip-on-the-shoulder working-class types from time to time. Once when B.A. went to the front of a loosely organized bus queue to peer at the bus schedule, a rheumy-eyed old man, slightly the worse for drink, angrily demanded that he get back: "those days are over." The implication was that tweed-coat wearing B.A. was the upper class oppressor, thrusting himself before the Honest Working Man.
Have I mentioned it is actually dangerous for me to wear any hat more ornate than a beret on the Rough Bus? I love hats, especially cute vintage ones with eye-veils, but I can't wear them on the bus or while alone on the public street. The one exception may be when I look as though I were going to a wedding. The sartorial police would probably then give me a pass.
"Oh I know," said a Scottish lady I know, who is always beautifully turned out at parties. "On the bus I wear a hoody and pull the hood over my head, willing myself to be invisible."
This may put the Young Fogeys' choice of clothing into perspective. It is actually brave to dress according to an older idiom in Edinburgh, especially if you leave the pretty Georgian parts for the grimier neighbourhoods, and the Historical House lies between two grimier neighbourhoods. If ever I am killed by a rock flying through the window of the Rough Bus, you may all consider me a Scottish Architectural Heritage martyr. The papers got all excited because boys from the right-hand grimy neighbourhood threw rocks at a Pole. Racist hate crime, shrieked the papers. But I snorted because those boys throw rocks at anything that moves.
I do hate the fact that actual fear of attack, whether verbal or physical, governs my sartorial choices. Of course, it is not as bad as it is in Egypt or Afghanistan. But, honestly, given where I live, I think I could be forgiven if I left the house only in long T-shirts, leggings and trainers (running shoes). I have never in my life--even as a middle-aged lady--managed to be invisible, but the T-shirt, legging and trainer combo would offend no-one as I tramped around the down-at-heels town to the left.
Edinburgh University, which is in a nice part of Edinburgh, is a different story, and my Polish Temporary Pretend Daughter mentioned yesterday that she gets more male attention when she wears a skirt than when she wears jeans. PTPD is a cute wee thing in her early 20s, but wearing a shortish skirt and a Nordic pullover makes her super-cute, and thus all the masculine attention and "Oh, you look very pretty today".
What I draw from this is that "pretty" is okay and indeed good in the area around Edinburgh University, at least for women under thirty. However, I suspect eccentricity is not okay there either, especially when eccentricity looks like a "middle-class" person trying to look "upper class". (In the narrow minds of the "socially excluded" people on the Rough Bus--no-one on Council having thought to do anything about the stultifying mental poverty the "socially excluded" are forced into--anyone on a bus cannot be authentically posh.) The poor of Edinburgh grudgingly respect poshness in the obviously rich, but loathe it in the possibly poor, in the "Who does she think she is?" spirit their more adventurous great-uncles and great-aunts took with them to Canada.
It strikes me as absolutely pathetic that I have to worry about looking like I am "putting on airs", and I suspect this is a problem that plagues young black women in American ghettos. "Acting posh" is the British equivalent of "acting white", and it is really very sad. Indeed, I am factoring it in as I decided whether or not to buy that absolutely beautiful tweed jacket for sale at Walker Slater.
So although they occasionally look silly, I must say that I admire the Young Fogeys of Britain for their counter-cultural stand. Compared to a Young Fogey, punk rockers are boringly conventional and cowardly sheep. And, now that I think about it, I admire even more the non-Fogeys who go to Mass with us Fogeys and Fogettes, and treat us like normal human beings instead of real-life versions of the most hated fictional character in Britain, Hyacinth Bucket. That is real Christian charity.
Update: As a Canadian of British descent, I am trying to understand how a real British person would read this. Am I like a Central European trundling up to a white American and saying, "Is it true that you are frightened of black people?" or to a black American and saying, "Are white people really that awful to you?" On the other hand, I live in this uniquely British class mess, so I think I have the right to complain and work to change it, insofar as that is humanly possible.
Update 2: At a party last weekend, I met someone who teaches Social... er. Actually, it was such an Orwellian phrase, I can't remember it. Basically she works in a "socially excluded", welfare-dependency neighbourhood in Glasgow, and has to teach teenagers social skills. "Like filling out tax forms?" I asked brightly. "Nothing so complicated," she said. She seemed a bit gloomy. "Like how to eat in a restaurant?" I suggested. (In Germany, applicants for Top Jobs are still taken to restaurants so that the interviewers can assess the interviewee's table manners.) But no. It seems it is mostly about staying off drugs.
Update Three: Actually, though, when I was an undergrad it was de rigeur at the University of Toronto for students to despise "the petits bourgeois", which quite often meant their own middle-class parents. Actually, now that I have finally looked up the term, I see that the petits bourgeois includs hard-working shopkeepers. So how dared they?
Saturday, 22 March 2014
Suor Cristina and Soeur Sourire
Yes, I saw the clip from "Voice of Italy". No, I'm not impressed. Nun have been singing for over 1500 years. Many of them, if not most of them, have been fine singers.
What I am is terribly frightened for Suor Cristina. Behind those glasses, she looks very young and pretty. And confident. Too confident.
I do not see why this nun felt inspired to go on television. To show that nuns can sing? Or that they listen to Alicia Keys? What it showed me is that even women in religious life can get sucked into the razzle-dazzle of the entertainment world.
