Cult Status

What struck me most, when reading about the Allison Mack story, was that she founded what was called a "female empowerment" group. 

So I wrote this. (Someone else provided the headline.) 

One of the most embarrassing aspect of being a woman, these days, is that so many women (myself included) want a big strong man to look up to, make us feel special, and solve all our problems.

This may not have been so embarrassing before 1968. In that respect, women were definitely allowed to be women. In previous centuries, you were considered a bit strange if your erotic imagination did not involve the Big Strong Man. Strange or an excellent candidate for religious life.  

(I've been rereading The Summerhouse Trilogy, so Margaret's resistance to marriage is very much on my mind.) 

It's rather an irony then, that Allison Mack, whose life revolved around her male guru, has a same-sex partner. She had boyfriends before, though. Ah me. I'm just not qualified to comment on that. 

But the "DOS" story is a cautionary tale about how women will throw other women under the bus to get what they want from the man in their life. It reminds me that there are two kinds of women: women who use their power to help other women (e.g. good mothers, physical or spiritual) and women who use their power to hurt other women. 

I don't really believe in female "empowerment" unless it involves barbells, martial arts, or weapons training. Women are powerful in many ways, and the important thing is that we not use our power badly, hurting ourselves or others through sheer stupidity or wickedness. 

Was it Ethel Boileau who wrote that a woman's sexuality was "a weapon that can break in her hand"? I think it was. Meanwhile, how Marxist to rabbit on about power. Still, it's unavoidable when considering a "female empowerment group" that was ultimately a power grab. 

The Quiet of Good and the Glamour of Evil

I have been in bed with either the flu or food poisoning for two days. Too wretched for most of Monday to do anything but sleep or  stare at the horrible lampshade on the ceiling (which came with the flat) by evening I felt briefly well enough to watch something on Netflix.

Netflix is a morass of evil dressed up as entertainment, I concluded after B.A. and I watched Anthony Bourdain drag himself around the world to hang out with local chefs, curse and eat too much. In the end, Bourdain committed suicide offscreen, and it might have been the flu talking, but I concluded it was the show itself that was to blame. Apparently Bourdain was exhausted, so why didn't he just lock the door and sleep for three days? Or check himself into the hospital? But I suppose a production company can't sue a dead man.

Anyway, sick in bed but feeling somewhat (if temporarily) better, I scrolled through Netflix moaning, "Why isn't there anything Catholic?" At last I found Moonstruck, which is the Christmas go-to film for many of the women of my family. We can quote from it extensively ("Chrissy, bring me the KNIFE!"), but I hadn't see it for a while.

It started off well, and as B.A. was now home from work, I nudged him whenever a holy picture, pinned up in several Italian-owned Brooklyn shops, was in shot. I got quite teary eyed over that. The weak part of the film is, of course, the scene-chewing of Nicholas Cage ("HUH, sweetie?") and the evil part is Cage telling Cher (e.g. Loretta Castorini, surely a heroine for single/widowed women aged 37) that he doesn't care if she goes to hell as long as she gets into his bed.

Cage, as Ronnie Cammareri, makes an odd little speech including the idea that we aren't on the earth to love "the right people": "We are here to love the wrong people, to break our hearts, and die." That is a dangerous and stupid philosophy, and ridiculous in this context as Ronnie is clearly not at all the "wrong person" for Loretta for several reasons. She even knows his family, for heaven's sake, although, yes, it's inconvenient that she's engaged to his brother.*

The film ends well for the Castorini and Cammareri families. I, however, was suddenly and violently and disgustingly ill, so I stayed in bed another day and eventually binge-watched Sherlock.

The contemporary Sherlock is cleverly photographed, written, and acted, and if Sherlock is to be believed the best and most love-worthy women are high-class hookers and paid assassins. The sweet pathologist with her heart on her sleeve is a loser, and the respectable-looking landlady is a retired stripper. Yes, I see that it is good TV to overturn viewers' expectations, but the endless nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "everybody's bent" message is worst than wearisome, it's wicked.

I was frankly relieved to find myself having an instant message conversation with two theologate classmates, a priest and a married mum of four. The priest (who was eating supper) dropped out soon, but the mum kept on and thanked me for the work I do for LSN. This was quite heartening because it is actually very difficult to wade through the sludge every work day, scooping for the most harmful pieces of sludge, so I can say to the reading public, "Look, here's the sludge you really need to worry about."

