Only the Concrete is Good

I live in a specific place (Scotland) in a specific time (early 21st century) with a specific man (Benedict Ambrose). I am also a specific person--and an immigrant, albeit one with strong ancestral ties to Edinburgh and other places in Scotland. 

I love to visit the specific buildings in which my ancestors and their families lived. On All Soul's Day I visit the cemetery (wet, untidy, depressing) where my Edinburgh great-great-grandfather lies. His widow was buried in Canada, whence she and their children emigrated. I can't pass their old home without thinking of them all and of my grandma, too. When she was small, her mother took her to Edinburgh for a year or two while sorting out some family business. And when she grew up, my grandmother married into another family from the east coast of Scotland. Various quirks of East Coast culture, some quite passé, were trained into my mother and then into me. And then I married into the remnants of a family from the east coast of Scotland, so here I am, watching the northern morning sunlight light up the trees along the river. 

I love living in Scotland, and I love the Scots although some aspects of contemporary Scottish life were a shock. Having grown up worried that Quebec nationalists would break up Canada, I was stunned to find myself among Scottish nationalists longing to split the United Kingdom. The crude language and nudity permitted on British TV were another surprise, as were the minuscule outfits and skyscraper heels on young ladies on Princes Street, even on cold, rainy winter nights. Homeless Scottish youngsters begging on the street blew my mind. Despite their clothes and their coarse language (which I couldn't understand), they had faces like children from Toronto's top private schools. (Of course this says more about 1980s Toronto than 2000s Edinburgh.) 

I also loved living in the attic of a 17th century house with 18th century additions and going, every Sunday, to a 1900 wooden flat pack church which was meant to be the temporary solution to the Catholics in the area having only enough money to buy the house and the land. The congregation was smaller and more Scottish in 2009 although the university had long provided a steady stream of foreigners. There was a goodly handful of English people, too. 

"Canadians are not foreigners," trumpeted an Englishman. "You're British born somewhere else!"

The Edinburgh TLM community provided me with another set of ancestors: the elderly Scottish ladies who prepared, presided over and cleaned up after the After-Mass Tea and the elderly men (English and Scots) who also connected us to the history of the TLM's survival in Edinburgh. I pray for these four women and two men during every Sunday Mass, so I think of them often, too. As I've written before, I wonder what the tea ladies would think of my changes to the After-Mass Tea and if they are quietly exulting to see how much the community has grown.  

Tradition is not only books but people--specific people. It is not only liturgy but culture, a specific culture. There are immigrants who want to live in Scotland as though there were no Scots, no Scottish culture, no Scots ancestors to pray for, no past to plug into--just opportunities to exploit and riches to plunder. I met that kind of immigrant often enough in Toronto: "I like Canada, but I don't like Canadian people." "Canada didn't have a culture until we got here." I loathe that attitude, and I'd wipe out my foreign accent if I could. 

The Canadian philosopher Father Bernard Lonergan, SJ, was re-expressing St. Thomas Aquinas when he said "Only the concrete is good." What he meant was that there are real, specific things and real, specific people to whom to pay attention. Ideas are just ideas, thoughts just thoughts: an excellent thing for Lonerganians overly excited by the Master's thought-structures to remember. 

It is something the young have to learn, too: that the world--that is, God's Creation--is what it is and not what we imagine about it or what we want it to be or what random strangers say it is. 

It is so sad to see the young imprisoned by their imaginations. They say things like:

"All the boys I know are dumb." 

"All the girls I know are crazy feminists." 

"The world is too horrible to bring children into." 

"Maybe I'm sad because I was born in the wrong body." 

"I fall into sin when I dance, and therefore everybody else does, too." 

"I really like this author, so everything he says is true." 

"Canada/Scotland/England/Australia has no culture of its own." 

"This man frightens me, but if I get off the elevator, somebody will think I'm racist." 

"I read a book about this, so now I know everything I need to know about it."  

These are all lies. These are just fantasies preventing their captives from grasping reality, and as such they are evil. Very evil.

Only the concrete is good.