Don’t worry, this is not going to be a xenophobic rant. I had supper with a German friend at the weekend, who has lived in France for many years, and has just spent a few weeks in London improving her English.
We got onto the difference between the French and the English, and it was interesting having her fairly objective viewpoint as someone who has lived in both countries as an outsider.
She said that the French, in the way they think and argue, are more abstract. They start with first principles and work outwards to the nitty-gritty of reality. The English are more concrete, more empirical. They start with things, stuff, examples, case-studies, and only then try to draw some more general conclusions from the specific instances.
She also put the same point in another way: that the French work by deduction, and the English by induction.
It struck me that this, if it’s true, is exemplified by our measuring systems, metric and imperial. A metre length is just an idea. It’s not based on anything ordinary or everyday or natural. Yes, there is a bar of platinum-iridium in a vault in Paris that used to be the standard measure of a metre, for reference (although this system has been surpassed now). But the bar, the metre, was created by the French mind – a mind imposing order on the world.
The imperial system – take the foot as an example – is based on (wait for it…) the foot! The whole system of measurement is based on the length of a man’s foot (a man’s and not a woman’s…). You see the world, and measure it, and understand it, in terms of something concrete; you see and understand one aspect of reality in the perspective of another aspect of reality. In the imperial system, man is – literally – the measure of all things; not a metal bar in Paris.
It sounds like I am defending the English way. Not really. There are advantages to each way; and the abstraction certainly appeals to me. And anyway, the French won! The metre rules the world. I’m just noticing the philosophical differences in world-view that are embodied in something as benign as a unit of measure; and how that connects with a German’s perception of English-French differences.
That’s it. You don’t need to read the post – it’s all in the title.
What a great phrase! We all know those management and self-help rules: that getting anything done requires you to make priorities, that you need to make decisions about what you are not going to do as much as about what you are going to do, that often you need the courage to say no, etc.
I got the phrase from Tom Peters, The Little Big Things, who got it from someone else.
In Peters’ words at the end of this section:
So, top of your “to-do” list for today is immediately beginning work on your “to-don’t” list!
And he quotes John Sawhill, who took over the strategic thinking for a huge environmental charity called Nature Conservancy, and asked the question:
What areas should the Conservancy focus on, and more important – what activities should we STOP? [Peters' italics]
The homily at Mass is usually about Holy Scripture – and rightly so. There are lots of passages in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM) where the natural link between Scripture and liturgical preaching is made explicit. (See a pdf of the English and Welsh version here; and a webpage with the US version here.)
St Paul preaching in Corinth
Here is one example:
Although in the readings from Sacred Scripture God’s word is addressed to all people of every era and is understandable to them, nevertheless, a fuller understanding and a greater effectiveness of the word is fostered by a living commentary on the word, that is, the homily, as part of the liturgical action. [#29]
And another here:
For in the readings, as explained by the homily, God speaks to his people, opening up to them the mystery of redemption and salvation, and offering them spiritual nourishment; and Christ himself is present in the midst of the faithful through his word. [#55]
But it’s worth remembering that in the main GIRM section about the nature of the homily (#65-66), it is explicitly stated that the homily does not always have to be about the Scripture readings. The ‘terms of reference’ are wider:
[The homily] should be an exposition of some aspect of the readings from Sacred Scripture or of another text from the Ordinary or from the Proper of the Mass of the day and should take into account both the mystery being celebrated and the particular needs of the listeners.
So there is an invitation here, if it is appropriate, to preach about other texts from the Mass, whether they are the prayers from the Ordinary of the Mass, or Proper prayers for a particular Sunday, feast-day, votive Mass, etc. And that will obviously include, insofar as they come up in the Proper prayers, the feasts and saints themselves that are being celebrated that day.
I mention this in passing just because I happened to preach about the Collect (the opening prayer) last week, for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, at the Sunday morning Masses in the parish I was visiting. It’s the first time I’d ever done this explicitly – just to spend the whole hour of the homily (joke! 10 minutes…) examining and opening up the theological riches of the Collect. It’s much easier and much more rewarding with the new translation.
I also mention it because now and then you meet a fervent Catholic who becomes incensed if someone has not preached about the Scripture readings or mentioned them in the homily. I’m not, as a rule, advising anyone to ignore Scripture – of course not. But I’m just pointing out that there may be occasions when the homily takes a different focus, and looks at the prayers of the Mass; and that this is perfectly in line with what the Church is asking of her preachers.
Here, by the way, is the beautiful Collect that I was so keen to speak about. First the Latin:
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus,
qui caelestia simul et terrena moderaris,
supplicationibus populi tui clementer exaudi,
et pacem tuam nostris concede temporibus.
And then the various translation possibilities (from Fr Z at WDTPRS).
LITERAL RENDERING: Almighty eternal God,
who at the same time does govern things heavenly and earthly,
mercifully hearken to the supplications of Your people,
and grant Your peace in our temporal affairs.
OBSOLETE ICEL (1973): Father of heaven and earth,
hear our prayers, and show us the way
to peace in the world.
NEW CORRECTED ICEL (2011): Almighty ever-living God,
who govern all things,
both in heaven and on earth,
mercifully hear the pleading of your people
and bestow your peace on our times.
to defer action; to put off what should be done immediately [Chambers]
It’s exam time in Allen Hall, so I’m guessing (without judging our seminarians at all!) that the demon of ’procrastination’ is in the air.
Rebecca Ratcliffe writes about the daily struggle as a student to actually get down to things, especially with the internet staring you in the face. Some of the tips are useful for the rest of us non-students as well.
The spectre of the second term, with its attendant horrors of essay deadlines and January exams, is looming. But as we reflect on the negligible amount of work we completed over the Christmas break, let’s soberly consider our new year’s resolutions.
Pledges not to run up astronomical library fines or drink any more cans of Relentless have probably been sworn by students up and down the country. But this year’s promises will be dominated by the mother of all academic resolutions – to stop procrastinating.
The irresistible desire to put off until tomorrow what should be done today afflicts ooh, I don’t know, 99% of students? What I do know is that it’s by no means a new phenomenon – the term “procrastination” was first used in the 1500s. But it’s reached new heights among those battling the distractions of Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging.
If procrastination is the thief of time, the internet is its most insidious accomplice, delaying work one small click at a time.
But fear not, dawdling scholars, there is help out there. Firefox extensions are an easy way to curb stray clicking: LeechBlock can block distracting websites from loading during specified time periods – you could set it to make Facebook available only between 6 and 7pm. And the desktop program RescueTime can provide a breakdown of how you have spent your time online.
Here are some tips she has plucked from the seasonal crop of self-help books:
• Remind yourself of past successes.
You will procrastinate less if you boost your belief in the relevance of your work and your ability to succeed, according to Dr Piers Steel’s book The Procrastination Equation.
• Shut out the world with some noise reduction headphones.
Perfect for anyone distracted by noise, say Pamela Dodd and Doug Sundheim’s in The 25 Best Time Management Tools and Techniques. And if your flatmates are still refusing to turn the heating on, they can double up as ear warmers.
• Don’t miss out on a good night’s sleep.
A clear head is the key to a better memory and academic success, says Lynn Rowe in How to Beat Procrastination – and you’ll save money by cutting down on cans of the aforementioned Relentless.
• Move.
If you feel yourself getting distracted, do something physical like standing up and stepping away from your computer screen, Michael Heppel advises in How to Save an Hour Every Day.
Here is some information from the Westminster Diocese website about an event for women discerning a call to consecrated life.
On 4 February 2012 women aged 20-40 are invited to a special day of discernment.
In 1997 Pope John Paul II instituted a ‘World Day of Prayer for Consecrated Life’ on February 2nd, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord. Each year since then the Church has thanked God for the gift of the different forms of consecrated life, and prayed that our world will continue to be enriched by the lives and witness of consecrated men and women.
In 2012, Westminster Diocese will mark this ‘World Day of Prayer’ in a new way. On Saturday February 4th, there will be a day for women interested in finding out more about consecrated life; a ‘Come and See’ experience from a ‘neutral’ perspective, held in the Carmelite Priory in Kensington Church Street. The idea is that it will enable women to make a first step into exploring what consecrated life is, with the opportunity to ask questions and interact with religious and with others who are discerning their vocation.
A variety of women religious (representing both active and enclosed congregations) will speak about consecrated life and how to discern if God is calling a person to this way of life. There will also be time set aside for prayer, with both Mass and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
If you, or anyone you know might be interested in attending the day please contact Fr Richard Nesbitt for more details at richardnesbitt@rcdow.org.uk
For any young adults living within striking distance of London, Soul Food is starting another Life in the Spirit Seminar this week – details copied below. You can see the website here. They are a great group, and I can highly recommend them.
The Life in the Spirit Seminar is a series of talks, worship, scripture, sharing and testimonies that helps us to encounter God’s immense love for us. It opens us up to the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can deepen our personal relationship with Christ and receive the gift of freedom and happiness that he wants for each one of us.
What is the structure of the Life in the Spirit Seminar?
The Life in the Spirit Seminar is made up of 9 sessions and will run mostly on Thursdays from 7 to 9pm at St Charles Borromeo Church, Ogle Street, W1W 6HS:
19th Jan: Session 1 – Welcome and Witness
26th Jan: Session 2 – The Father’s Love
2nd Feb: Session 3 – Search and Rescue
9th Feb: Session 4 – Salvation through Jesus
Fri 10th – Sun 12th Feb: Weekend Retreat at the Wycliffe Centre in Buckinghamshire, covering sessions 5 to 7.
Session 5: New Heart, New Spirit
Session 6: Come Holy Spirit
Session 7: Learn to walk, Learn to run
16th Feb: Session 8 – Life in the Spirit: Prayer
23rd Feb Session 9 – Life in the Spirit: Sacraments & The Church
The format for most sessions will be praise and worship, followed by teaching, personal testimonies and small group sharing. The Life in the Spirit Seminar is a journey of discovery undertaken together as a community so, to get the most out of the series, it is key that you are able to attend all the sessions as well as the retreat weekend.
Please take this opportunity to invite other people who you feel will benefit from attending the Life in the Spirit Seminar.
Weekend Retreat.
The weekend retreat takes place from the evening of Friday 10th February until the afternoon of Sunday 12th February at the Wycliffe Centre in Buckinghamshire.
Although the Life in the Spirit Seminar is free, there is a charge of £135 for the weekend retreat [snip...]
What if I cannot attend the weekend retreat?
You will get the most from the Life in the Spirit Seminar by coming on the weekend retreat but if you cannot come, you are still more than welcome to register and attend the Thursday evening sessions. We will make specific arrangements for people in this situation.
Can I come just for the weekend retreat?
No. The retreat is designed to consolidate and build on the teaching from the Thursday evenings, the scripture prayer programme and the small group sharing over the weeks preceding it.
Still not convinced?
Then read this article on the internet about a previous Life in the Spirit Seminar!