And families really do need to worry about the sludge, as this column by Rod Dreher illustrates. The sludge is waiting to come into every house via the television or the computer or the radio or the child's homework assignment. Some Catholic families still have little stoups of holy water. The original idea was to ward off any demons who might leap onto you after you leave your holy Christian house and expel any demons who clung to you when you came back in. Whereas I do believe in real, take-possession-of-foolhardy-people demons, I think the average person is much more in danger of tracking, or inviting, really bad ideas into the house.

And the horror of the really bad ideas is that they cause mass suffering. Compared to the 19th century, for the western world, or to 1980, for everywhere outside the western world, we are all so materially rich, and yet there is so much unhappiness. White American men are committing suicide in droves, for example, apparently thanks to the sexual revolution. And yet insane numbers of girls have decided to have their breasts cut off and become white American men. What?!

All this evil and all this unhappiness is terribly exciting, but the truth is that happiness, like goodness, is rather quiet. The other day I had the good fortune to eat lunch with a traditional Catholic family. This is Scotland, so the fact that they live in an Arts-and-Craft neo-mediaeval cottage is not particularly notable, except that it added to a very timeless scene: a young mother and father and their many children of different sizes all gathered around a stone hearth, watching the flames after a good lunch. Apart from the fact that everyone was healthy and clean and the mother's and my skirts ended mid-calf, it could have been any year after the invention of the standard chimney (in northern Europe, 11th or 12th century, apparently).

There was a Disney cartoon playing in a different room, and the children drifted in and out, apparently torn between the video and interest in what the adults were doing, which was not very much: just talking, holding or feeding the baby, and looking at the fire. And I was struck by how very peaceful, happy and good this all was, and how very rich in all the important ways this family was.

Gainfully employed man + patient woman + healthy children + roof + hearth = happiness.

The children are homeschooled, by the way; the sludge I wade through for work and entertainment is kept well away from the beautiful A&C doors and windows. I really am not sure of how much of a chance other parents have of passing on such a quiet, happy and good life to their children without homeschooling and keeping the internet, trash-music and trash-TV out of their homes. However, I suppose everything I write these days has the potential of inspiring one more parent to say, "Enough. We're homeschooling from now on" or "Enough. We're not going to allow Netflix to turn our kids into zombies."

Naturally I was a little sad that my home doesn't have a fireplace, let alone any children, in it. My generation was told in a million ways that being a stay-at-home mother was the waste of a life and that homeschooling was a sure sign of "religious mania." Now, of course, I can think of no vocation for women more important than that of the homeschooling married mother--unless, of course, it is the prayers of cloistered nuns keeping the end of the world at bay.

*Since I haven't mentioned this for some time, I will repeat that the whole point of the story of Romeo and Juliet was that the only reason their marriage would have been inadmissible to their families was their fathers' dumb feud. They shared the same religious faith, the same culture, the same class, and even the same town. Shakespeare's point was not that there is "unity in diversity," but that personal feuds are harmful to society. My own philosophy of marriage is that if husband and wife share the same core values (which may not be shared ethnic and religious identities, but very often are), then they will probably be happy.

Advent 1

It's Advent, so I am in the mood for purple. I have ordered a purple tablecloth and purple candles. I have even recoloured my blog, as you can see. 

The music was extra-splendid at the Edinburgh Missa Cantata this morning. There was lots of singing in which the humble people in the pews were allowed to take part. We had the Advent Prose ("Rorate  caeli"), the Hymn of the Advent Office ("Conditor alme siderum") and the Advent hymn to Our Lady ("Alma redemptoris mater"). 

Is "Christe, redemptor omnium" for Advent, Christmas or Epiphany? Whichever one it is, I hope we get Monteverdi's this year. 

I love Advent music. When B.A. and I got home from Mass, I found a long album of Advent carols on youtube and began to wrap Christmas presents. Wrapping presents on December 2 is my all-time record for earliness. It's partly because I have to send the parcel to Canada sooner rather than later, and it's partly because I feel badly I didn't make the Christmas cake two-to-four weeks ago. I was hoping B.A. would be allowed to travel to Canada, and I didn't want to jinx it by making the cake.  Thus, there will be no proper Christmas cake this year.  I will bake every traditional thing else. 