Taking part in the show might seem so innocent right now. She has a gift, and she wants to share it with the world. Maybe she will make a record, and its sales will help her community so much! Never mind that the entertainment industry is...well. Two words: Miley Cyrus.
Two other words: Soeur Sourire. (Yes, I linked to that yesterday. It's such a horrible story, it haunts me.)
One thing I have noticed about many young NGCs. Young NCGs think they are impervious to the big bad sins of the world. How their friends end up sleeping with their boyfriends--- after long girlish conversations about the beauty of chastity--is a mystery to them. And if young NCGs are really shrewd, really clever and really rooted in reality, they recognize evil when they see it and keep out of its way. But not all young NCGs are that shrewd, clever or rooted in reality. Some are easily tricked by shrewd, clever and wicked people.
One thing to add to the end of my "Nun Week" is that although many, many nuns are holy, not all nuns are shrewd, clever or rooted in reality.
Sorry to be a downer, but I admire most those nuns who spend their whole lives anonymously (or pseudonymously) in prayer and work. Listening to cloistered nuns sing is a wonderful privilege that I am willing to travel the length of the UK to hear. But they don't sing pop music. They sing the Office.
What I am is terribly frightened for Suor Cristina. Behind those glasses, she looks very young and pretty. And confident. Too confident.
I do not see why this nun felt inspired to go on television. To show that nuns can sing? Or that they listen to Alicia Keys? What it showed me is that even women in religious life can get sucked into the razzle-dazzle of the entertainment world.
Taking part in the show might seem so innocent right now. She has a gift, and she wants to share it with the world. Maybe she will make a record, and its sales will help her community so much! Never mind that the entertainment industry is...well. Two words: Miley Cyrus.
Two other words: Soeur Sourire. (Yes, I linked to that yesterday. It's such a horrible story, it haunts me.)
One thing I have noticed about many young NGCs. Young NCGs think they are impervious to the big bad sins of the world. How their friends end up sleeping with their boyfriends--- after long girlish conversations about the beauty of chastity--is a mystery to them. And if young NCGs are really shrewd, really clever and really rooted in reality, they recognize evil when they see it and keep out of its way. But not all young NCGs are that shrewd, clever or rooted in reality. Some are easily tricked by shrewd, clever and wicked people.
One thing to add to the end of my "Nun Week" is that although many, many nuns are holy, not all nuns are shrewd, clever or rooted in reality.
Sorry to be a downer, but I admire most those nuns who spend their whole lives anonymously (or pseudonymously) in prayer and work. Listening to cloistered nuns sing is a wonderful privilege that I am willing to travel the length of the UK to hear. But they don't sing pop music. They sing the Office.
Wednesday, 12 March 2014
The Particular
This morning I was very disturbed to read a report that the Ont*rio English C*tholic Te*chers' Association has decided to participate in Toronto's Pr*de Day Parade. Of course, it is an open secret among church-going Catholics in Toronto, at very least, that OEC*A is Catholic in name only. The same can be said for many of the actual English-speaking Cath*lic teachers in Ontario, I am very sorry to say.
I find it a horribly irony that the word that denotes this infamous parade is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride. And the true aims of the parade are quite obviously a celebration of another deadly sin, which is lust. Note the remarks of a man named Danny Glen*right in this LifeSiteNews article.
I think it is particularly horrible to use the agony of little children who fall into the clutches of pedophiles to score points against someone. This is particularly horrible when this is used to justify sexual abuse of other children--in this case, adult men and women parading naked, or in sexually shocking or provocative costumes, where children are.
This may boggle your minds, but in Toronto some parents really do bring their children downtown to watch "the fun"--not just of this parade, but of something I believe is called the "Le*ther Fair." I was once walking with a left-wing pal through "Le*ther Fair" and at a stage where a lesbian comic was warming up for a obscenity-laced show, the comic paused for a moment and told some women with children that her act wasn't really suitable for children. The women said something like, "Ah. It's okay. It will be over their heads anyway."
Really? Because one of the most vivid memories of my childhood was a production of Doctor Faustus, in which all the roles were played by men, and a man dressed as Helen of Troy caressed the man playing Doctor Faustus. I had never seen a man dressed as a woman in my little life, nor had I ever heard a man saying, as said Doctor Faustus's servant, that he would use magic to make all the maidens of his parish dance around him naked.
My father, who had taken me to this university production, felt rather badly that he had taken me to see it, but I absolutely loved it. In fact, because of this fun play I hoped to become an actor myself and to join that very same super-glamorous medieval drama club when I grew up. And I DID. And compared to all the glamorous, smart, sophisticated, sexually active people in that club, my Catholic friends suddenly seemed so....boring.
In case you are wondering, the lesbian comic carried on with her child-unfriendly act.
Anyway, I mention Danny Glen*right by name (with * so he doesn't find us while Googling himself) because I scorn to do what he did, which is make cheap shots about a whole class of people. In his case the class was "priests". In my case, the class would be called "gays". However, I don't want to do that because I am not angry or horrified by everyone who calls himself (or, very rarely) herself "gay" but specifically at Danny Glen*right and any other person who thinks lewd behaviour in public is worth breaking the laws of the land for, no matter how many children might be around.