By nationality, I am 100% British – I was born in London and have a British passport. By blood-grandparents-heritage-ethnicity (I’m not sure about the best term), I am half-Chinese, quarter-English, and quarter-Scottish; two grandparents born in Toisan in southern China, one in the north of England, another in Scotland.
As a child at primary school, there were a few incidents that would rightly be called racist: teasing and name-calling because of my unusual surname; but I didn’t have a sense that I was being teased or provoked any more than the other kids. Everyone seemed to have a name or a hairstyle or a twitch or a football team that elicited some kind of faux-resentment when the pack mentality demanded it. Low-level playground stuff that didn’t leave too many emotional scars.
I don’t think I’m glossing over some unacknowledged but deep experiences of racism. The fact is, I look white, and not half-Chinese like some of my mixed-race cousins do. I haven’t really experienced what it is to be Chinese in Britain, as my father’s generation did. Now and then someone will give me quizzical look and ask if I’m ‘Greek or something’; but only Chinese people ever spot that I am actually half-Chinese.
In the wake of recent discussions about racism in this country, Elizabeth Chan writes about her experiences as a British Chinese woman.
Chinese Britons are often referred to as a “silent” or “hidden” minority. For although we are the fourth-largest minority ethnic group in the UK, we are virtually invisible in public life, principally the arts, media and politics.
On the surface, the Chinese seem relatively content and well-to-do, with British Chinese pupils regularly outperforming their classmates and Chinese men more likely than any other ethnic group to be in a professional job. Consequently, we are often overlooked in talks on racism and social exclusion.
But academic and economic successes do not negate feelings of marginalisation. A 2009 study by The Monitoring Group and Hull University suggested that British Chinese are particularly prone to racial violence and harassment, but that the true extent to their victimisation was often overlooked because victims were unwilling to report it.
Growing up in the north of England in the 80s, I had few role models. Popular culture was dominated by white faces and occasionally black and south Asian, but never east Asian. I’m not sure that much has changed since.
Shouts of “Jackie Chan!” and kung-fu noises from random strangers continue to greet me in the street, perhaps followed by a “konichiwa!” Just a few days ago, a friend was having a post-hangover drink in a trendy east London pub, only to be accused by the manager of being a DVD pedlar hassling his clients.
Going to drama school in London was a revelation; I was told I couldn’t perform in a scene from a play because it had been written for white people. The scene was two girls sitting on a park bench talking about boys, and the year was 2006. Worse was when it came from my contemporaries; one (white, liberal, highly educated) helpfully suggested I did a monologue from The Good Soul of Szechuan instead, and another rushed up after one performance to tell me how delighted her parents had been that I’d spoken perfect English (I’m from Bradford).
In hindsight it was good preparation for a profession where, on my first job, the Bafta-winning director chuckled to everyone on set that I’d trained in kung fu, and where any character who speaks in some kind of dodgy east Asian accent is considered hilarious.
I have friends who are shocked that such things actually happen. They are usually most surprised at the fact that it’s happened to me. Why? I suspect mainly because, like them, I am part of the educated middle class, and things like that don’t happen to people like us.
Well, they do, and quite often. And frankly, it isn’t surprising that prejudices are rife in a country whose media perpetuates the very images that evoke stereotypes and cultural misunderstandings: Chinese characters rarely appear on our television screens, but when they do, you can bet they’ll be DVD sellers, illegal immigrants, spies or, in the case of last year’s Sherlock, weird acrobatic ninja types. Many Chinese viewers were outraged at the portrayal of east Asians in this show, but typically, few complained.
Sadly, the British Chinese are reticent about speaking up for themselves, and simply do not have the numbers to make the same noise the black and south Asian communities do, whose vociferous and galvanising voices have been making waves against racism for decades. Racism is one of those horrendous, soul- and confidence-crushing things that, when faced with, you’d much rather forget or pretend didn’t exist. So we tend to brush it off, pretend it never happened, or laugh along with the rest rather than come across as bad sports. We Chinese have become dab hands at this, living up to the stereotype of the smiling but silent Chinaman.
If we are to make progress in understanding the true extent of racism in this country, we all need to be a lot braver in confronting truths about how we live. It’s about swallowing our pride and being less afraid of telling the world how racism affects us and really thinking about the people across Britain who have come to accept racism as a part of life. It’s about standing up in classrooms, television studios, offices, pubs and public transport, not just for ourselves, but for friends and strangers, too.
Denial gets us nowhere. But awareness, thoughtfulness and courage could make millions of lives so much better.
I don’t know enough Chinese outside my own family well enough to judge whether this description of British Chinese reticence is accurate or not. But it’s certainly good to broaden the discussion about racism to include the experience of British Chinese, especially if – as Chan writes above – British Chinese are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the UK.
I keep hearing whispers about the possibility of World Youth Day 2015 taking place in Krakow. But what has happened to all the post-Madrid noise about WYD coming to London? I think we need to stir it up a bit more. Or is it dead in the water already?
So, after months of passivity on Facebook, I’m setting up my first ‘page’ and my first ‘event’ – I’m not sure which is the best way to approach this, but let’s see how each develops.
As you can see, I went for 2016 instead, which gives us another year – a three year gap after Rio.
Here is the pitch:
We believe that the next World Youth Day, after Rio 2013, should take place in Britain in 2016, with the main events and closing Mass in London. And we’ll be there! There will never be a better time: post-Papal Visit, post-Olympics, the faith and energy of young Catholics here, the sense of renewal and hope within the Catholic Church in this country, the pull of the English language, and the attraction of Britain as a destination for visitors. WYD has already been to Poland, France, Italy, German and Spain – it’s time to come to Britain!
We could put on the best WYD there has ever been. It would revitalise the Church and be an incredible witness to the people of this country. It would be a truly national event, bringing together every Catholic diocese, parish, group and movement. It wouldn’t distract from other important pastoral priorities – instead it would provide a focus and stimulus for them. The period of planning and preparation would galvanise the Church at national and local levels. The ‘Days in the Dioceses’, in the week before WYD itself, would be a celebration of faith throughout the regions, with hundreds of thousands of international young pilgrims welcomed into parishes and families across Britain. And there could be an important ecumenical dimension too, with Catholics and other Christian communities cooperating in hospitality, witness and celebration.
London would be the focus for the main WYD events and closing Mass. Why? Not because of some unthinking ‘London-centric’ prejudice in favour of the capital, but simply because of the practical advantages. London has the venues, the infrastructure, the transport, the public spaces – the sheer size; and it will have the experience of dealing with the Olympics. In the three dioceses that converge there (Westminster, Southwark and Brentwood), it has the greatest number of Catholic parishes and movements, the richest concentration of Catholic life, and an incomparable diversity of people and communities. And it has a unique pull in the international imagination – witness the time of the Royal Wedding. It would be ‘London uniting the country and opening out to the world’, rather than ‘London excluding the regions’.
Yes, there would be significant costs. But unlike the recent Papal visit, WYD would pay for itself. If just half a million pilgrims register (a conservative estimate), and the fee is just £50, that’s £25m to start with, even before the serious fundraising has begun. And despite the misgivings of some, no-one seriously doubts that this kind of event brings massive economic benefits to the host country. The Papal visit, for example, brought an £8.5m boost to Glasgow alone; and a £12.5m boost to Birmingham. According to an independent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, WYD Madrid brought 354m Euros to Spain [see links below]. This is one reason why the British Government, and Boris Johnson (as Mayor of London), will surely be interested in it. But there would be deeper reasons are well: the opportunity of hosting what is perhaps the largest youth event in the world, of opening our doors to people from every corner of the earth, and of putting young people at the centre of the national agenda.
At the moment, this is an off-the-cuff, un-thought-out, testing-the-water kind of proposition. It began in the parks and cafes of Madrid at WYD 2011, when thousands of young people from the UK began to think ‘We could do this!’ And this Facebook event itself started as a response to the enthusiasm shown on the Krakow WYD Facebook event page, and the feeling that we in Britain should be just as enthusiastic as the Poles. If we overtake the Krakow WYD event numbers (currently at 3,242 on 15 Jan), then it’s probably time to start thinking and praying about this more seriously.
So if you want to see it move forward, INVITE YOUR FRIENDS – TODAY!! And we’ll see where we are in a couple of weeks. The question is: Do we care as much as the Poles?
What do you think? Post your own comments, suggestions, criticisms, links, etc. in the box below.
Here is an argument against hosting WYD in the UK in the near future, from CatholicYouthwork.Com, who argues against it on both pragmatic and theological/pastoral grounds. I can understand many of these objections – but the gut still says Yes.
Here is a ’26 Years of World Youth Days’ video:
Here is my all-time favourite WYD song, Guy Sebastian’s Receive the Power, from Sydney 2008:
Sir Paul Coleridge spoke last week about his newly established Marriage Foundation, which seeks to halt the ‘appalling and costly impact of family breakdown’.
A marriage stone lintel, which marks the initials of the newly married couple, and the date of the wedding. A nice connection with the previous post about marking lintels for the Epiphany
He certainly knows how to frame a provocative soundbite:
Almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family
Sir Paul wishes to encourage people not to have children unless their relationship is stable, and if it is stable, to encourage them to get married.
“Marriage, as the best structure in which to raise children, needs to be affirmed, strengthened and supported. Recycle your rubbish by all means, but be very slow to recycle your partner,” he told The Times.
“We have to rid ourselves of this dream that we are going to find the partner who is perfect in every way: emotionally, physically, intellectually – it’s just a nonsense.
“People want to change horses mid-stream – it’s the disease of the modern age. Soon you find the new partner is as flawed as the last. It is like a hydra: you cut off one head and get rid of a boring partner but inherit 26 new problems, your new partner’s children, family and so on.”
Family breakdown is the “scourge of society”, he added. “It affects everyone, from the Royal Family downwards. In about 1950 you weren’t allowed in the royal enclosure at Ascot [if divorced]. That would now exclude half the Royal Family.”
“It is a myth that children, even older ones, don’t care. They care greatly and a break-up shocks the whole foundation of the family, it never recovers.”
“My message is mend it — don’t end it. Over 40 years of working in the family justice system, I have seen the fall-out of these broken relationships. There are an estimated 3.8 million children currently caught up in the family justice system. I personally think that’s a complete scandal.”
Leaving aside the practical question of exactly which laws and tax-incentives might support the institution of marriage, it’s remarkable that Nick Clegg can characterise marriage as simply a private commitment without any public/social implications.
In a Lib Dem disagreement with the Conservatives about tax breaks for marriage couples he said there was a limit on what the state “should seek to do in organising people’s private relationships” [my italics].
Getting married is probably the best thing that ever happened to me. But just as a liberal I think there are limits to how the state and government should try to micromanage or incentivise people’s own behaviour in their private lives [my italics].