Although the homily had nothing to do with martyrdom, I worried a lot about Audrey's assisted suicide. I read Lord of the World: I know what happens next. What happens next is that Catholics are called cruel for standing in the way of easy, painless deaths and not allowing them in our hospitals.  Then, just as I had to turn down offers of IVF almost every time I talked to doctors about my chances of having a baby, many of us are likely to be offered "medically assisted death" when we are at our weakest, most painful ebb. 

And that made me think about that lady in the Catholic religious articles shop in the US--and if you don't know the story, please don't look for it, for it is the most ghastly, grotesque, and horrid American atrocity story I've read in months, if not years. To make a horrible story short, a brave Catholic wife-and-mother looked down the barrel of a gun and decided she'd rather be shot than do what the gunman told her to do.  I hope and pray I would have her guts. 

But it might be even harder to say no to a caring nurse with the merciful needle than to a villain with a gun, which led me to my next thought: how does one train oneself to say no to the needle?

I suppose the way forward may be to not only to fast periodically so as to actually feel hungry as pain but to confront other kinds of pain, like getting up at 5 AM, doing one too many pushups every day, or learning how to do one's own outrageously complicated taxes. 

St. Ignatius of Loyola was very down on the idea of his Society overdoing it on penances, but it strikes me that penance might be a kind of training and as long as you don't do yourself a damage, it may bear fruit later. 

I have almost finished reading Peter Kwasniewski's Tradition & Sanity: Conversations & Dialogues of a Postconciliar Exile, so keep an eye out for my review. It should appear this week. 

"Why We Fight"

When I was three and Nulli was two, my parents moved to England for a year. We lived near Cambridge University, and I enjoyed English life as thoroughly as an under-five could in those happy days of the milk ration, nursery school and playing with keys at church. I am sorry to say I did not meet any of the great figures of Cambridge life in the 1970s--or if I did, I don't remember.

When telling my friends I was returning to Canada, one asked if I would come back, and I said "Yes"--which is probably the first time (and most definitely not the last) I made a rash promise probably impossible to keep. However, I did go back to England many times through books, starting with Winnie the Pooh, the Narnia series, The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings and a lot of other books written by men who went to Oxford or Cambridge or by their daughters.

Unsurprisingly, this gave me a very antiquated view of Britain and what British people were like. Obviously I didn't think the modern day Englishman was quite like Aragorn son of Arathorn, but I did assume that the average Englishman aspired to be so.

I have long since realised this is not the case, and having watched British television for almost nine years, I thought I had seen the depths of British cultural decline. However I haven't, for these posters shocked me as much as anyone:

NHS stand for National Health Service, and the product they are pushing in the first poster is the "morning after pill". The second poster advertises condoms.

The general public has found the first poster   offensive, but I think the second is even worse.  And, unfortunately, many people find the first poster offensive merely because it suggests you have to choose between dressing up and having a baby. Their argument is that you certainly can wear those shoes AND have a baby.

Frankly I think wearing such shoes is appalling to begin with, not only because they are a public declaration of sexual "power" but because of what they do to your feet and legs.  For the National Health Service to pretend that wearing shoes like that is desirable, let alone more important than motherhood--yes, even teen motherhood--is to have abdicated their own responsibility to the public.

But the second poster really upsets me for two reasons. The lesser reason is that it suggests to the English teenage boy that video games are crucial to his existence. As the obestiy problem skyrockets in the UK--an American friend of mine says all you have to do to get fat in the UK is breathe--it is outrageous that the National Health Service would hold up video games as superior to fatherhood (yes, even teen fatherhood).

The greater reason is the warning "Bware da baby trap". Bware da baby trap--in the country of Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Dickens,  Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, A.S. Byatt and Julian Barnes. Yes, of course it is also completely offensive to refer to readers' responsibilities to their potential children as "a trap". But it seems to me even more offensive to assume he enjoys being patronised in this fashion by an agency of the government.  

I've entitled this post "Why We Fight" in a rather tongue-in-cheek way, as I do most of my fighting on a North American battleground. The people doing the real fighting to retain cultural standards in Britain are English and Scottish parents who either send their children to the best schools they can afford or homeschool them.