Also, I think sexuality is rather too fluid and complicated to box in with terminology. I do not really believe in "gays" or "straights" at all; I believe there are human beings with different sexual impulses or feelings, who make different sexual choices at different times in their lives, for different reasons. The vast majority of these people, whatever their "preference" are psychologically capable of having ordinary sexual relations that can lead to reproduction. A small minority are not. And like all orthodox Christians, I am not so cool on "pleasure" being the primary reason for anything including sexual behaviour. Pleasure is a nice bonus to, say, staying alive or having children or keeping your marriage alive, but you'll notice that temporarily giving up innocent pleasures, like coffee or meat or sleeping in or married sexual relations, is considered an important spiritual discipline.
I was off-my-head crazy about an older girl when I was 14. I didn't think it was a big deal. Books I read and, later, observations about high school, told me many girls tended to get over-emotional about other girls, and I would probably grow out of it. I grew out of it although, now that I think about it, a younger female friend broke my heart when I was in my early thirties. Dear me, how I cried.
Well, that's love, which is an entirely different beast from sex, no matter what anyone tells you. Love can certainly be mixed in with luv, which is to say, immoderate attachment to another human being, often against reason. I've had that for women, but not sexual desire or lust, which is a lack that got Charlotte of Sex & the City kicked out of her new super-cool, well-connected lesbian friends' club, if you recall that episode. I won't repeat what they said to Charlotte, for it was obscene. Basically it was that she had to do more than smile at everyone.
No, your Auntie only feels sexual desire or lust for men, and tries to keep that under the control of her God-given reason, and hopes to inspire nothing stronger than admiration or affection in the entire male population save your Uncle B.A. Which means that if there was any such thing as a "Straight Pride" parade, with so-called "straights" dancing about naked and, having consumed sufficient quantities of crystal meth, thrusting their hips at children on the pavement, I would be disgusted by that, too.
If it weren't so serious, I would have be terribly amused by the lovestruck, hand-holding, usually male couples (including teenage) presented to our attention by Scottish lawmakers during the g*y marriage debates. The idea presented was that marriage was about luv, when marriage has almost always been about sex, either having it, or presenting a respectable front to society while having it elsewhere, which an astonishing number of homosexu*l male "couples" plan to do. [Link is to an article with shocking language and themes albeit in the New York Times.) But marriage is not about luv, but about sex, familial companionship, joint projects (like parenthood) and doing chores when you don't want to and think the other person should be doing more of them. Sex, however, should be the servant of marriage, not marriage the servant of sex, just as reason should rule the passions, not the passions reason.
If 2% of Torontonians have strong homosexual desires that means there are about 58,000 individual Torontonians to whom Danny Glen*right is speaking. And I hope a goodly number of those 58,000, each having reason and responsibility for his or her own actions, will write to Danny Glen*right and say that they do not approve of adults dancing naked in front of children, and that they do not want them doing it in their name. Fifty-eight thousand people telling Danny Glen*right where he can stuff his attitude would do more to heal divisions in the community than any parade.
I find it a horribly irony that the word that denotes this infamous parade is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride. And the true aims of the parade are quite obviously a celebration of another deadly sin, which is lust. Note the remarks of a man named Danny Glen*right in this LifeSiteNews article.
I think it is particularly horrible to use the agony of little children who fall into the clutches of pedophiles to score points against someone. This is particularly horrible when this is used to justify sexual abuse of other children--in this case, adult men and women parading naked, or in sexually shocking or provocative costumes, where children are.
This may boggle your minds, but in Toronto some parents really do bring their children downtown to watch "the fun"--not just of this parade, but of something I believe is called the "Le*ther Fair." I was once walking with a left-wing pal through "Le*ther Fair" and at a stage where a lesbian comic was warming up for a obscenity-laced show, the comic paused for a moment and told some women with children that her act wasn't really suitable for children. The women said something like, "Ah. It's okay. It will be over their heads anyway."
Really? Because one of the most vivid memories of my childhood was a production of Doctor Faustus, in which all the roles were played by men, and a man dressed as Helen of Troy caressed the man playing Doctor Faustus. I had never seen a man dressed as a woman in my little life, nor had I ever heard a man saying, as said Doctor Faustus's servant, that he would use magic to make all the maidens of his parish dance around him naked.
My father, who had taken me to this university production, felt rather badly that he had taken me to see it, but I absolutely loved it. In fact, because of this fun play I hoped to become an actor myself and to join that very same super-glamorous medieval drama club when I grew up. And I DID. And compared to all the glamorous, smart, sophisticated, sexually active people in that club, my Catholic friends suddenly seemed so....boring.
In case you are wondering, the lesbian comic carried on with her child-unfriendly act.
Anyway, I mention Danny Glen*right by name (with * so he doesn't find us while Googling himself) because I scorn to do what he did, which is make cheap shots about a whole class of people. In his case the class was "priests". In my case, the class would be called "gays". However, I don't want to do that because I am not angry or horrified by everyone who calls himself (or, very rarely) herself "gay" but specifically at Danny Glen*right and any other person who thinks lewd behaviour in public is worth breaking the laws of the land for, no matter how many children might be around.