This contrasts with David Cameron at the Conservative Party Conference last October, where at least he recognised the importance of marriage for children, and by implication for society in general – even though there are other equally important questions about how he defines marriage.
Marriage is not just a piece of paper. It pulls couples together through the ebb and flow of life.
It gives children stability. And it says powerful things about what we should value. So yes, we will recognise marriage in the tax system.
Tim Ross reports on some of the differences within the coalition.
[In a speech to the Demos think-tank] Mr Clegg will say: “We should not take a particular version of the family institution, such as the 1950s model of suit-wearing, bread-winning dad and aproned, home-making mother – and try and preserve it in aspic.
“That’s why open society liberals and big society conservatives will take a different view on a tax break for marriage.”
Mr Clegg will argue that liberal values are more important than ever as the world faces deep economic uncertainty and risks turning inwards.
“Conservatives, by definition, tend to defend the status quo, embracing change reluctantly and often after the event,” he will say. Senior Conservatives retaliated Mr Clegg yesterday. The employment minister, Chris Grayling, told Sky News: “We are two parties in the coalition. Of course there are things on which we have different views.
“We as Conservatives believe strongly in supporting marriage and the family. The Liberal Democrats take a different view. We accept that family is not always the same thing as it has been in the past. “But we have always argued that we should support the family, that we should support marriage in the tax system.
We think we need to strengthen the institution of marriage in our society.” He insisted that the “differences of emphasis” did not mean the Liberal Democrats were not “valued partners” in government.
Mr Grayling’s stance was supported by Gavin Poole, executive director of the Centre for Social Justice, a think-tank founded by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith.
Mr Poole said Mr Clegg’s argument “flies in the face of all the evidence” demonstrating how important marriage is to well-being of children.
Catholic devotions are fantastic! Last night, after Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and Night Prayer, we processed to the lobby by the front door of the seminary to bless the Epiphany Chalk. Then the Rector took the Holy Chalk, stood on the Holy Step-Ladder, and wrote on the Holy Lintel of the Holy Front Door.
Here is a door from Bamberg marked in the year 2007
OK, I’m getting carried away with the step-ladder, and I know how easily this could all sound a bit mad, or superstitious. But when you realise that it is about faith – that blessings and chalk and inscriptions above doorways can be an outward expression of faith in Christ, and in his power to work in this world and to work through the intercession of his saints – then it makes eminent sense.
Chalk, in itself, doesn’t have any power; but blessed chalk, through our faith in Christ, and in the blessing he gives through his ministers, can be a means for our hearts to be more open to him and our homes to be kept under his protection.
Here is the explanation we were given last night:
The Solemnity of the Lord’s Epiphany is associated with many traditions of popular piety. One such is the blessing of homes, through the intercession of the three wise men, using blessed chalk.
An inscription is made above the front door to entrust the home to God’s protection for the new year and ensure all who enter or leave may enjoy God’s blessing. It looks like this:
20 + C + M + B + 12
The number designates the new year, while the ‘CMB’ stands for the traditional names of the wise men – Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar – and also the prayer Christus mansionem benedicat which means ‘May Christ bless this dwelling’.
This blessing is common especially in Central Europe and is often accompanied by processions of children and their parents.
[Cf. Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, 118]
Often broken pieces of chalk are blessed at the end of the Epiphany Mass, using the traditional formula found in the Rituale:
O Lord God, bless this chalk that it may be used for the salvation of the human race.
Through the invocation of Thy most Holy Name, grant that whoever shall take of this chalk and write with it upon the doors of his house the names of Thy saints, Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, may through their merits and intercession receive health of body and protection of soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
The problem, when I got to my own room and made the inscription, was that the door-frame and the walls are all white. Oh well, it’s there for the angels to see.
The Guardian asked various artists, playwrights, musicians, dancers, etc. to give their top tips for ‘unleashing your inner genius’. Take a look here. It’s a great way to decide on some new year resolutions if you wish you could be more creative and adventurous over the coming year, even if the only ‘canvas’ you have to paint on is the day ahead of you
Just start scribbling. The first draft is never your last draft. Nothing you write is by accident.
Don’t be scared of failure.
The best advice I’ve ever had came about 20 years ago from Mano McLaughlin, one of Britain’s best songwriters. “The song is all,” he said, “Don’t worry about what the rest of the music sounds like: you have a responsibility to the song.” I found that really inspiring: it reminded me not to worry about whether a song sounds cool, or fits with everything we’ve done before – but just to let the song be what it is.
Forget the idea that inspiration will come to you like a flash of lightning. It’s much more about hard graft.
Find a quiet studio to work in. Shostakovich could not have composed with the telly on.
Try to find a studio with more than one window. I work best when I have windows in two walls, for some reason; maybe it is because there is more light. At the moment, I’m working in a room with no windows. It’s not going well at all.
If you get overexcited by an idea, take a break and come back to it later. It is all about developing a cold eye with which to look over your own work.
The best ideas are tested by their peaks and troughs. One truly great image or scene astride a broken mess is more intriguing than a hundred well-made cliches.
Once you have an idea, scrutinise the precedent. If no one has explored it before in any form then you’re 99% likely to be making a mistake. But that 1% risk is why we do it.
Make sure you are asking a question that is addressed both to the world around you and the world within you. It’s the only way to keep going when the doubt sets in.
An idea is just a map. The ultimate landscape is only discovered when it’s under foot, so don’t get too bogged down in its validity.
I have a magpie attitude to inspiration: I seek it from all sorts of sources; anything that allows me to think about how culture comes together. I’m always on the lookout – I observe people in the street; I watch films, I read, I think about the conversations that I have. I consider the gestures people use, or the colours they’re wearing. It’s about taking all the little everyday things and observing them with a critical eye; building up a scrapbook which you can draw on. Sometimes, too, I look at other artworks or films to get an idea of what not to do.
If ever a character asks another character, “What do you mean?”, the scene needs a rewrite.
Feeling intimidated is a good sign. Writing from a place of safety produces stuff that is at best dull and at worst dishonest.
Write backwards. Start from the feeling you want the audience to have at the end and then ask “How might that happen?” continually, until you have a beginning.
Break any rule if you know deep inside that it is important.
If you have a good idea, stick to it. Especially if realising the project is a long and demanding process, try to keep true to the spirit of the initial idea.
Daydream. Give yourself plenty of time to do nothing. Train journeys are good.
Don’t wait for a good idea to come to you. Start by realising an average idea – no one has to see it. If I hadn’t made the works I’m ashamed of, the ones I’m proud of wouldn’t exist.
Be brief, concise and direct. Anyone who over-complicates things is at best insecure and at worst stupid. Children speak the most sense and they haven’t read Nietzsche.
Don’t try to second-guess what people will want to buy. Successful artists have been so because they have shown people something they hadn’t imagined. If buyers all knew what they wanted before it had been made, they could have made it themselves, or at least commissioned it.
Don’t be afraid to scrap all your hard work and planning and do it differently at the last minute. It’s easier to hold on to an idea because you’re afraid to admit you were wrong than to let it go.
You cannot overprepare. Enjoy being as searching and thorough as possible before you begin, so you can be as free as possible once you’ve started.
Lots of this, of course, can be applied to preaching. In fact, wouldn’t our preaching take off if we really took some of this to heart (and kept praying and meditating on the scriptures and deepening our faith etc…).
It’s the fourteenth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood today. The weather was exactly the same – storms raging across the whole of the UK. Some people couldn’t make it because many of the trains were cancelled or stranded.
I was always disappointed that the date chosen wasn’t a feast day in the Church’s calendar (for various reasons it had to be the first Saturday of the year). I’ve always loved the serendipity of special occasions aligning with significant feast days – and in this case there was none!
So I am delighted that with the new translation of the 3rd edition of the Roman Missal, today is now the restored feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. So I can thank the Lord not just for the gift of ordination, but for the impetus to think and pray more deeply about what this Name means for me and for my ministry.
The new Missal will include 17 additions to the Proper of Saints, the part of the Missal that includes prayers for the observances of saints’ days. The Proper of Saints follows a calendar established by the Vatican and modified by the bishops of each country to include saints of local importance. Any changes to a national or diocesan calendar require the consent of the Vatican.
The saints new to the third edition of the Roman Missal include saints, like Saint Augustine Zhao Rong, who were canonized after the second edition of the Roman Missal was published in 1985. Some of these saints, including Saint Lawrence Ruiz and Saint Andrew Dung-Lac, have been on the U.S. calendar for years. However, the new Missal will be the first time their prayer texts have been available in the printed book. Other added saints appeared on the liturgical calendar until 1969, when the calendar was simplified and many saints’ observances were removed. Also restored to the calendar are observances for the Most Holy Name of Jesus and the Most Holy Name of Mary. Still others saints and observances added to the Missal highlight important teachings of the Church such as the teaching on Mary (Our Lady of Fatima) and on the Eucharist as the Sacrament of Christ’s love (as promoted by Saint Peter Julian Eymard).
By canonizing these holy men and women, the Church presents them as models of Christian living. The added saints come from all eras and areas of the Church’s life – from the fourth century (Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Apollinaris) to the twentieth century (Saint Josephine Bakhita, Saint Christopher Magallenes and Saint Pio of Pietrelcina) – and from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. They include priests, religious women, martyrs, a married woman and missionaries.
With the exception of the memorials of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (better known as Edith Stein) and Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (better known as Padre Pio), all of the new observances are optional memorials.