Unfortunately, British traditionalists and conservatives have lost battle after battle in the public realm. This strikes me as untenable; it's not as if traditional parents will be left in peace to raise their children as they see best. However, I am not sure myself what to do about that.

The Freedom of Being Nobody

St. Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us.

The "Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises" of Saint Ignatius of Loyola helped me a lot when I was grappling with a very difficult decision years ago.

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created. 

From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.  

For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honour rather than dishonour, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created. 

The part that really challenged me was the idea of not desiring "honour rather than dishonour," since I was about to quit a PhD programme and therefore abandon my lifelong dream of becoming a university professor.  

Now, I would never recommend to anyone that they drop their PhD programme. Getting that far and then giving up--for whatever unhappy reason--can leave a very deep wound.  (I suppose if it is for a happy reason--like something so much better--then you'd be okay.) However, I eventually found a fulfilling life outside of academia, even discovering that the Great Conversation carries on outside the walls. 

In fact, the conversation inside the walls can become very restrictive, and I am reminded again of the time I positively savaged a book of feminist theology in a book review published in the Toronto Catholic Register. At that time, Canadian Catholics in academia did not rip apart the books of other Canadian Catholics in academia in print. Doing so is not very nice, and the Catholic Register was (and may still be) a nice paper, rather more interested in building up than tearing down, which was as it should be. Moreover, ripping into the works of potential future colleagues is not great for your future career. 

However, I was very passionate about theology, and I had a very low tolerance for the cotton candy quality of thought that came along with the 1970s-style pastoral branch, so I very much hated this book. I recall hating it so much, I threw it across a laundromat--which I may have said in my review. 

It did not occur to me to imagine how the authoress would feel when she read my review, as she inevitably did, and I have paid for my thoughtlessness since by reading reviews of my own work. (I no longer do this for I have suffered enough.)  

But not to put a fine point on it, she went nuts. She wrote to me at two email addresses, and she wrote to the editor-in-chief, and she telephoned him too. Telephoning a newspaper editor to scream is inelegant, but at least it leaves no traces. I never deleted the authoress's email and although I have written many stupid emails since the genre was invented, I have never written one quite like that. 

In short, the authoress was a learned, respected professor at a wonderful university who had the confidence and support of the bishops----"and who are YOU?"

"I'm nobody," said your humble correspondent to her screen and "--and that makes me free." 

I don't agree with St. Ignatius about the health and the riches, exactly. I'm not sure 16th century people had as much choice about these things as we westerners do now, and compared to 16th century people, we're all rich. However, I do think he is spot on about the honour/dishonour thing. If you do not care that much about what Very Important People think of you--caring more about, say, how you appear to the ladies of your mother's branch of the Catholic Women's League*--then you have more freedom to stand up for what you believe in, no matter how unfashionable it is.  

The outraged authoress did me three very good turns by freaking out, by the way.  

First, her tears (I think I was told she cried over the phone) were a wake-up call that words hurt even grown-up strangers with tenure. 

Second, although I myself have cried over bad reviews since then--even private ones from friends, shameful, shameful, shameful**---I have never pulled the "I am so GREAT, and you are so SMALL" stunt, and I hope God prevents me from ever doing it.  

Third, she alerted the editor-in-chief to the fact that there was something scream-worthy in that week's Register. He picked up a copy and had a read of my review. And that, mes enfants, is how I eventually got my own column and my first book published and thus the book republished in the USA and in Poland. 

I am very thankful that when my once-promising academic career fell sick and died, I had my writing career (!) to fall back on. But I am also grateful for the lesson that to be "nobody" is to be free and being "somebody" can lead to delusion.

*The ladies of the Catholic Women's League, I am quite sure, would draw a line well before  picketing outside a private house and telling a man's children that his father is a horrible person and loads of people hate him. I suspect the CWL eyebrow would have lifted right when Mr Bone told his parents that instead of getting a job after university, he was going to live on the public purse.

**When I had spent the requisite time with poets, story-writers and other scribblers in the 1990s, I began to notice that we seemed particularly vulnerable to certain sins, chief among them volcanic envy. I will never forget my reaction when I first discovered that a dear friend had had a book published by a mainstream publisher with a big advance and bee-oo-tee-ful binding: murderous rage. Up until that moment I thought I was proof against the snarling hatred certain poets I knew had for much more successful poets their age.  Ah ha ha ha ha--no. 

