I spent the formative years of my childhood living between two rivers. A short distance from my childhood home was a tributary of the Potomac River, and closer to what I considered at the time to be civilization was the Rappahannock River. I spent most those years in benign indifference to these bodies of water, though appreciative of their beauty. It wasn’t until I began digging more into history that I began to appreciate that these two rivers, specifically, were rivers of consequence; that rivers, generally, were more than just natural features but of great historical and symbolic importance.
Continue reading CXXV – The Wisdom of Old Man RiverTag: Tradition
(m) – Blessed Nativity!
A Blessed Nativity of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, to you all! I am new to Catholicism and so there are many Christmas Traditions I hear about from my cradle-Catholic friends. Today, I would like to hear from you, dear readers: What are your Christmas Traditions? Spiritual or not!
My family typically makes Roast Beast Beef, has a nice dinner together. Cheese Fondue is essential either Christmas Eve or New Years. My Mom sewed needlepoint stockings for us as wee tots, so those go up; and we’ve got a lifetime of ornaments we hang on our modest plastic tree. We used to get a live one but once my siblings and I grew up, we switched to plastic since it was easier. I now add in the Christmas Vigil Mass so I can spend the day-of with my family. I have a wee niece and this I believe will be the first Christmas she is capable of understanding what is going on so I am looking forward to that. I am sure there will be board games a-plenty.
I hope you all have a restful and relaxing day. God bless you all!
AMDG
-Scoot
XCIII – Rules for Catholics After Things Go Bad
1.) How you relate to God
I. Keep a Holy Hour, and practice self mortification and penance. Pray and Fast. Offer yourself to God, and be open to whatever He may say in answer.
II. Be a priest or Beget them. The Church needs priests, and the best priests are formed in families. Discern carefully your Vocation, and that of your issue. If you are not going to be a priest, you still need to be well formed.
III. Remember the Four Last Things. Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. Remember that you will die. Go to confession in preparation of your judgement. Aim for Heaven, but know that Hell is real and people go there, probably more people than we would like to think.
2.) How you relate to your Parish
IV. Shrink the Church. The Church manifests itself locally through your Parish. Be concerned about how your Parish is run, get involved with keeping your Parish run well. Be visible, be vocal, be active in the service of your Church, as it exists around you.
V. Find Fertile Soil, and set down roots. Be discerning about your Parish, and vote with your feet and your dollars. Find a Parish that is worth investing your time and money in. Send your kids to the Parish school, and get to know your fellow parishoners.
VI. Hold to Tradition. Tradition is what has kept the Church alive for 2,000 years. Hold it. Keep it. Make it your own. Bring it into your home. Bring it into your Parish.
3.) How you relate to The Church
VII. Ask God to fix it. Accept that you have no control over what is going on in the Greater Church. It is going to take a Miracle.
VIII. Be prepared for God to ask you to fix it. It is going to take a Miracle. Ask God for that Miracle. Be prepared for Him to ask you to be that Miracle.
4.) How you relate to the World
IX. Don’t Apologize for your Faith. Practice joyfully, and in full confidence that it is True.
X. Have an answer for why you love your Faith. Practice it. Be ready to answer. You never know when someone will ask. You never know how powerful your witness can be.
XCII – Vichy Earth
France was conquered in six weeks, ending on 10 May 1940. They endured the war until D-Day under jointly German Occupation and a puppet government established in the town of Vichy. A resistance existed, and performed various symbolic acts of resistance designed to draw Nazi resources away from the fronts of battle. In this, they were effective, but in actually liberating their nation, there was nothing they could do. This was a resistance, not a restoration.
Vive la Résistance
The French Resistance was able to do a lot more once the Allies landed at Normandy. They provided aid, navigation, reconnaissance, supplies to allied troops. The Allies landed in sympathetic territory, and merely needed to drive out the oppressors, rather than occupy the people.