Also, I think sexuality is rather too fluid and complicated to box in with terminology. I do not really believe in "gays" or "straights" at all; I believe there are human beings with different sexual impulses or feelings, who make different sexual choices at different times in their lives, for different reasons. The vast majority of these people, whatever their "preference" are psychologically capable of having ordinary sexual relations that can lead to reproduction. A small minority are not. And like all orthodox Christians, I am not so cool on "pleasure" being the primary reason for anything including sexual behaviour. Pleasure is a nice bonus to, say, staying alive or having children or keeping your marriage alive, but you'll notice that temporarily giving up innocent pleasures, like coffee or meat or sleeping in or married sexual relations, is considered an important spiritual discipline.
I was off-my-head crazy about an older girl when I was 14. I didn't think it was a big deal. Books I read and, later, observations about high school, told me many girls tended to get over-emotional about other girls, and I would probably grow out of it. I grew out of it although, now that I think about it, a younger female friend broke my heart when I was in my early thirties. Dear me, how I cried.
Well, that's love, which is an entirely different beast from sex, no matter what anyone tells you. Love can certainly be mixed in with luv, which is to say, immoderate attachment to another human being, often against reason. I've had that for women, but not sexual desire or lust, which is a lack that got Charlotte of Sex & the City kicked out of her new super-cool, well-connected lesbian friends' club, if you recall that episode. I won't repeat what they said to Charlotte, for it was obscene. Basically it was that she had to do more than smile at everyone.
No, your Auntie only feels sexual desire or lust for men, and tries to keep that under the control of her God-given reason, and hopes to inspire nothing stronger than admiration or affection in the entire male population save your Uncle B.A. Which means that if there was any such thing as a "Straight Pride" parade, with so-called "straights" dancing about naked and, having consumed sufficient quantities of crystal meth, thrusting their hips at children on the pavement, I would be disgusted by that, too.
If it weren't so serious, I would have be terribly amused by the lovestruck, hand-holding, usually male couples (including teenage) presented to our attention by Scottish lawmakers during the g*y marriage debates. The idea presented was that marriage was about luv, when marriage has almost always been about sex, either having it, or presenting a respectable front to society while having it elsewhere, which an astonishing number of homosexu*l male "couples" plan to do. [Link is to an article with shocking language and themes albeit in the New York Times.) But marriage is not about luv, but about sex, familial companionship, joint projects (like parenthood) and doing chores when you don't want to and think the other person should be doing more of them. Sex, however, should be the servant of marriage, not marriage the servant of sex, just as reason should rule the passions, not the passions reason.
If 2% of Torontonians have strong homosexual desires that means there are about 58,000 individual Torontonians to whom Danny Glen*right is speaking. And I hope a goodly number of those 58,000, each having reason and responsibility for his or her own actions, will write to Danny Glen*right and say that they do not approve of adults dancing naked in front of children, and that they do not want them doing it in their name. Fifty-eight thousand people telling Danny Glen*right where he can stuff his attitude would do more to heal divisions in the community than any parade.
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
In Fairness to the Bishop of Forth Worth
An excerpt from an email I got today, which I post with a goodly number of personal details about the writer removed for anonymity's sake. Be content that I am content that s/he knows what s/he is talking about:
You probably don't remember me, and I hate to email about Fisher-More as a reintroduction, but this situation is driving me crazy and I can at least try to help somewhere (i.e. your little corner of the blogosphere) in a world gone mad. I was X from Y-Z. I do not want to drudge up all the unpleasant memories, but I would like to stress that the suppression of the EF makes perfect sense in the context of Fisher-More. The liturgy had become a weapon to attack the hierarchy, and a real danger to people's souls. (I write this as a cradle trad who [...]) The Mass as worship of God was eclipsed by the Mass as ideology. Y-Z was a very, very ugly year, and I am happy to have escaped with my Faith intact. For the good of Michael [King's] soul and those of [the] students, they needed the wake-up call that the Church is more than a particular form of the Mass or even a particular rite. In an environment as insular as FM, this was the only way - even if it has led to the bishop being crucified.
***
Thankfully, the bishop has not actually been crucified, which I mention because sometimes cruel people do have the bright idea of crucifying Christians, including at least one Ukrainian protester I read about last month. However, I imagine the Bishop has received nasty mail. In fact, I know he has, for I read one man's boast that he had sent some. I think that is a real shame, and I wish it hadn't happened even though I personally can't understand how suppressing the EF (while not the NO, which can be seriously messed with and too often is) can ever be a good thing. I will just have to take the cradle trad's word that in this unusual situation, it is.
You probably don't remember me, and I hate to email about Fisher-More as a reintroduction, but this situation is driving me crazy and I can at least try to help somewhere (i.e. your little corner of the blogosphere) in a world gone mad. I was X from Y-Z. I do not want to drudge up all the unpleasant memories, but I would like to stress that the suppression of the EF makes perfect sense in the context of Fisher-More. The liturgy had become a weapon to attack the hierarchy, and a real danger to people's souls. (I write this as a cradle trad who [...]) The Mass as worship of God was eclipsed by the Mass as ideology. Y-Z was a very, very ugly year, and I am happy to have escaped with my Faith intact. For the good of Michael [King's] soul and those of [the] students, they needed the wake-up call that the Church is more than a particular form of the Mass or even a particular rite. In an environment as insular as FM, this was the only way - even if it has led to the bishop being crucified.