Mantra against Misfortune

I have a new technique against useless retrospection. Every time I begin a thought with "Oh, if only..." or "I wish I had...", I say, "What can I do today to make tomorrow better?" 

This mantra popped into my head--very possibly at Mass---when B.A. and I were living in the New Town this summer. At a certain point after the Deluge drove us from our happy home in the Historical Flat, I began to say such mournful things as "What terrible decisions have I made in my life that have led up to this moment?" 

This was nonsense, of course, as neither of us made decisions that led to the sudden malfunction of the HH's fire extinguishing system. Neither of us was responsible, either, for poor B.A.'s brain tumour deciding to grow again. And neither of us was responsible for the delay in taking possession of our flat, which was caused by some shoddy map-making at some registry office, plus a crack in the concrete around the [redundant] chimney.

As a matter of fact, our life decisions had left us well-off, not only because we had kindly friends with a kindly tenant who allowed us to rent a room, but because we had been working and saving against the evil day we would have to leave the Historical House. So in reality we had made excellent decisions that led up to the joyful moment in August went B.A. took possession of our new home. 

This mantra "What can I do today to make tomorrow better?"is a good dispeller of gloomy thoughts, I have found, especially as making tomorrow better includes digging a few dandelions out of the lawn. It occurred to me this morning that I may never finish digging dandelions out of the lawn, as they keep coming back, but that does not mean I should give up. (Giving up would lead to a brutal dandelion occupation.) The victory is in digging up the dandelions as long as I have breath and strength---which is also true of the struggle against sin. 

Gardening is a very theological activity. 

After reading a simple but persuasive book called Eat, Move Sleep by a pop scientist named Tom Rath, I decided that another thing I could do to make tomorrow better was to start running for 30 minutes a day. Despite my athletic years (ages 25-36), this was a very radical decision--especially as this running will be outdoors instead of in a comfortable gym. 

However, for over a year I have been sitting down for over 8 hours a day,  I have gained a lot of weight, and I have arms that ache from too much typing. It seemed to me that I had better take up cardiovascular exercise NOW, or I will be very sorry SOON.

So this morning I got up at 6:50 AM and ran along the river and back for what turned out to be 24 minutes, and it didn't kill me. Eat, Move, Sleep promises (as have other books I've read) that cardiovascular activity improves learning, too. so that will be useful for my Polish. 

Snatches of Packing, Gardening and Pondering Sin

I have been writing about fall-out from the Cardinals McCarrick and Wuerl scandals, and my hands ache so much at the end of the day that it is hard for me to write anything else.

In the mornings before work, I have been going to the Historical House to pack up books. Small cardboard boxes, especially vodka boxes, are best for this task.  Four more hours should get the job done. 

One evening this week before dinner I rushed out to continue pulling up the dandelions in the lawn, and this morning I managed to get outside again to empty the veg scraps bin on what is still just a compost heap. No compost bin as yet. 

I have watched one television show--"Celebrity Masterchef"---and after so long away from TV, I was surprised by how very boring and mindless it was and wondered why anyone would watch "Celebrity Masterchef" instead of reading a book. There are so many good books, and so few great TV shows. We recognised the face of only one celebrity and the name of the 80s band of another, the mood music was stupid, and the dishes the chefs made looked thoroughly unappetising.  It was a complete waste of an hour, and it frightens me to think that there are people who spend a third of their time--or more--watching television. This is surely not something worthy of human beings. 

Another thing that has been bothering me is artificial snacks. Because so much of the McCarrick/Wuerl scandals involve sins and networks that don't tempt me, I decided it would be a good idea to look at my own inclinations and see if I do anything that could be considered disordered in itself.  And it occurred to me at once that--even if this is "small matter", as B.A. says--there is something  inherently wrong with eating food that has little nutritional value, like potato chips (or crisps, as they are called in Britain), when one has access to highly nutritional food. 

Gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and chowing down on something just because it has a pleasurable balance of salt, fat and crunchiness strikes me as a kind of gluttony. Fortunately for this point of view, the apples in the back garden are now ripe, and if I suddenly long to eat something, I can eat one of them. However, stress-eating may also be a form of gluttony. At any rate, we are supposed to ponder our own sins instead of other people's, so I am trying to do that to balance out what I write about all day these days.

Well, back to work.