Imagine, for a moment, being in the French Resistance between 10 May 1940 and 6 June 1944. Surely, you wanted all freedom loving Frenchmen to join your cause. Perhaps some were apathetic and needed to be convinced, but overall if you could get through to them you could convince them to join the Resistance. Resistance meant doing certain things at certain times: For example, General deGaulle asked everyone to stay indoors as a form of passive resistance on a certain day. Other times, your activities were individual: Perhaps you could give bad directions to a Nazi courier. Perhaps you could slow a supply train as it passed through your town.
The authorities had a responsibility of communicating with the allies if they could, in order to ensure their efforts were unified. Imagine for example if the French Resistance tore up train tracks which the allies needed for their effort later on–that would be disruptive. So keeping consistent with the Allies was key. Every other citizen simply needed to use their radios to keep informed or receive instructions. In General, as a member of the Resistance, you had to keep fit, alert, and be ready to help at a moments notice.
The Church is like the French Resistance. We are beset on all sides, we have no power to restore order, only to organize ourselves and be prepared for when God returns with his great and terrible host at the end of all things. There is little we can do to help, but there is much we can do to prepare.
The Church is Burning
Like Notre Dame, the Church is burning in a great and terrible transformation. According to this (annoying but interesting) economist, the Boomer generation will begin their decline and the Millenials will ascend within the next 10 years. With them will go the money that is propping up the Church, Inc we know today. The population pyramid of the Church is a sharp “V” shape, and we’re likely to go from a billion Catholics to a sparse few. What does all this mean?
The Church doesn’t need to be prestigious, wealthy, or prominent. For you and me, give us a priest, an altar, and a valid consecration. Whether it’s in a Cathedral or a basement, it is a valid Mass, and it transcends time and space to join the Church Militant with the Church Triumphant, all the Angels and Saints, in the presence of our Eucharistic Lord. We don’t need to be popular or famous or wealthy or anything: We just need Mass. Maybe soon, that’s all we’ll have.
AMDG
LXV – Cultural Acidity
Kristor has an excellent article over at Orthosphere. I recommend reading it in full. He asks: Is Traditional culture even possible anymore? He expands on this at length. My response to him, as usual, was long enough to be its own post so I am reposting it here.
You posted this during my mental blue-hour where i can’t distinguish between exhaustion or mental acuity, so you’re getting a prompt reply, and i’ll issue my regrets in hindsight.
Three points which combined I think form some kind of answer to your question.
1- Tradition is (rather, can be) a moving reference point.
2- Bad Ideas thrive where good men fail to scorn them.
3- Culture is prone to cycles, but they don’t appear to be gradual but rather precipitous preference cascades.
1: Tradition, as you mean it above, I take to mean “The mores and methods that informed a lively and thriving past society, and which if adhered to today could enliven and revive our present society.” You may also mean a specific set of mores and methods. You might also mean, more simply, that the way we used to live is preferable to the way we live now.
So, the acid of cheap information eats at all tradition indiscriminately, true. I will push your metaphor to the limit: Acid can in some cases, dissolve rust off of a nail or dissolve the nail entirely. It’s yet to be seen whether cheap information will destroy all of society or just the parts that aren’t helping it.
You say:
the internet is systematically pushing all human cultures ever more toward the Cult and Culture of Death.
I argue that the culture of death has traditions of its own which are eaten away by cheap information of the productive kind. Your comment reminds me of this quote from Abraham Lincolns Lyceum address:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Indeed, the culture of death is cultural suicide. So long as some men remain dedicated to a culture of life, they will win in the long game. I turn to scripture: In Exodus, after Moses came down from the mountain and found his people worshiping the Golden Bull, he ground it up and made them eat it, then murdered about 3,000 of his own people. It took him 40 years in the desert and many hardships like that one to learn his lesson, but those who worshiped the culture of death, successfully found death. Those who worshiped hope and life successfully found hope and life. The desert need not be limited to so short a time as 40 years.