***
Thankfully, the bishop has not actually been crucified, which I mention because sometimes cruel people do have the bright idea of crucifying Christians, including at least one Ukrainian protester I read about last month. However, I imagine the Bishop has received nasty mail. In fact, I know he has, for I read one man's boast that he had sent some. I think that is a real shame, and I wish it hadn't happened even though I personally can't understand how suppressing the EF (while not the NO, which can be seriously messed with and too often is) can ever be a good thing. I will just have to take the cradle trad's word that in this unusual situation, it is.
Thursday, 20 February 2014
Virgin-Shaming
A Single reader with a boyfriend sent me this link, thinking it explained her office dynamic. Further questioning revealed that the most recent conversation about her chaste relationship with her boyfriend was mostly just her colleague putting her foot in it, e.g. "So are you and your boyfriend going away for the weekend? Why not? Doesn't he stay over? He doesn't? Why not?"
I don't work in an office, and thank heavens, for offices feature bored female administrative assistants who long to win the lottery and get the heck out. The gossip and tittle-tattle and attempts to divert oneself with the personal lives or emotional reactions of others are just soul-killing. It's one reason why I worked so hard to get into a PhD program; one slip in my grades, I felt, and I'd be back in the file room. (I should state, however, that I have warm memories of the women in the file room of the ODSP, who taught me a lot about humility and getting along with others.)
Young people often lack the calm confidence of the middle-aged, taking refuge in frightened anger or in-your-face bravado when someone treads on your toes. But in the West all kinds of laws have been passed to prevent harassment of women in the workplace, and these apply not only to men but to other women. It is not okay for people at work to give you a hard time about your sexual choices or to pry into your personal life. However, you are still the one primarily responsible for protecting your private life. You can't just call up HR the minute someone says, "So are you and your honey going away for the weekend?"
The way to take such a question, which 90% of the time is just as friendly attempt at passing some time, is lightly and in the spirit it is meant. "Nah, we'll kick back here, maybe see a movie" is an excellent response, and may lead the conversation right to the safe territory of movies.
Of course, 10% of the time, the question will be part of an office lady plot to find out your business, possibly because you have said something imprudent that put you on the "This girl is different" radar. Unless you are self-employed like Saint Paul, making tents beside the stall of your neighbour the spice peddler, mentioning topics like chastity at work is a bad idea. Just mentioning that you have a boyfriend is a bad idea, unless directly asked. But remember that at all times you are allowed to subtly change the subject. Throw your questioner a tidbit: "Yeah. Rob's really into film." If Rob's into film, you can change the subject to film EVERY time anyone asks anything personal. "What are you and Rob doin' tonight?" "Ah, probably watching a film." Make old Rob sound cozy and predictable, and everyone will assume you're "just normal," whatever "just normal" means to them.
Of course, if there is a real problem, with jerks making fun of you and your sexual choice not to have sex, then it may very well be time to go to your manager or Human Resources. Say you don't push your religion on anyone, and you are sick of people pushing their sexual beliefs on you and humiliating you for your choices. Nobody should be sexually harassed at work. Ever. By anyone.
Update: Thanks to the reader who linked to this in the combox. It's pretty good. In fact, when I think about the girls who gave B.A. a hard time for, well, being B.A., not their idea of who B.A. SHOULD be, I also conclude that they were idiots. However, I'm grateful that they WERE idiots, because that meant they left B.A. for me. Yay, them!
I don't work in an office, and thank heavens, for offices feature bored female administrative assistants who long to win the lottery and get the heck out. The gossip and tittle-tattle and attempts to divert oneself with the personal lives or emotional reactions of others are just soul-killing. It's one reason why I worked so hard to get into a PhD program; one slip in my grades, I felt, and I'd be back in the file room. (I should state, however, that I have warm memories of the women in the file room of the ODSP, who taught me a lot about humility and getting along with others.)
Young people often lack the calm confidence of the middle-aged, taking refuge in frightened anger or in-your-face bravado when someone treads on your toes. But in the West all kinds of laws have been passed to prevent harassment of women in the workplace, and these apply not only to men but to other women. It is not okay for people at work to give you a hard time about your sexual choices or to pry into your personal life. However, you are still the one primarily responsible for protecting your private life. You can't just call up HR the minute someone says, "So are you and your honey going away for the weekend?"
The way to take such a question, which 90% of the time is just as friendly attempt at passing some time, is lightly and in the spirit it is meant. "Nah, we'll kick back here, maybe see a movie" is an excellent response, and may lead the conversation right to the safe territory of movies.
Of course, 10% of the time, the question will be part of an office lady plot to find out your business, possibly because you have said something imprudent that put you on the "This girl is different" radar. Unless you are self-employed like Saint Paul, making tents beside the stall of your neighbour the spice peddler, mentioning topics like chastity at work is a bad idea. Just mentioning that you have a boyfriend is a bad idea, unless directly asked. But remember that at all times you are allowed to subtly change the subject. Throw your questioner a tidbit: "Yeah. Rob's really into film." If Rob's into film, you can change the subject to film EVERY time anyone asks anything personal. "What are you and Rob doin' tonight?" "Ah, probably watching a film." Make old Rob sound cozy and predictable, and everyone will assume you're "just normal," whatever "just normal" means to them.
Of course, if there is a real problem, with jerks making fun of you and your sexual choice not to have sex, then it may very well be time to go to your manager or Human Resources. Say you don't push your religion on anyone, and you are sick of people pushing their sexual beliefs on you and humiliating you for your choices. Nobody should be sexually harassed at work. Ever. By anyone.