And here is the complete list:
New saints and observances in the third edition of the Roman Missal
January 3 – Most Holy Name of Jesus — This is part of the Church’s celebration of Christmas, recognizing that God “bestowed on [Jesus] the name that is above every name” (Phil 2:9). February 8 – St. Josephine Bakhita, virgin – Born in Darfur, Josephine survived kidnapping and slavery to become a nun who embraced and lived hope as a redeemed child of God. April 23 – St. Adalbert, bishop and martyr – Martyred near the end of the first millennium, Adalbert was a missionary in the countries of central Europe, striving to bring unity to God’s people. April 28 – St. Louis Mary de Montfort, priest – This French priest is best known for his devotion to Mary, encouraging the faithful to approach Jesus through his mother. May 13 – Our Lady of Fatima – The Virgin Mary appeared to three children in the Portuguese town of Fatima in 1917. During these apparitions, she encouraged penance and praying the rosary. May 21 – Sts. Christopher Magallanes, priest and martyr, & Companions, martyrs – Martyred in 1927, this Mexican priest was noted for his care of the native peoples of Mexico and for his work to support vocations to the priesthood. May 22 – St. Rita of Cascia, religious – A wife, mother, widow, and nun, Saint Rita was known for her patience and humility in spite on many hardships. Conforming herself to the crucified Christ, she bore a wound on her forehead similar to one inflicted by a crown of thorns. July 9 – Sts. Augustine Zhao Rong, priest and martyr, & Companions, martyrs –Canonized with 119 other Chinese martyrs, Augustine began his career as a soldier. Inspired by the martyrs, he was baptized and eventually became a priest and martyr himself. July 20 – St. Apollinaris, bishop and martyr – Martyred in the second century, Apollinarius was the Bishop of Ravenna in Italy. He was known as a great preacher and miracle worker. July 24 – St. Sharbel Makhluf, priest – A Maronite priest in Lebanon, Saint Sharbel spent much of his life as a hermit in the desert, living of life of extreme penance. August 2 – St. Peter Julian Eymard, priest – Founder of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, Saint Peter devoted his life to promoting First Communions and devotion to the Eucharist as the sacrament of Christ’s love. August 9 – St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, virgin and martyr – Born of Jewish parents as Edith Stein, she received academic renown as a philosopher. After her conversion to Catholicism, she became a Carmelite nun. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. September 12 – Most Holy Name of Mary – After beginning in Spain in 1513, this celebration became a universal feast in the seventeenth century. A companion to the Memorial of The Most Holy Name of Jesus, it follows the Feast of the Nativity of Mary. September 23 – St. Pio of Pietrelcina, priest – Padre Pio was known throughout Italy and the world for his patient hearing of confessions and for his spiritual guidance. In poor health for much of his life, he conformed his sufferings to those of Christ. September 28 – Sts. Lawrence Ruiz & Companions, martyrs – Saint Lawrence and his companions spread the Gospel in the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan. Saint Lawrence was born in Manila and was a husband and father, November 24 – Sts. Andrew Dũng-Lạc, priest and martyr, & Companions, martyrs – Saint Andrew and his 107 companions, both priests and laity, were martyred in Vietnam in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Through their preaching, lives of faith, and witness unto death, they strengthened the Church in Vietnam. November 25 – St. Catherine of Alexandria, virgin and martyr – Martyred in the early part of the fourth century, Catherine was known for her intelligence, her deep faith, and the power of her intercession.
I’ve been at the Youth 2000 retreat in Balham for the last three days. Each afternoon I lead an ‘open forum’ workshop where participants bring random questions about faith and Christian life. It’s not that I necessarily provide expert answers, but as a group we thrash the questions around, and if I can shed any light I try to do that.
In yesterday’s session, we went beyond the usual questions about doctrine and morality, and someone asked about the Marian title ‘Co-Redemptrix’. We had a great discussion, just thinking through what we knew about Mary’s role in salvation from the scriptures and the tradition.
I came home this afternoon and found a book by Josef Weiger called Mary, Mother of Faith (Chicago, Henry Regnery Company: 1959), which is more a meditation on the Marian scripture passages than a doctrinal exposition. He has sections on ‘Co-Redemptrix’ and ‘Universal Mediation’.
First of all, he makes it quite clear what the title Co-Redemptrix does not mean.
What it does not mean is that our salvation depends on Mary; that Jesus’ mother is the source of our sanctity; that her own personal sanctity comes from herself; that she possesses a supernatural nature independent of the grace of her divine Son. Nor does it mean that Mary stood in no need of redemption.
Our redeemer is Christ; our Mediator is Christ; he has redeemed us by his death; and all are redeemed by him; all without exception; including Jesus’ holy mother.
Having said all that, which certainly needs saying, because the title can so easily be misunderstood, Weiger goes on to reflect on what it truly means.
At the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel came to Mary to invite her to give her consent to God’s plans:
God bound his will to the will of one of his creatures – the choicest of them, no doubt, and the most endowed with grace; still, the will of a human being was to help decide God’s plan for salvation; in fact, God made the salvation of the world dependent upon the freely-given consent of a human heart [...].
Divine Wisdom made our redemption part-dependent on the Yes or No of the Virgin. Our Redeemer had no desire to force himself on people or to assert himself by deploying rights and opportunities easily available to his almightiness. The salvation of the world was to become a reality in an act of faith, and through the faith of a virgin heart. Mary was to be a partner in our redemption. That is the meaning of her title, Co-Redemptrix. Without the Virgin’s faith, there would be no redemption by Christ. Through her faith Mary gave the Word of God a human home. Our Lord’s incarnation and the Virgin’s faith are an indivisible whole.
If we wonder what it is that distinguishes Mary’s faith from that of other saints – hers was necessary to bring about the salvation of the world in Christ; and that can be said of no other human being. Other people’s faith is necessary for their own salvation. The Virgin’s faith and her Son’s achievements are prerequisites, for without Mary’s faith and Christ’s death and glorification, it would be impossible. It is in fact on quite a different plane. Thus one person’s lack of faith cannot jeopardize the salvation of the whole world… So belief in her part in redemption implies belief in the irreplaceable and representative character of her faith [...].
Mary was no mere passive instrument of the Incarnation, she took an active part in it; so much so that, lacking her faith and her faithfulness, the salvation of the world would have been jeopardized [pp. 90-100].
This all makes theological sense to me. It’s hard to deny that the Virgin Mary, in a unique manner, cooperated in the work of our redemption; that in this limited but crucial sense she was a Co-Redemptrix. The big question, which we didn’t all agree on, is whether the doctrine should be defined!
[Lots of stuff here if you want to follow up the scripture, history, theology, patristics, Magisterium, FAQs, objections, etc: http://www.fifthmariandogma.com/ ]
What if there were another you? I don’t mean just an identical twin or a clone with the exact same genes. I mean someone who was like you in every way, the same body and mind and heart, the same past and experiences and memories, the same thoughts and feelings, the same decisions taken and the same mistakes made, standing in front of you now – but not you.
This is the idea at the heart of the film Another Earth, which jumps straight into my Top Ten films of the year. [Major plot spoilers follow - sorry!]
Another planet appears – just a dot in the night sky. As it comes closer it becomes apparent that this planet is the same size as ours, that it even has the same structure of continents and oceans as ours. Then, in a magical sci-fi moment, as the woman responsible for ‘first contact’ with the new planet speaks on a microphone, she realises that the woman talking to her on the other end is herself. [It's on the trailer here - I've ruined it for you!]
So the synchronicity between the two planets and between each corresponding person is absolute, apart from the fact that it inevitably gets broken by the appearance of the other planet – so the woman is not hearing the same words ‘she’ is speaking on the other planet, but actually having a non-symmetrical conversation with her other-self.
First of all, you are simply in sci-fi territory. I love these films. And in fact this film is really a re-make of another film from the ’70s (I can’t remember its name – brownie points for anyone who can help) where the US sent a spaceship to another planet on the other side of the sun, only to discover that the planet was the same as the earth – apart from everything being a mirror image of this earth. So our astronaut lands on the other planet, and another astronaut from that planet lands on our earth, with everyone thinking that our astronaut has come back early – until he sees that all the writing here is in reverse. Anyway – this is classic sci-fi.
But very quickly it becomes philosophical. Looking at this other earth in the sky above, marvelling that we can behold such a world, you realise that this is exactly what we do whenever we reflect on our experience, or use our imaginations, or question what is going on in our own minds. The remarkable thing about human beings is that we can ‘step back’ from our own experience (inner and outer) and view it; that we can ‘see ourselves’. The strangeness of the film brings to light the strangeness of ordinary human life.
We take this ability to reflect for granted, but it really is the key factor that seems to distinguish us from other animals. No-one today would deny that animals can be incredibly sophisticated and intelligent; and on many measures of intelligence they would beat us. But this power of self-reflection seems to be one of our defining characteristics; and it surely connects, in ways that aren’t always clear, with human freedom – the freedom we have to think and imagine and act in ways that go far beyond the instinctual programming we receive as bodily creatures.
So the wonder that Rhoda Williams feels staring up at this other planet is no more than the wonder we should feel whenever we step back and reflect on ourselves.
Then there is a theological angle too. To cut a long story short: Rhoda unintentionally kills the family of musical conductor John Burroughs in a driving accident, soon after the planet is discovered. He is haunted by the loss of his family, and then receives a ticket to travel to the other planet – a ticket that Rhoda has for herself, but she decides to give it to him. Why would he go? Because if the synchronicity between the two worlds was broken when they started to impact on each other, then perhaps the accident did not happen on the other planet, and ‘his’ family is still alive up there.
I call this a theological idea, because it’s about the possibility of redemption, of putting right something that has gone irredeemably wrong in the past. That in some sense this action might not have happened, or it might be possible to go back and undo the harm that has been done. This is crazy of course – in normal thinking. But if it’s crazy, why do we spend so much time imagining/hoping that somehow we could put right what has gone wrong? I don’t think our almost compulsive inability to stop regretting the mistakes we have made is simply a dysfunctional habit that we can’t let go of; it’s a yearning for forgiveness and redemption, for someone to go back in time and allow us to change things, an echo of a possibility of renewal that we can’t justify at a rational or philosophical level – because the past is completely out of reach. It’s about hope.
Or the film is about conscience – the possibility of imagining an action now, as if it were happening, and asking if we really want this parallel imaginative world to unfold into reality, or if we would regret it. So the work of conscience, and of all conscious deliberation, brings us up against another parallel world that is exactly the same as ours – only we have the power to decide whether it shall come into existence or not.
At the very end of the film, in her backyard, Rhoda meets ‘herself’ – we presume she has come from the other planet, with her own ticket, which she didn’t need to give away, because the accident there didn’t happen. All we see is her catching the gaze of the other woman before her, and recognising her to be herself – but not. Then the film ends immediately. It’s incredibly moving. As if a lifelong search, unacknowledged, is finally over; as if, miraculously, I step away and see myself for who I am, and see myself seeing myself. And that, miraculously, is in fact what happens every time we know ourselves through self-reflection, through self-consciousness. Human beings are not just conscious. We are self-conscious. That’s the idea that the film opens up so well.
There are lots of these videos floating around that show some aspect of faith or the Christian story through the lens of social media. This is one of my favourites, from Igniter Media. Called ‘Follow’, it shows very simply and very powerfully how the events of Jesus’s life might have been communicated if there had been Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. The immediacy of the messages brought to life for me not just the story itself, but the ordinary humanity of the people involved – people I treat too often as just characters in a book.
It’s not specifically a Christmas video. But anyway: Happy Christmas!
There is a lovely online debate going on about how best to organise your bookshelves. It falls under that more general heading of ‘cataloguing disputes’ or ‘making lists about lists’.
Ah, how to organise one’s bookshelves? One of life’s central questions, and well done Alexander McCall Smith for raising it on Twitter yesterday. Perhaps not everyone would consider this a vital topic, but for me it is. Just as Casaubon in Middlemarch is trying to find “the key to all mythologies” (the title of his unfinished book), so I believe that if I can arrange my library properly, everything will be solved. Who needs the Higgs boson? The real key is where to file The Iliad. Poetry or history?
I have about a dozen categories. Fiction is the largest. It is arranged alphabetically by author and then chronologically where I have several titles by the same writer. There are sections devoted to poetry, memoir, biography, essays, travel writing and plays, all organised alphabetically. Books in these categories have a better chance of surviving than novels, which tend to be culled first. There are smaller sections, more loosely organised, devoted to dictionaries, reference works, art, music, sport and chess. I also have a shelf of foundation texts – the Bible, the Qur’an, the Mahabharata, Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and the modern philosophers. I admit this shelf is very inaccessible.