2: Cheap information has brought the primordial soup of ideas to a boil. Presently society scorns things like “tradition” and “self deprivation” and “theism” and “monogamy”. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the fruits of our society are death and despair. It is not the fruit of the Orthospherian Culture. Society is not scorning things, at present, which it ought to. You recognize this when you say:
Viz., the Democrats are looking pretty doggone stupid right now, to anyone with the foggiest notion of how things work in the real world. It’s comical. Laughter is the best medicine for that disease
We ought to, and do, in our circle, scorn the bad ideas which cheap information allows to multiply. Scorn works like an inoculation: We become aware of, and thus immune to, the acid eating away at society and thus remove ourselves from the equation. Vaccine protection works by group-protection. We may be an isolated cluster protected in a vast unvaccinated population, but that population does not have our longevity and is not aided by our isolated inoculation.
Thus cheap information enables us to identify and dutifully scorn those ideas which deserve it, and while we ourselves may receive scorn, our ideas are not leading us inexorably to destruction.
3: I openly acknowledge it is my generation, we millennial, which have trademarked nihilism and made it a defining trait. What nostalgia will we have? What “traditions” will they lay claim to? An extreme case, perhaps, but consider the Tinder phenomenon: “Ahh, yes, I had so many partners back in the day.” Will they consider that healthy and socially profitable? What will their children think of such stories?
I believe in the cyclical nature of society. I believe that the children of hedonists become traditionalists. I believe, perhaps vainly, that the children whose parents are mutilating them due to a fad induced by social indifference to gender dysmorphia, will have a fascinating story to tell when they are 18, 25, 40, years old. I do not believe, perhaps naively, that it will be favorable to their parents decisions. I further believe that we are already seeing signs of this in the generation following mine, Gen Z.
Therefore: Eventually, a disease hits the population which only the inoculated are prepared for, and it sweeps through with violent force. A preference Cascade, which you’ve discussed before. And then, we will be on the side of the majority, heaping scorn on the ideas which are deleterious to society. And, with the benefit of hindsight and cheap information, perhaps we will do so in a way that has longevity and strengthen that society, whatever it looks like.
and so! To specifically answer your questions:
Is it possible, under such conditions, for *any tradition whatsoever* to perdure?
Yes, indeed I believe it is inevitable that tradition, including and especially tradition informed by Catholic morals and teachings, can perdure.
How would a society that had reacted radically against the perverse and pervasive subscendence of global “culture” need to be organized in order to immunize itself from the sly soft constant subtle alluring attacks of the Cult and Culture of Death?
I don’t think any change in structure needs to happen. I think cheap information cuts both ways, and when the majority of society scorns the “Turkish Delight” found on the internet, consumption will decrease. The danger will always be there: The forbidden fruit, after all, was from the tree of knowledge. Cheap Information being the acid of society is simply an acknowledgement of original sin. It takes self mortification and diligence to work against it, to say nothing of the heavy doses of Gods grace and mercy we require.
AMDG
LV – The Power of Liturgy
What Is Liturgy?
Contemporaneous usage gives the definition of Liturgy as “The formulas for conduct of divine service”. The word itself is derived from French liturgie (which shared its modern meaning) by way of Latin liturgia, meaning public ministration. This is one of the rare cases where the Latin word is derived from Greek leitourgos, meaning the person performing a public ceremony. The roots being leitos, meaning public, and -ergos, ‘that works’, from ergon meaning work. Leitourgos was a person performing a public work and the word came to mean the work itself, and was taken into Christianity when the works of consecrating the Eucharist were standardized and the Mass was codified. This sacred setting gave it a stricter definition, coming to mean the way in which the public works were performed.
In short: From ‘Person performing a public work’, to ‘A public work’, to ‘Way a public work is performed’. The word is used in sacred contexts most often, but carries no sacred meaning unto itself, only a sense of formality. It is thus apropos to other formal public ceremonies.