Update: Thanks to the reader who linked to this in the combox. It's pretty good. In fact, when I think about the girls who gave B.A. a hard time for, well, being B.A., not their idea of who B.A. SHOULD be, I also conclude that they were idiots. However, I'm grateful that they WERE idiots, because that meant they left B.A. for me. Yay, them!
Monday, 20 January 2014
Attention British Catholic Bloggers
We all know that the media has a field day when a Roman Catholic priest or brother is accused, usually by Roman Catholics, of having either had an affair with or sexually abusing someone--usually another Roman Catholic.
Our hurt that a priest has (or may have) hurt one or more of us (again, Roman Catholic) laypeople or priests, behaving shamefully and sacrilegiously, is compounded by the media's salacious interest in the case, sometimes reviewing it again and again, giving the impression that there are more accusations than there actually are, and as many convictions as there are accusations. This leads to public contempt towards ALL church-going Roman Catholics, and public approbation for merely tribal Catholics who loudly declare themselves separate from "all that rubbish." And this is particularly painful in the United Kingdom, especially Scotland, where, since the Reformation, Roman Catholics have been a marginalized and very often reviled minority.
And for all these reasons, it is a matter of great joy that the Edinburgh High Court has quashed the unjust conviction of Father Mark Paterson, O.Carm. Father Mark Paterson, former Catholic chaplain at Aberdeen University, did not sexually assault his accuser. Father Mark Paterson did not behave shamefully and sacrilegiously. And a short paragraph or paragraphs in a few British newspapers and blogs have briefly mentioned that the conviction was quashed.
That is not enough. Father Paterson has been maligned in the press. The nasty testimony of his (adult, female, non-student) accuser was described in salacious detail in the tabloids. However, the testimony of his defenders has not been read by the public until now. The news was not, for example, in this week's Catholic Herald, as we might have expected (but this may be because the paper went to press before the editors heard the news).
Not good enough. Bells should be ringing from Papa Stronsay in the
Orkney Islands to the Abbey of Saint Cecilia in Ryde. However, that's not going to happen overnight. Just as it was left to a layman to work for seven years to get Father Paterson's conviction appealed, it has been left to British Catholic bloggers and social media to get the word out.
So let's get the word out. Please repost this post, or post "The conviction of Father Mark Paterson, O.Carm. for sexual assault has been quashed" and then link either to my article at Catholic World Report or to this post at Laodicea.
It's not PC to say so, but it is a fact: some accusers of priests are just making up malicious stories for gain. And, given this case, one even begins to wonder if a Roman Catholic priest can get a fair trial in Scotland, even today.
Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:24).
Wednesday, 11 December 2013
Thinking of Lectures...
Today I am pondering what to tell my retreatants about the dignity of woman. After all, I am giving four (4) talks. So far I am thinking, "The Dignity of the Single Woman", "Theology of Woman", "Challenges to the Dignity of Women in the West" and "Heroic Catholic Women of the Past Century." This way I can talk about Blessed Natalia Tułasiewicz. (On the one hand, I want to talk about specifically Polish interests, but on the other hand, I have to know what I am talking about, and my Polish is not that terrific as yet. If, however, anyone can recommend a book in English on "Social Trends in Contemporary Poland", that would awesome.)
The problem of the West is that it is in decline. This is so obvious, I don't think I have to make an argument here. All I have to do is throw out phrases: "Internet porn addiction", "redefinition of marriage by the state", "illiterate high school graduates," "bare-breasted Argentine feminists attacking men protecting the cathedral in San Juan from them."
(If you haven't seen the youtube video for this last item, don't see it. One way the bare-breasted Argentine feminists taunted the brave Catholic men was with woman-on-woman sex acts. I have never seen anything as revolting as the behaviour of those women, if they can still be called women. They looked more like the demons tempting St. Anthony, and actually what they were doing was akin to rape, unless you think there is a better word for deliberately, out of hatred, trying to sexually arouse a man against his will. And, incidentally, how can anyone in a soi-disant Catholic country spit on a helpless, praying man without thinking of the Passion Narrative? Just thinking about those creatures makes me want to throw up.)
This is a bad, bad time for social trends in the West to be influencing the former Eastern Bloc. Which I will say. I will talk about the Polish rock film Jesteś Bogiem--although western music, including the very fact that a song called "Jesteś Bogiem" ("You are God") was considered acceptable for Polish broadcast, is part of the problem--and how hilariously innocent I found it, compared to the lives of rap artists in the West. For one thing, all the rappers in the film had fathers at home. And these fathers had married their mothers, and at least two cases were still married to their mothers. One father fixes his son's busted Walkman.
The implication was, boo hoo, in 1990s Poland you had to get your Walkman fixed, not just buy a new and better one. But what I saw was a father at home, fixing his rapper son's Walkman with his own bare fatherly hands. The neighbourhood's buildings were crumbling, sure, but it was full of fathers living at home with their children. Fatherhood was a fact of life. It was the rule, not the exception. Meanwhile, forty percent of children in the UK are born out of wedlock. And seventy percent of African-American children in the USA, birthplace of the music the heroes of Jesteś Bogiem love so much, are born out of wedlock. When marriage goes out the window, so does fatherhood, unfortunately. And lots of women are complicit in this; although sometimes the fathers are just immature jerks, sometimes we actually drive the fathers away. WHAT an age we live in.