History is a large section. It begins with general histories, and then takes a predictable course from Sumeria and Egypt to the Third Reich. There is a problem with a book such as Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland 1600-1972, because I don’t have a separate Irish section and can’t decide whether it should be in general histories or in chronological sequence. For the moment it sits awkwardly in the 17th century, next to Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches. Clearly I need to spend the rest of the day assessing this. One day, when I build my book annexe, all these questions will be resolved. Then, the whole of existence will be mapped, classified, ordered, and I can die happy. George Eliot was unnecessarily cruel to Casaubon. He was definitely on to something.
There are some lovely comments below his piece:
melymnn: I organize my books by publisher and colour and I’m not even ashamed to admit it. Come at me, bro.
Gdhsyerehdjsue: I have colourbetised my books and it looks great.
Mark Barnes: My entire collection is organised by Dewey, and catalogued on LibraryThing.com. Perhaps I need to get out more. That said, not only can I easily find my own books, but I now know exactly where to go in most libraries I visit.
msmlee: The WORST way to organise bookshelves is by an immediately discernible order to the untrained, non-bibliophile eye – you are not running a public library, you are arranging your bookshelves as a means of self expression, why do it so that others could find your books easily without having acquired your particular history of book encounters??? No, the right way to shelve books is not alphabetically, not chronologically, and certainly not by colour. I can stomach somebody’s bookshelves arranged broadly by subject, but that is only elementary level to book organising. You have to organise books in such a way that ONLY YOU know the rhyme and reason for these books being together, and really showed that you have actually READ the books to know what they are about before filing them.
ontheotherhand2010: Not trying to sound aggressive or anything, but… Who cares. Get a life. As long as you can find them, why does it matter? FYI I have mine in about half a dozen fairly broad categories or so (not alphabetical), which is enough for me to know roughly where they are located. I stopped being pedantic with the exact location of my books in my late teens. Maybe you should give it a rest as well…
To this last commentator I’d reply: If you can’t understand why someone wants to catalogue and sort and order and list and arrange and argue and shape and obsess and file and group and re-group and on and on and on, without it having to be explained to you, then you never will. It’s part of being human. Maybe the obsessiveness isn’t, but the impulse is.
This is how the apparently logical/scientific argument goes: Teenagers keep getting pregnant, and thus having more abortions and unwanted babies. So if we give them more drugs to stop the pregnancies, and include the morning-after pill in the package, the pregnancies will decrease.
This kind of unquestioned argumentation colours many of our opinions, and drives public policy. But it’s not empirically true. It’s bad science.
The morning-after pill was introduced to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies, yet subsequent abortion rates have continued to increase unabated. The morning-after pill was then made available over-the-counter to over 16s in the UK in 2001, again with the rationale that the ease of access would curb unplanned pregnancy. Yet there was still no effect on the ever-increasing abortion rates.
The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) has launched an online campaign this month to make the morning-after pill freely available in advance via the post. Randomised controlled trials investigating whether advance provision of the drug reduces the numbers of unplanned pregnancies have shown no such effect; in fact they show that women increase usage of the morning after pill and some studies even suggest that normal contraception is compromised. A study published earlier this year by Nottingham University found that the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases amongst teens was increased in association with local authorities increasing their access to the drug.
What we see is an effect known as “risk compensation” or “behavioural disinhibition”: where a safety net (a Plan ‘B’) is provided – in the form of abortion and the morning-after pill – “risky” sexual behaviour then increases as a result. We are apparently in a lose-lose situation [...]
Professor David Paton, Nottingham University, reports to ScienceDaily in January 2011: “Our study illustrates how government interventions can sometimes lead to unfortunate unintended consequences. The fact that STI diagnoses increased in areas with Emergency Birth Control schemes [schemes increasing access of the morning-after pill to teenagers] will raise questions over whether these schemes represent the best use of public money.”
Neary also goes beyond the scientific analysis to look at some of the broader cultural issues involved:
Instead of tackling the root of the problem, by promoting fidelity and faithfulness, campaigns brandish the word “sex” in fairy lights, framed by the slogan, “Are you feeling turned on this Christmas?” advertising the online access to the morning after pill (BPAS December 2011). The U.S. is currently in debate whether it should allow underage girls to obtain the pill over-the-counter. I think society owes an apology to the girl who winds up pregnant at 14 when she’s bombarded with adverts trivialising sex, when a boy uses the easy access to the morning-after pill as a persuasive device and when the government makes a public statement that casual sex at any age is normal behaviour.
Reporting to the BBC, Ann Furedi adequately epitomises society’s backward attitude towards unplanned pregnancy: “Unintended pregnancy and abortion will always be facts of life because women want to make sure the time is right for them to take on the important role of becoming a parent. Abortion statistics are reflective of women’s very serious consideration regarding that significant role within their current situation.”
While the voices of “Plan B” advocates are louder, couples are increasingly exposing themselves to sexually transmitted disease by engaging in unprotected sex, more women are taking the morning-after pill (a mega-dose of female hormone) when the long-term health consequences are unknown. Perhaps one of the most pressing issues in the US and UK now with the increased availability of the morning-after pill under scrutiny, is that underage girls could get hold of it without face-to-face contact with their Doctor. The latter serves to flag underlying problems which can be discussed and most importantly, keeping a medical record of who is taking it and how often can potentially flag cases of sexual abuse in underage girls.
My bedtime reading for the last few weeks, between Teresa of Avila’s Foundations, has been Max Hastings’s All Hell let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945. It’s almost too disturbing to read late at night, which is why I moderate it with some Carmelite spirituality.
No-one would deny how much the Allies suffered in the Second World War, on the front line and at home; but what comes across to me from the global perspective that Hastings offers is the breathtaking scale and unimaginable horror of war on the eastern front, as the Red Army clashed with the Nazis. I was mostly ignorant of this whole reality, and over-influenced by the British/American perspective.
I won’t try to summarise the book. If someone has asked you for a late Christmas present suggestion then get it for yourself. But here are a couple of statistics that made me stop in my tracks about war in the east.
On Sunday, 23 August, the Germans heralded their assault [on Stalingrad] with an air raid by six hundred aircraft: 40,000 civilians are said to have died in the first fourteen hours, almost as many as perished in the entire 1940-41 blitz on Britain [p308].
By the end of 1943, the Soviet Union had suffered 77 per cent of its total casualties in the entire conflict – something approaching twenty million dead [p395]
And to put in perspective the relative Allied losses:
The Soviet Union suffered 65 per cent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 per cent, Yugoslavia 3 per cent, the USA and Britain 2 per cent each, France and Poland 1 per cent each [p324].
Hastings is at pains to explain that you can’t compare one form of suffering with another, and that the knowledge of someone’s tragedy on another side of the globe does not in any way diminish or trivialise your own. But the scale of tragedy on the eastern front almost defies comprehension.
Part of the interest of the book lies in how Hastings manages to weave personal accounts of the war into the overall story, without ruining the flow. So in the midst of a section about grand strategy there are illuminating human passages from a letter sent home from the front line, or a diary found in the rubble of a besieged building.
I don’t know enough about the war to judge his judgments, but it’s a gripping story, and a sobering reminded of the tragedy of war. Despite the stories of heroism and daring, very little romance remains - at least in my own mind.
Here is the blurb from Waterstones, if you need any more persuading:
A magisterial history of the greatest and most terrible event in history, from one of the finest historians of the Second World War. A book which shows the impact of war upon hundreds of millions of people around the world – soldiers, sailors and airmen; housewives, farm workers and children. Reflecting Max Hastings’s thirty-five years of research on World War II, All Hell Let Loose describes the course of events, but focuses chiefly upon human experience, which varied immensely from campaign to campaign, continent to continent. The author emphasises the Russian front, where more than 90% of all German soldiers who perished met their fate. He argues that, while Hitler’s army often fought its battles brilliantly well, the Nazis conducted their war effort with ‘stunning incompetence’. He suggests that the Royal Navy and US Navy were their countries’ outstanding fighting services, while the industrial contribution of the United States was much more important to allied victory than that of the US Army. The book ranges across a vast canvas, from the agony of Poland amid the September 1939 Nazi invasion, to the 1943 Bengal famine, in which at least a million people died under British rule - and British neglect. Among many vignettes, there are the RAF’s legendary raid on the Ruhr dams, the horrors of Arctic convoys, desert tank combat, jungle clashes. Some of Hastings’s insights and judgements will surprise students of the conflict, while there are vivid descriptions of the tragedies and triumphs of a host of ordinary people, in uniform and out of it. ‘The cliche is profoundly true’, he says. ‘The world between 1939 and 1945 saw some human beings plumb the depths of baseness, while others scaled the heights of courage and nobility’. This is ‘everyman’s story’, an attempt to answer the question: ‘What was the Second World War like ?’, and also an overview of the big picture. Max Hastings employs the technique which has made many of his previous books best-sellers, combining top-down analysis and bottom-up testimony to explore the meaning of this vast conflict both for its participants and for posterity.
Rotten Tomatoes is still my favourite site for film reviews. You get a percentage score for each film, a summary of each review, and – most importantly – a link to the original reviews themselves.
But every now and then it drives me mad. It scores each movie solely on the basis of how many positive reviews it has, but it doesn’t give any weighting to each review. So if 100/100 reviewers quite like a film (and give it say 3 stars out of 5), it gets the same score – 100% – as it would if 100/100 reviewers absolutely adore the film (and give it say 5 stars out of 5). So a bland, unprovocative film that managed to mildly please most critics would get a very high score.
This is what set me off last week: I went to see Moneyball partly on the basis that it got 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. Yes, it’s a well-made and thought-provoking film; but it’s also boring, over-long, and not half as funny or intelligent as it should be. This is what the Rotten Tomatoes scoring system can do.
(Maybe I am unjustifiably taking it out on this innocent website. It still got a staggering 87% on Metacritic. Maybe, in this case, it’s the critics themselves who are almost universally wrong. How can Robbie Collin at the Daily Telegraph call it ‘an accomplished, bracingly intelligent film that scores points on all fronts…’?!)
The solution to this problem? Do what Metacritic does. Instead of just adding up the number of positive reviews a film gets, give a certain weighting to each review according to how positive the reviewer was. They also (I’ve just found out) give some reviewers greater weight – as if they trust their judgment more than others. And, it has to be said, the site is really crisp and beautiful – unlike the Rotten Tomatoes site.
Creating our proprietary Metascores is a complicated process. We carefully curate a large group of the world’s most respected critics, assign scores to their reviews, and apply a weighted average to summarize the range of their opinions. The result is a single number that captures the essence of critical opinion in one Metascore. Each movie, game, television show and album featured on Metacritic gets a Metascore when we’ve collected at least four critics’ reviews.