The Sense of Importance
Formal public ceremonies lend those ceremonies a sense of importance. Indeed, the more regular the ceremony, the more important it is. It is Liturgy that lends these ceremonies a sense of importance. The Inauguration of a President. Graduation from College. The changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Every single one of these follows a prescribed formula, so everyone who experiences it does so in more-or-less the same way. Liturgy is the common element to all of them. Consider a proof by counterexample: When a Liturgy is abandoned, the ceremony loses it’s importance and reverence.
Consider a wedding. Traditionally, a wedding is composed of two parts: Marriage and reception. Marriage is a liturgy, indeed it is explicitly a Sacrament performed around a Mass. The reception following the Marriage is a party which is not ceremonial in any way. As religion is removed from the Marriage, it becomes more and more, well, irrelevant. People are pretending to officiate marriages in barns, on beaches; Friends and relatives are pretending to be officiants. The liturgy, which gave Marriage a sense of reverence, was altered or removed, and thereby thrown into irrelevancy. Because Marriage is pretended to be a civil ceremony rather than a spiritual one (people must rationalize why exactly there needs to be a ceremony in the first place), the availability of the civil contract is widened.
Therefore, Liturgy serves two roles: In the present, it creates a sense of reverence which defines the occasion as an important one. Secondly, it connects the ceremony to all previous ceremonies by preserving the importance which was historically ascribed to any given occasion.
The Gravity of the Mass
This brings us to the modern context of Liturgy, namely, the Mass. It is becoming something of a cliche, but it gets to the heart of the latin Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi. The Mass is the public ceremony of offering the Sacrifice of the Eucharist in persona Christi. Mass is important for a number of reasons, not least of all because how it is done illustrates all three of the Lex components. Prayer, Belief, and Life, all roll into one beautiful Liturgy.
Changing the Mass has allowed irreverence to seep into the liturgy. Reverential silence is not a sure thing at any Mass or any Church. Contemporary music mixes with traditional hymns. I don’t here propose to offer an opinion on which liturgy is best or most accurate, but ambiguity means that there are differences and the people see and react accordingly. The converse is also true: If you begin treating Mass with greater reverence, your spiritual life will necessarily change (dare I say, improve!). Liturgy is a way our actions demonstrate the difference between the mundane and the Holy.
AMDG
L – Contra Desperatio
I’ve seen a couple blog posts this week that have added sand to the bags of despair I already carry around my shoulders. I reject the despair that pervades the Church, and society, these days.
The despair I have seen looks kind of like this:
- Society does not value God
- Society does not value tradition
- The Church does not value it’s own tradition
- A society that values neither God nor Tradition cannot save the Church.
These thoughts do nothing to help the Church and I did not realize how deeply they weighed on me until I thought about writing this post.
First Objection: Regarding Despair, Generally
Despair is the opposite of Hope, which is a theological virtue. Despair is thus a very human feeling when we lose sight or focus of God. There is a quote that gets thrown around like a cliche these days: Upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it[1]. For a Church which appears to be under siege from within and without, this is little consolation. They already appear to be here. This idea was given to me by our local Priest via a friend: This is not a defensive statement. The Church is not under siege by hell, hell is under siege by the Church. The earth is enemy occupied territory, and the Church is a stronghold in it’s midst. In the end of days, the gates of hell will not prevail to keep the Church out! The victory is already won! The Church is eternal! We are chastised periodically, sure. But Fulton Sheen himself acknowledged[2] that the Church has died and been reborn in 500 year intervals since it’s inception. The Church will not fail. Trust in God!