Anyway, there is a better way, and it is called Christianity. Rant, rant, rant.
Well, rant in the combox yourselves. Be warned that I may steal your ideas and use them in my lectures without attribution.
The problem of the West is that it is in decline. This is so obvious, I don't think I have to make an argument here. All I have to do is throw out phrases: "Internet porn addiction", "redefinition of marriage by the state", "illiterate high school graduates," "bare-breasted Argentine feminists attacking men protecting the cathedral in San Juan from them."
(If you haven't seen the youtube video for this last item, don't see it. One way the bare-breasted Argentine feminists taunted the brave Catholic men was with woman-on-woman sex acts. I have never seen anything as revolting as the behaviour of those women, if they can still be called women. They looked more like the demons tempting St. Anthony, and actually what they were doing was akin to rape, unless you think there is a better word for deliberately, out of hatred, trying to sexually arouse a man against his will. And, incidentally, how can anyone in a soi-disant Catholic country spit on a helpless, praying man without thinking of the Passion Narrative? Just thinking about those creatures makes me want to throw up.)
This is a bad, bad time for social trends in the West to be influencing the former Eastern Bloc. Which I will say. I will talk about the Polish rock film Jesteś Bogiem--although western music, including the very fact that a song called "Jesteś Bogiem" ("You are God") was considered acceptable for Polish broadcast, is part of the problem--and how hilariously innocent I found it, compared to the lives of rap artists in the West. For one thing, all the rappers in the film had fathers at home. And these fathers had married their mothers, and at least two cases were still married to their mothers. One father fixes his son's busted Walkman.
The implication was, boo hoo, in 1990s Poland you had to get your Walkman fixed, not just buy a new and better one. But what I saw was a father at home, fixing his rapper son's Walkman with his own bare fatherly hands. The neighbourhood's buildings were crumbling, sure, but it was full of fathers living at home with their children. Fatherhood was a fact of life. It was the rule, not the exception. Meanwhile, forty percent of children in the UK are born out of wedlock. And seventy percent of African-American children in the USA, birthplace of the music the heroes of Jesteś Bogiem love so much, are born out of wedlock. When marriage goes out the window, so does fatherhood, unfortunately. And lots of women are complicit in this; although sometimes the fathers are just immature jerks, sometimes we actually drive the fathers away. WHAT an age we live in.
Anyway, there is a better way, and it is called Christianity. Rant, rant, rant.
Well, rant in the combox yourselves. Be warned that I may steal your ideas and use them in my lectures without attribution.
Monday, 25 November 2013
Broken Engagements
A broken engagement usually equals disappointment, a unique dream that has died and a cherished friendship that has either been wounded or exterminated. Sometimes it signifies a betrayal. It is serious stuff.
It is serious if the man broke off the engagement (which a gentleman was never supposed to do), and it is serious if you broke off the engagement. Either way, it hurts. And, unfortunately, it represents HIGH DRAMA to all your mutual friends and relatives. Your nearest and dearest will be sorry and perhaps embarrassed, and many of your under-twenty-five friends will talk, shriek, speculate, shake their heads... Ugh.
This is why I recommend, from the bottom of my heart, that a broken engagement is a good reason for you to get out of Dodge. Now is the time to take a quick How-to-Teach-ESL course and move to rural Poland for six months. I'd suggest Japan except that it would be harder to get to Sunday Mass. If you are away from almost everyone you know, you will escape both the possibility that your broken engagement will be of interest to those who should not be interested and the possibility that people who should care don't care.
Another long-distance plan involves mission work in some country so desperately poor, your own problems will be put into perspective. Incidentally, don't do anything dangerous or life-changing or involves a commitment of more than six months. St. Ignatius of Loyola says that you should make no important decision when you are in a state of desolation, and very often after a broken engagement a person is in a state of desolation.
A safer option involves your aunt across the country or ocean. "Scooter and I broke up. It's over. Can I stay with you for a month to get my head together?" sounds perfectly reasonable to me, aunt of three, wife of Uncle Kindhearted.
Or if you really can't move away that long, see if you can take a holiday away somewhere, as in across a large body of water. Presumably there was a wedding budget; use some money for this.
At very least, you must take a week off work or school, as soon as you possibly can. And you must not contact your ex-fiance. You must not allow your ex-fiance to contact you. It is not time for closure. Closure after a broken engagement is not something you can make happen, particularly not within a week of the break. Closure may take months. If you broke up in October, you will feel just a little better in November, and then a little better in December (with a dip around Christmas), and then a little better in January. By April, you will be much better indeed. Look forward to April.
Wherever you go, I recommend hiring a therapist to listen to you talk. The etiquette books of yore held that a gentleman cannot say anything about a broken engagement, and a lady can speak of it only to one ladylike friend who can be trusted not to say anything to anyone else. These etiquette books were published long before Bridget Jones was a book, let alone a film. I think it is almost impossible to talk about a failed engagement to only one ladylike taciturn friend, and that there are only so many times she can listen to the same story before she starts screening your calls. Therefore, I think the addition of a shrink a very good idea. If you have little money, I recommend seeing if you can talk to someone at Catholic Family Services or your university's mental health services for a nominal sum. And, for the truly poor and distressed, there is always your favourite priest.