Why the term “weighted average” matters
Metascore is a weighted average in that we assign more importance, or weight, to some critics and publications than others, based on their quality and overall stature. In addition, for music and movies, we also normalize the resulting scores (akin to “grading on a curve” in college), which prevents scores from clumping together.
How to interpret a Metascore
Metascores range from 0-100, with higher scores indicating better overall reviews. We highlight Metascores in three colors so that you can instantly compare: green scores for favorable reviews, yellow scores for mixed reviews, and red scores for unfavorable reviews.
Why do I stay with Rotten Tomatoes? Simply because the UK site gives you reviews from the UK press, which Metacritic doesn’t, and lists the films under their UK launch date – so you can see what is out this week. If there were a UK Metacritic I would switch to it immediately. And if I had time I’d set about developing one. Maybe there is some money to be made here…
I love baseball. I love Aaron Sorkin. I love, at least since the magnificent The Tree of Life, Brad Pitt. So there were high expectations for my trip to see Moneyball last week. What a shame that it disappointed so much. It glided along well, with some sharp Sorkin-dialogue and a few great scenes, but it never really took off; and I was even tempted to look at my watch two-thirds of the way through. (How it gets 95% on Rotten Tomatoes I don’t know. I’ll blog about Rotten Tomatoes soon.)
But the central premise (based on a true story) is interesting. Baseball manager Billy Bean (Brad Pitt) is running a team that can’t afford to compete financially with the bigger teams. Every time one of his players proves himself, he gets offered a multi-million dollar contract by someone else and is gone at the beginning of the next season.
Bean notices that people tend to rate players on a limited number of obvious skills and characteristics – how many runs they score, how good their swing is, how fast and accurately they can pitch, etc.
But not many people are analysing the less obvious statistical data about what actually helps a team to win a single game, and to keep winning consistently over a season. It’s not, as it turns out, simply the showy stuff or the obvious stuff – hits and catches and home runs and strike-outs (or whatever – I’m not sure I understand it all); it’s a combination of much less interesting factors like whether someone can make it to first base or whether they can throw a ball from the outfield.
When you get a team of non-stars who, in combination, can do this boring stuff, they beat a team of all-stars. You just need to analyse systematically what actually works, and find people who can do this.
The moral, if there is one, is that we shouldn’t assume we know what works and what doesn’t – until we have done the statistical analysis. Yes, statistics can distort or even deceive, but if you ask the right questions, they can reveal what really makes something work. It’s too easy for us to think we know what works, to take for granted that our criteria for judging something properly are reliable and proven, when often we are just going on unfounded hunches and prejudices.
This is why I always prefer to do detailed written feedback sheets at the end of a course or programme. I’ve heard people say that they like to sit down with people and hear from them directly; and there is certainly something to be gained from talking and listening. But my experience is that in a group conversation, even when you ask everyone to speak, the conversation will still be dominated by the louder ones, or the ones who feel most strongly about the issue (positively or negatively); and as an organiser you will always be tempted to be influenced too much by those who speak with most conviction.
But when you give everyone a chance, in a quiet moment of written reflection, to say what they think in detail about how something has worked, you get a much better picture, and often a lot of surprises. How to get honest and helpful feedback from people is a great art. I’d like to know more about other ways of getting constructive feedback.
For anyone interested in questions about marriage and the family, Maryvale Institute in Birmingham is taking new students for the MA course which beings again this January. [This is last year's poster.]
To save time I’m just copying this helpful summary from the Witness to Love website from earlier this year:
A new course has just begun at the Maryvale Institute in Birmingham, an international Catholic distance-learning College. It is an MA programme in Marriage and Family based on the teaching and vision of John Paul II (especially his Theology of the Body) drawn up in close collaboration with the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Rome. The new MA programme runs via distance learning on somewhat similar lines to Open University courses and promises to be a really exciting and innovative way to bring the wisdom and beauty of John Paul II’s teaching to others.
The Maryvale Institute was also the home of Blessed John Newman in 1846 after his conversion when he lived there with a small community. Maryvale is also a former seminary (1794-1838) and orphanage (1851-1980) run by the Sisters of Mercy. It houses the historic and beautiful Chapel of the Sacred Heart from its seminary period and has also today houses a convent for Bridgettine sisters since 1999.
The new MA pathway “seeks to develop an ‘adequate anthropology’ through the study of God’s plan for marriage and family” (see pathway No. 6 here). It is therefore interdisciplinary and could be of interest to students from a wide variety of backgrounds such as teachers, priests, youth workers, those involved in marriage care, medicine or family law.
There are different kinds of near-death experiences. There are ‘end of life’ experiences, when people at their death-bed report being drawn towards a certain kind of light, or sent back into the world of the living, or seeing their own bodies lying there from an out-of-body perspective. I’ve never gone through one of these.
There are ‘near miss’ experiences when something happens that could have been catastrophic, but wasn’t. I can think of twice when I have driven at a reasonable speed straight through a red light and only realised when it was too late. Once was years ago at a major crossroads in St Albans – I don’t know why it happened; I must have just been distracted. I could have killed myself and many others with me. I was terrified afterwards with a kind of retrospective shock; the full force of ‘what if?’
The second time was only a few weeks ago when I went through a red light at a pedestrian crossing here in Chelsea. It wasn’t my fault. I saw it as I was going through it, and I couldn’t work out why I hadn’t spotted it before. I was so perturbed that I drove back, to discover that one of those beautiful hanging flower baskets had been hung by the council on a lamp-post just a couple of feet before the light. I guess when it was hung it had no flowers, but they had since grown and completely obscured the red traffic light. It was genuine concern that drove me, like a good citizen, to call the police, and the local council, and whoever else the next person referred me to. But no-one could deal with it before Monday morning (this was Friday night) or felt that it was urgent enough to find a way of sorting it out. I gave up. I should have gone and cut the flowers myself; but then I’d have probably got arrested.
Anyway, the third kind of near-death experience is the much more everyday ‘intimation of one’s own mortality’ that catches us now and then, often for small and unexpected reasons. I had one of these last week. There was a Mass at Westminster Cathedral offered for the deceased clergy of the Diocese. As I processed in with the other concelebrants, we walked past the Book of Remembrance that was open on the relevant day: a single page for each day of the year, with the names of the clergy beautifully inscribed on the page for the day of their death. And it struck me with great force as I walked past: my name will be in there one day. Probably in quite a few years; but possibly in just a few months or weeks or days (who knows?). But however long it takes, there my name will be – in that very book.
I know this isn’t an unusual experience. It was just very concrete. Every so often I think about death; but I don’t usually have such a simple reminder of how thin the line is between now and then – just a few moments away; just a few letters on the page.
I know these everyday reminders of death are more common in rural communities (or at least slightly less urban ones), where you as an individual have a particular link with a particular graveyard. I’m not saying that you meditate on it every day; but it must be similarly sobering just to think, ‘This is the place where my body will lie one day’; that death is not just an abstract idea but a concrete destiny.
It reminds me of a village I visited just outside Salzburg. I’m used to seeing old village churches in England with the graveyard at the side of the church somewhere. But here the parish church was literally surrounded by the graves of the parishioners. There was a row directly around the external wall of the church; then a path around this row; and then more graves extending out to the boundary wall. So as soon as you walked into the grounds of the church you walked past the graves of your parents, your ancestors, your fellow parishioners, the townsfolk; and you knew that you would lie there one day. My friend said this was typical in small Austrian villages. It wasn’t at all oppressive; it was as if the church itself (and everything that happened within its walls) was living within this larger communion; as if you congregated with your neighbours and friends and family to pray each Sunday, and this congregating just continued after death.
There aren’t many Catholic churches with graveyards at their side in Britain today. The nearby parish in Fulham is probably one of the few. I wish we had a few more, and that we were more connected in these concrete ways with those who have gone before us.
Here is my review of Nanni Moretti’s new film We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam), which was first published on the Independent Catholic News site:
The Pope is dead. The Conclave is assembled in the Sistine Chapel. Three heavyweight cardinals, the bookies’ favourites, surge ahead in the first few ballots of the ensuing election – only to fall into a deadlock. When a compromise candidate is eventually chosen from the backbenches he steps forward with a humble heart and a nervous smile. But his courage fails him, and just as he is invited onto the balcony to greet the waiting world, he runs back to his room in terror, and eventually escapes into the city to contemplate the strange turn of events that has brought him to this point.
It’s an unusual theme for Italian director Nanni Moretti, a self-professed atheist. Many viewers might have expected him to put together a hard-hitting expose of ecclesiastical corruption, or at least to take a few easy swipes at the Catholic Church. Instead, we get a light-comedy that treats its ecclesiastical protagonists with amused curiosity and uncritical affection.
It’s an entertaining two hours, but it never really opens up the central question of how a man gets chosen for this high office, or why this particular man finds it impossible to bear. Veteran actor Michel Piccoli brings out the dignity and vulnerability of the avuncular Pontiff; but we don’t get any sense of what this inner struggle means to him.
There are some great scenes. Moretti himself plays a secular psychoanalyst brought into the Vatican to help the Pope overcome his paralysis. Their first session takes place before the assembled cardinals, and the visiting therapist is told he is free to explore any areas of the Pope’s life, apart from… his relationships, his childhood, his mother, etc. Moretti, dumfounded, ploughs on. The clash of cultures, of mentalities – religious and secular, classical and post-Freudian – is illustrated with such gentleness and humour.
We see a particularly corpulent Swiss guard being led into the papal apartments, and realise he is the Pope’s stand-in, charged with opening the curtains in the morning and switching off the lights at night. On the second day he discovers a penchant for method acting and feels obliged to polish off the lavish Pontifical breakfast; and by the third day he can’t resist the flourish of a papal blessing, raising his hand in benediction from behind the net curtains.
And when the Vatican spokesperson is asked why the new Pope has not appeared and what this unprecedented event means for the wider Church, he responds “It’s perfectly normal for a Holy Father to seek some space for prayer and reflection as he prepares for his new responsibilities” – the kind of pious flannel that so easily becomes a substitute for an uncomfortable truth.
The ending, which I won’t give away, is unsatisfactory. It doesn’t make dramatic sense of what’s come before, and it highlights the fact that the film is a collection of amusing vignettes rather than a coherent whole. We Have a Pope provokes a few reflections about vocation, the yawning gap between office and person, and the relationship between priesthood and acting, but it fails to make any deep impressions. It’s not tough enough or funny enough to avoid falling into whimsy. Directors like Woody Allen and Roberto Benigni (Life is Beautiful) are somehow able to mix light comedy and even slapstick with themes of profound seriousness; I wish Moretti had managed to do the same.