Hope, however, does play a pivotal role when considering despair. What if we Hope for too much? What if our expectations are for Heaven on Earth? We will quickly find that we become disappointed. We must temper our expectations: The Church will never be victorious on Earth, until Christ comes to take his seat at the end of days. Until then, we are waging a perpetual war for the souls of our fellow man, and even for ourselves. Yes, we want our Priests to be pillars of society, guided by the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Love of St. Francis of Assisi. Yes, we want our fellow man to be packing the pews Every Sunday, every Day, to commune with God. Yes, we want to know the words to speak to our fellow man and to show them the strength that Love and Fear of God brings us. The perfection of these dreams will not come to pass in this life. We must strive, always strive, to attain these dreams, but we cannot expect to realize them. We can do so much more on so many fronts, but we cannot ever be satisfied that our work has been done. It feels like a trial of Sisyphus, and in a way it is: We are a fallen people and it takes the dedicated effort of every man woman and child to maintain the status quo, to say nothing of any advance. When Moses came down from Mt. Sinai, the Israelites were not obediently awaiting him; they had begun worshiping a Golden Bull. When Christ was carrying his cross, he too fell three times. We are fallen, but the Hope lies in the fact that God has given us the means to get back up again.
Second Objection: Regarding Society and God
Society doesn’t value God, plain and simple. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to value God. That actually means it’s more important than ever for us to not just value him in our hearts, but to live a bold witness to our convictions. Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi: As we worship, so we believe, so we live. In other words: We must lead by example. Treat God with reverence, visit Him often, remain in communion with Him via the sacraments. Invite God into your home, your workplace, and your life. These are things we as individuals can accomplish. What effect will this have on society?
It might seem trivial now, but our actions are the clearest opportunity for conversions. Our strange behaviors signal to others that we live by a set of values they do not understand. They will ask questions. They will try to understand why you believe what you believe. They will compare your way of life to theirs. Some will use it as an excuse to reject you. Others will try to resolve the cognitive dissonance it creates in their hearts and minds, and no small number will ultimately be converted by it; if not now then later on. Society does not value God, but you can show society what it looks like if they do; you can show them the strength and vigor it brings your life. Society is not changed all at once. Society is changed by individuals, one at a time. We must begin with ourselves!
Third Objection: Regarding Society and Tradition
The best tools we have at our disposal for our Praying, Believing, and Living, is the traditions of the Church. These are not distinct, they are not written in some extra document like a constitution enshrining traditions. Traditions are the Church. Look to the Saints! We can pray just as they did, we can believe just as they did, we can live just as they did. Nothing about their lives is off limits to us. Mass is uniting our present state with the whole Church, across infinity. The Church Militant (present day Catholics) unites itself with the Church Penitent (Those in their purifying time in Purgatory), as well as the Church Triumphant (Those living in the beatific vision). It is the tradition that makes it the same for all three components.
Society has been taught that they can define their own traditions. These take an over-large portion of their time, and supplants and replaces their proper focus of God. Tradition keeps society rooted in the things that keep it alive, vibrant, and healthy; it is the fullness of these things only through the Church. Through our individual effort, we must bring society back to the Church. We must NOT suppose that the Church must be brought to society. The Church does not need reform, it is society. The traditions are fine and keeping the Church healthy; the people must embrace them fully.
Fourth Objection: Regarding the Woes of the Church
The Church may seem to be in a sorry state. What can be done? Can you or I elect a new Pope? Can you or I change who gets to be priests? We are given challenges individually and collectively in order to purify us and help us grow. The Church may be in such a time right now. To focus on the woes facing the Church too much is to cultivate despair. Trust God and know that He is with us. The Priests will receive their reward, if they have done evil. The traditions that worked are not fully forgotten, and will not go away forever. Politics are temporary. Suffering is temporary. God will use it to purify us and show us what is important.
In Conclusion
There is no better time to be a Catholic. That is why I crossed the Tiber: there is a beautiful core of Truth that the Church gets to keep and it is not found anywhere else in the world. When the Church struggles, that is when we must fall into battle lines and storm the breach. If the Church is in a period of desolation, we must not change things, but fight to keep everything the same. I reject despair because it weighs me down, and makes it harder for me to live my faith.
St. Athanasius, he who stood against the world, pray for us, that we may share your strength and, through our Lord God, fill our hearts with conviction that our Faith is Truth, and that our Church will never die.
[1] Matthew 16:18
[2]Fulton Sheen, The Fourth Great Crisis of the Church
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 