I seriously recommend not dating for six months. The temptation to win emotional intimacy with a cool new guy by telling him all about the last cool guy (which never, ever, works in real life) will probably be too much for you. Ignore everyone who tells you that when you fall off a horse, you have to get right back on. Relationships are not horses.
Above all, allow yourself to be sad. The natural healthy reaction to disappointment and loneliness is sadness. Sadness is not a disease. It is your right to be sad until you slowly begin to discover that you are happy. (If six months go by and you are still not happy, and indeed feel worse, I recommend you see at doctor about this at once. Sadness is not a disease, but depression is.)
So to recap:
1. Get some physical distance from the community where the engagement and break-up occurred for up to six months, if you can.
2. Do not contact your fiance or allow him to contact him, no matter how lonely either of you feels. Of course you feel lonely. Find other ways or people to help you carry the burden of your loneliness. Your OWN loneliness. You are not responsible for his loneliness; you can't help him.
3. Do your best not to tell everyone in the universe what happened. Instead, hire a therapist, see a counselor or talk to a priest. If you can afford only to talk to a priest, stuff some money in the poor box.
4. Don't date for six months.
5. Don't demand instant closure. Instead, own your sadness. Imagine your sadness is a wounded bird you are going to take care of until it can fly again. Don't feel ashamed to be sad. But don't hang onto the wounded bird when it is ready to fly away. If the wounded bird doesn't show any signs of healing, go to a doctor.
I hope this is helpful.
It is serious if the man broke off the engagement (which a gentleman was never supposed to do), and it is serious if you broke off the engagement. Either way, it hurts. And, unfortunately, it represents HIGH DRAMA to all your mutual friends and relatives. Your nearest and dearest will be sorry and perhaps embarrassed, and many of your under-twenty-five friends will talk, shriek, speculate, shake their heads... Ugh.
This is why I recommend, from the bottom of my heart, that a broken engagement is a good reason for you to get out of Dodge. Now is the time to take a quick How-to-Teach-ESL course and move to rural Poland for six months. I'd suggest Japan except that it would be harder to get to Sunday Mass. If you are away from almost everyone you know, you will escape both the possibility that your broken engagement will be of interest to those who should not be interested and the possibility that people who should care don't care.
Another long-distance plan involves mission work in some country so desperately poor, your own problems will be put into perspective. Incidentally, don't do anything dangerous or life-changing or involves a commitment of more than six months. St. Ignatius of Loyola says that you should make no important decision when you are in a state of desolation, and very often after a broken engagement a person is in a state of desolation.
A safer option involves your aunt across the country or ocean. "Scooter and I broke up. It's over. Can I stay with you for a month to get my head together?" sounds perfectly reasonable to me, aunt of three, wife of Uncle Kindhearted.
Or if you really can't move away that long, see if you can take a holiday away somewhere, as in across a large body of water. Presumably there was a wedding budget; use some money for this.
At very least, you must take a week off work or school, as soon as you possibly can. And you must not contact your ex-fiance. You must not allow your ex-fiance to contact you. It is not time for closure. Closure after a broken engagement is not something you can make happen, particularly not within a week of the break. Closure may take months. If you broke up in October, you will feel just a little better in November, and then a little better in December (with a dip around Christmas), and then a little better in January. By April, you will be much better indeed. Look forward to April.
Wherever you go, I recommend hiring a therapist to listen to you talk. The etiquette books of yore held that a gentleman cannot say anything about a broken engagement, and a lady can speak of it only to one ladylike friend who can be trusted not to say anything to anyone else. These etiquette books were published long before Bridget Jones was a book, let alone a film. I think it is almost impossible to talk about a failed engagement to only one ladylike taciturn friend, and that there are only so many times she can listen to the same story before she starts screening your calls. Therefore, I think the addition of a shrink a very good idea. If you have little money, I recommend seeing if you can talk to someone at Catholic Family Services or your university's mental health services for a nominal sum. And, for the truly poor and distressed, there is always your favourite priest.
I seriously recommend not dating for six months. The temptation to win emotional intimacy with a cool new guy by telling him all about the last cool guy (which never, ever, works in real life) will probably be too much for you. Ignore everyone who tells you that when you fall off a horse, you have to get right back on. Relationships are not horses.
Above all, allow yourself to be sad. The natural healthy reaction to disappointment and loneliness is sadness. Sadness is not a disease. It is your right to be sad until you slowly begin to discover that you are happy. (If six months go by and you are still not happy, and indeed feel worse, I recommend you see at doctor about this at once. Sadness is not a disease, but depression is.)
So to recap:
1. Get some physical distance from the community where the engagement and break-up occurred for up to six months, if you can.
2. Do not contact your fiance or allow him to contact him, no matter how lonely either of you feels. Of course you feel lonely. Find other ways or people to help you carry the burden of your loneliness. Your OWN loneliness. You are not responsible for his loneliness; you can't help him.
3. Do your best not to tell everyone in the universe what happened. Instead, hire a therapist, see a counselor or talk to a priest. If you can afford only to talk to a priest, stuff some money in the poor box.
4. Don't date for six months.
5. Don't demand instant closure. Instead, own your sadness. Imagine your sadness is a wounded bird you are going to take care of until it can fly again. Don't feel ashamed to be sad. But don't hang onto the wounded bird when it is ready to fly away. If the wounded bird doesn't show any signs of healing, go to a doctor.
I hope this is helpful.
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