Jumoke Fashola hosts the Sunday morning Inspirit slot on BBC London. One of the topics this morning was the question of whether it is possible to trust someone with your most intimate secrets. As part of the discussion, they wanted a Catholic priest to explain the meaning of confession. I got the invitation on Thursday, and spent an hour yesterday evening thinking about how you would open up the idea of confession to a very mixed London audience.
Confessions room at Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris
The mood of the programme is certainly not anti-religious (and Jumoke spoke about her memories of going to confession as a girl at a convent school), but I couldn’t assume people would know much about confession beyond what they had seen in the movies. I knew that one of the questions would be about the link between therapy (or simply ‘getting something off your chest’) and confession; but how would you explain in ordinary language that the sacrament of confession is far more than a helpful chat with a trusted friend or therapist?
They are part of an exhibition of new German art at the Saatchi gallery which runs until 30 April 2012.
“Artist Julian Rosefeldt has sifted through stills from soap operas around the world and collated the melodramatic expressions of the performers, creating a study of our era’s emotional codes.”
It’s embarrassing. Not just for the actors themselves, but for oneself, as you realise how many of these gestures have been internalised and are no longer just ironic or comic references to second-hand soap melodrama, but have become an ordinary part of one’s own emotional vocabulary. OK, what I really mean is that I am unconsciously using about half of these gestures in an average conversation.
I exaggerate. But I am definitely using the ‘OK circle’ from slide 4 far too much in my philosophy classes…
There have been various reports recently about a new test for Down’s syndrome that could be offered to pregnant women by the NHS within a few months. Unlike the tests used at present (amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling), the new techniques are non-invasive and low risk; they work by analysing DNA from the foetus in the mother’s blood. The company Sequenom has already introduced such tests in the United States. [See, for example, Mark Henderson's report in The Times, 29 Oct 2011, p3]
In itself, there is nothing morally wrong with pre-natal diagnostic testing, and it can bring a number of benefits. It can help parents to come to terms with a child’s disabilities early on; to prepare (psychologically and practically) for the birth of their child; and in some cases it can alert parents and doctors to the medical support and intervention that might be needed after the birth, and even before it. So there can be good reasons for parents to choose to have different kinds of pre-natal tests.
But the reality is that in most cases (about 90%), a diagnosis of Down’s syndrome in pregnancy becomes not a means to support the unborn child but a reason to abort it. So anyone with a concern for the unborn child, and anyone aware of the various psychological and social pressures on parents to choose to abort their Down’s syndrome child, might feel justifiable unease and even alarm at the advent of this new test. It’s not to be anti-science or anti-progress; it’s to recognise that some scientific advances can bring more harm than good when they are used without moral discrimination.
The reality is that eugenic screening and termination has become an accepted and largely unquestioned part of the British moral landscape, ever since disability became one of the grounds for abortion. It’s one example of how a change in law doesn’t just reflect the mores of a culture, but it actually helps to reshape them. It is now socially acceptable in Britain to think and say that people with Down’s syndrome have no right to be born, and consequently no right to live, simply on the grounds of their disability. (Eugenics: ’the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics’; Oxford Dictionaries.) The intention of the parents or of the medical establishment may not be strictly eugenic (there are many complicated reasons why parents make these choices); but the background assumptions of a culture which is at ease with selective abortion on the grounds of disability are surely eugenic, in that such a culture has already decided that a certain category of human beings does not have the same dignity or rights as others, and that their exclusion will not harm the common good.
Isn’t it strange that this unacknowledged acceptance of eugenics sits side by side with an increasing social abhorrence of any form of prejudice against disabled people. In the same month that this test was publicised in the British media, which will allow more efficient screening for Down’s syndrome and probably lead to further abortions, Ricky Gervais is vilified for using the word ‘mong’ as a term of abuse, because of its associations (via ‘mongoloid’) with people with Down’s syndrome. (See Joe Public’s Guardian blog here.)
In 2001 the Disability Rights Commission was brave enough to put into words the very obvious link between the disability clauses of the 1967 Abortion Act and public prejudice against disabled people (much to the annoyance of Polly Toynbee):
The Section [1(1)d] is offensive to many people; it reinforces negative stereotypes of disability and there is substantial support for the view that to permit terminations at any point during a pregnancy on the ground of risk of disability, while time limits apply to other grounds set out in the Abortion Act, is incompatible with valuing disability and non-disability equally.
In common with a wide range of disability and other organisations, the DRC believes the context in which parents choose whether to have a child should be one in which disability and non-disability are valued equally.
The vast majority of instances of Down syndrome occur in babies carried by women 35 and younger, but that age group has historically been less likely to get tested. Now a simple and accurate blood test for this condition can be safely and routinely administered to virtually anyone who wants it as long as a doctor authorizes it.
So for the math: If more than 90 percent of women who find out they are pregnant with a baby with Down syndrome abort, does this mean we might eventually have almost no babies born with Down syndrome? Will we have gotten rid of a supposedly “undesired” human condition by getting rid of the people themselves who carry it?
And what does that do to the rest of us? I am the first to admit that I’m not signed up on any “adopt a baby with Down syndrome” list. I also didn’t sign up on the “raising four children on my own” list. We never know what challenges life is going to present. Accordingly, what a false sense of security a “no Down syndrome” test result can give parents.
Sure, the new test is just a tool, after all. If used to prepare expectant parents for a baby with Down syndrome so they can learn about the condition before their little one enters the world, great. Maybe they can be assured that life expectancies and outcomes for children with Down syndrome are so much better now.
Early intervention for cognitive development and surgical and other treatments for physical impairments have fundamentally and positively changed the playing field for babies born with Down syndrome today.
But how many minds will change when they have this information? We live in a supposedly humane and tolerant age. I question that. Not when we apparently still have so little tolerance for humanity that might be a little different.
I don’t doubt (and I know from the experience of parents themselves) what a huge shock and a huge challenge it can be when parents discover that their unborn child might have a disability. That’s one reason why it’s so heartening to read various personal stories that have come into the media in the light of the publicity about these new tests; above all from parents who might not have been particularly pro-life, but have had a kind of conversion through learning to love and value their disabled children in ways they never imagined would have been possible at first. Bonnie Rochman reports:
For Amy Julia Becker, who has written a book about life with her daughter, Penny, who has Down syndrome, coming to terms with her daughter’s intellectual limitations has taken time. “I went to Princeton, I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, I have always been smart,” she says. “I didn’t realize how much I assumed I’d have a daughter just like me. Having Penny really challenged me to rethink what it means to be a whole and full human being.”
In her book, A Good and Perfect Gift, Becker transcribes a journal entry written soon after Penny was born: “Can she live a full life without without ever solving a quadratic equation? Without reading Dostoyevsky? I’m pretty sure she can. Can I live a full life without learning to cherish and welcome those in this world who are different from me? I’m pretty sure I can’t.”
But many expectant parents don’t feel that way. Up to 90% of women who know in advance of a Down syndrome diagnosis choose to end the pregnancy, according to the few studies that have tracked this. The new test is not being marketed only to women who would end a Down syndrome pregnancy, say advocates of testing. Mothers who plan to have the baby may also want to know ahead of time in order to prepare emotionally and medically; half of infants with Down syndrome, for example, are born with heart defects. “I don’t think it’s all search-and-destroy,” says Canick. “That is an awful way of looking at this.”
But parents of children with Down syndrome are skeptical of the intent of early screening. “There is a real disconnect between hospitals, administrators and OB/GYN doctors’ understanding of what has changed for children with Down syndrome over the years,” says Howard, whose daughter, Lydia, starts conversations with strangers and cracks jokes in her inclusive preschool. “There was encouragement to get screened with the understanding that I would terminate because that’s what most people do.”
It’s true that mothers who learn soon after delivery that their babies have Down syndrome describe being overwhelmed with sorrow and disbelief on what they’d presumed would a joyous day. Howard cried every day for nine months after Lydia was born. Perkins McLaughlin says it took her eight hours after her C-section to muster the nerve to go visit her daughter, Gracie, in the neonatal intensive care unit. “There are people out there who feel the test is great,” says Perkins McLaughlin. “In some ways, it is great. But it is scary too. Will more people terminate because it’s earlier in the pregnancy and why not just try again? I don’t know what I would have done if I had found out at 10 weeks.”
Gracie is now 3 1/2. In the two years since Perkins McLaughin, now 44, has served as a parent mentor for the Massachusetts Down Syndrome Congress, she’s told the dozen or so conflicted pregnant women who have contacted her that Gracie is bright: she started signing at six months and had accumulated 100 signs by age 2, prompting her grandmother to ask, Are you sure she has Down syndrome? She loves music, dancing and her older brother and sister. Perkins McLaughin tells them how Gracie has added perspective to her life, softening her Type-A edges. “She’s not going to do quantum physics, but I don’t do quantum physics,” says Perkins McLaughin. “Gracie has showed me in a profound way that I am not in control of everything. I have a bumper sticker that says, Grace Happens.”
I wonder if serious reflection on ‘disablist’ prejudices and disability rights in this country will eventually lead us to reconsider the inherently eugenic abortion laws we have at present.
My last post was about people doing what they are not meant to do: defying the social conventions that almost define them, the unwritten rules of behaviour that we take for granted without ever reflecting on. The best thing I’ve read about this is undoubtedly Kate Fox’s Watching the English.
It’s hysterical, and full of profound insights into the strange reality of being English, or British (she can’t quite decide). If you can’t afford psychoanalysis, read this book, and it will bring to light all sorts of habits and behaviours in your own life that you’ve never really thought about. I kept thinking, ‘How does this woman know me so well?’ If you have any drop of Englishness in you at all, you will learn things about yourself that you never knew before.
Why do we English people talk about the weather so much? Why do we say sorry (and actually feel sorry) when we have no reason to be sorry? Why do we queue so often? Why do we get so angry when other people jump our queue? Why are we so unable to express our anger? Why are we afraid of complaining about bad service? Why are we so awkward in social situations? Why do we consistently fumble for the right word or the appropriate gesture when we meet someone, or leave someone, or thank someone, or correct someone, or offer them our sympathy in the face of difficulty, disease or death? Why is this social ‘dis-ease’ almost a part of our genetic make-up?
Fox is one of these social anthropologists who takes part in her own experiments. So she set about systematically upsetting the social cart and seeing how people reacted. A whole morning aggressively bumping into people to see if they did indeed say sorry for her own rudeness. An afternoon pushing into carefully formed queues to see how many people would dare to challenge her, and how they would deal with this unwelcome need to enter into confrontation (loud coughs, long stares, the odd ‘Excuse me?!’).
In WATCHING THE ENGLISH anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and byzantine codes of behaviour. Her minute observation of the way we talk, dress, eat, drink, work, play, shop, drive, flirt, fight, queue – and moan about it all – exposes the hidden rules that we all unconsciously obey. The rules of weather-speak. The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo. Humour rules. Pub etiquette. Table manners. The rules of bogside reading. The dangers of excessive moderation. The eccentric-sheep rule. The English ‘social dis-ease’. Through a mixture of anthropological analysis and her own unorthodox experiments (using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig), Kate Fox discovers what these unwritten behaviour codes tell us about Englishness.
A miracle happened on the Piccadilly line on Tuesday evening. They broke the rules. The flew in the face of convention. They boldly went where no man or woman had gone before. They trampled on the strongest known London Underground taboo.
Three strangers had a conversation together.
Notice how carefully I choose my words.
(1) Three: Not one person having a conversation with himself. This happens quite often – through alcohol, insanity, loneliness, frustration, whatever. Not two people getting caught up in conversation. This happens now and then. Maybe I experience this a bit more often because I’m a priest in a clerical collar, which gives an opening. But in this case three individual human beings, sitting on the tube, apparently normal people.
(2) Strangers: All three were strangers to each other. So this isn’t two friends plus another stranger; or three old friends who bump into each other; it’s three people who have never met before. Unless they were plants/actors? Maybe I was on Candid Camera?
(3) Had a conversation together: Not just ‘grunted’ (‘Oh for goodness sake’; ‘what are they playing at’) or ‘exchanged information’ (‘What’s the next station?’; ‘Green Park’) or ‘shared curses’ (no descriptions needed).
Someone threw in the opening gambit, the others dipped their toes in, they felt their way forward hesitantly, and then they went for it and actually talked to each other – for about ten minutes. As normal people would. About where they had been, where they were going, what they were doing. It was remarkable.
At first, being British, what did I feel? Acute embarrassment. A discomfort so deep it was beyond words or reason. I thought, ‘Oh no – they can’t do that! Don’t they know? Where is this going? How can this last?’ As if some natural order had been disturbed; a sense of foreboding. I looked away; I concentrated even more intently on what I was reading.
Then, after about two minutes, when I realised it wasn’t just a dream, I felt an almost dizzy sense of liberation, a gratitude; even a kind of awe in the face of the boundless possibilities that open up to humankind when people realise they can be normal and that they don’t have to play the games. More than an experience of the Emperor’s New Clothes; as if I had secretly believed that the train would crash and even darker things happen if we didn’t follow the rules. (Where did these rules come from? Were they given as an injection when we were seven days old? Something in the water?)
Ten minutes of conversation between three strangers. I had a small part in it, but I wasn’t one of the three main protagonists. It began, inevitably, with an enquiry about where we were; and when the second person couldn’t answer, I threw in ‘Boston Manor’ – and then sank back into my reading.
But now comes the truth. It’s all as I have said, and it was indeed miraculous. It’s certainly the first time in my 45 years that I have witnessed this. But it was the Piccadilly Line; and yes, we were travelling from west to east – in other words, we were coming from the direction of Heathrow.
So perhaps, for the social anthropologists who have been devouring this post, it wasn’t technically part of the Underground system – they will bring up some formal exemption; perhaps, because it’s almost a spur from Heathrow, it counts – in the sociology of urban space – not as a tube line but as an airport lounge; as if the category of ‘train’ or ‘tube’ was somehow suspended for the thirty minutes from Terminals 1,2 and 3 to Earls Court.
In an airport lounge, even in Britain, you are allowed to talk to strangers, even to two or three at the same time; as long as you amble in nonchalantly, and back off at the merest hint of disinterest or disdain. And yes, I admit it, the conversation was about where they had been (on their travels) and where they were going. Or in this case, where they had not been (because someone had missed their plane – it’s a long story…And maybe that’s why it was allowed to develop, because it activated the sub-rule that you can break the rule and talk about recent or impending public disasters; only this wasn’t public but private, but it was felt so intensely that it took on a public dimension).
So maybe it wasn’t a miracle.
But they did talk. And they were complete strangers. And it was the tube!
And I was there to witness it! Something to tell my great nieces and nephews in years to come.
Do you cry in public? Do you cry in front of The X Factor or Downton Abbey when the emotion gets just a bit too overwhelming?
Remember that Hilary Clinton’s fight-back in the 2008 Primaries came, not when she started fighting, but when she started crying about how difficult things were in a downtown diner. And three of the Republican candidates choked up in front of millions of viewers at a recent debate in Iowa:
Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former pizza executive Herman Cain both choked up and fought back tears. Santorum got misty-eyed when he talked about the struggles facing his young daughter Isabella, who was born with the genetic disorder Trisomy 18, which results in main-organ malfunctions. Cain, on the other hand, choked up about being diagnosed with cancer. Forum moderator Frank Luntz said: “I feel like Dr. Phil.”
William Leith explains how the return of public emotion is a return to the social norm, and the stiff upper lip is just a recent blip.
Interestingly, we haven’t always felt the need to stay in control. The academic historian Thomas Dixon, who has studied the history of crying, tells me that the 18th and 19th centuries were very “tear-soaked” – crying in public, particularly at the theatre, and particularly in the cheap seats, was no big deal. Emoting was linked to popular culture – and also to religion. There used to be lots of weeping when people found God, and when they repented their sins. Then came the era of the “stiff upper lip”, an age of stoicism engendered by Empire, the Victorian public schools, and muscular Christianity.
The fashion for keeping your emotions bottled up lasted about 100 years. “Since the Seventies,” says Dixon, “we’ve been returning to something like normality.” In other words, normality is about losing control.
I asked Adam Curtis why television is so busy creating these tear-jerking moments. There are various reasons, he said. One is that we are hungry for authenticity; in a highly mechanised world, in which we are often confronted with things that are fake, or are copies of other things, we seek the genuine. And the emotion that causes you to cry seems to come from far inside yourself. When you cry, it feels very personal. It feels as if the person crying is the real you.
“In this age,” Curtis says, “individual feeling is the most important thing for us. What we neglect to think is that these feelings are part of a wider social system. Your feelings are as much from outside you as inside you.” In other words, if a skilled television producer knows how to short-circuit our brains, if he can locate the neural back alley that leads directly to our amygdala, he can make us lose control for a moment. Is that right? “The great myth of our time is that what we feel comes totally from within us,” Curtis says. “It’s shaped by outside forces.”
So what were these outside forces? In the second half of the last century, we were stepping out of the shadow of totalitarianism, and wanted to celebrate the self. At the cutting edge, there were talk-ins and hug-ins and love-ins. After this, the culture at large began to celebrate open displays of emotion. Footballers hugged and kissed each other when they scored. The air-punch began its journey towards universal acceptability.
One by one, the old citadels of restraint toppled and fell. We began to see cricketers hugging each other, politicians punching the air when they won, and crying on television when they were skewered by a personal question. Gazza cried. Maradona cried. Margaret Thatcher cried. The Australian prime minister Bob Hawke cried. Peter Mandelson cried. Bill Clinton raised a finger to the corner of his eye, several times. Diana cried. Diana died. Blair, making the announcement outside the church in Sedgefield, seemed to be holding back tears. There was a catch in his voice. Anything less would have seemed inappropriate.
Then came the public outpouring. More recently, millions of Apple fans mourned the passing of Steve Jobs with similarly religious fervour. Candle-lit vigils were held outside Apple stores; wreaths and half-eaten apples were placed, and iPhones laid on the ground like virtual eternal flames.
Displaying our emotions, just like hiding them, seems to be contagious. Right now, we’re all going through a weepy phase. And who knows — in another few decades’ time, we might be back to the stiff upper lip.
Fashions move fast these days. One question remains. Is it healthier to hide our emotions, or to display them? Decades of research have come down on the side of display. But the tide may be turning. A survey conducted on Americans about the trauma of 9/11 has tentatively suggested that keeping your feelings bottled up might not be so bad. At least, those participants who chose not to discuss their feelings right after the attacks seemed to fare better, mentally and physically, over the next two years, than those who had responded openly about how 9/11 had affected them. The jury is out.
At seminary it was suggested that there was a place for ‘appropriate self-disclosure’ in your ministry as a priest. I have found that phrase very helpful over the years. As priests and public figures, our personalities and feelings are not meant to be completely hidden; but nor are they meant to get in the way of our ministry, or in the way of others meeting Christ. The word ‘appropriate’ is so important. We are human – but part of being human is knowing what to share with others and when to do that.
Many Catholics are already getting used to the new English translation of the Mass; and the beautifully produced altar missals have been around for a few weeks now. The official launch is the beginning of Advent.
We are in a strange transitional period where most parishes are using the new translation, but some are not. This caused liturgical chaos a few weeks ago when I went to a funeral in a parish that is still using the old translation, with visiting mourners (including a number of priests) from parishes all over the country who had already switched, and didn’t know whether to revert back or acclaim even more loudly ‘And with your spirit’ and ‘It is right and just’.
The transitional missal texts on top of the old missal
I gave a talk on the new translation this week, which gave me an incentive to look into some of the online resources available for catechesis and general understanding of the process and the end results. One of the best sites is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops website, which has an extremely helpful section dedicated to the translation called Welcoming the Roman Missal: Third Edition.
There are articles, FAQs, sample texts, and a host of multi-media resources and downloads. Definitely worth a look.
One of the most helpful sections simply puts the old translation and the new one side by side, and highlights the changes so you can compare them easily. Here are the People’s Parts and the Priest’s parts, with commentary boxes.
When you see it like this, it becomes very clear, very quickly, how many words and phrases of the Mass were not just interpreted or re-phrased or even paraphrased, but simply cut out for the old translation. Some of this, I’m sure, was motivated by a desire for a noble simplicity; some of it was an attempt to find English phrases that could carry the meaning of the Latin without needing to map each word literally (this theory of interpretation was called ‘dynamic equivalence’). But some of it, unfortunately, perhaps stemmed from an unhappiness on the translators’ part with some of the sentiments and theology of the prayers themselves. Whatever the reasons, there is no doubt that we have a richer translation that brings us closer to the heart and mind of the Church’s liturgical prayer.
One nice factoid I discovered in my research (not on the USCCB website – I can’t remember where). In the debate about the dialogue ‘The Lord be with you… And also with you / And with your spirit’, it’s commonly pointed out that this is not a symmetrical dialogue, as if the prayers are interchangeable. The priest or bishop (and sometimes the deacon) is praying as an ordained minister for the people: ‘May the Lord be with you’. And in response, the people pray for their minister: ‘And with your spirit’. It’s only ever addressed to the minister, because it’s a specific prayer that the spirit given to him at his ordination may be strengthened and renewed, so that he may serve his people more faithfully and worthily, especially in this liturgical celebration.
The factoid was this, that Ronald Knox translated the response as: ‘And with you, his minister’, so that the theological meaning of the prayer would be built into the translation. I wouldn’t use this myself, but I like what it’s trying to do.
[But see Jack Mahoney's article here, about the non-significance of 'thy spirit' and the significance of 'with' instead! Thanks Tony and Katherine]
Looking across the landscape of contemporary culture - at the arts, science, religion, politics, philosophy; sorting through the jumble; seeing what stands out, what unsettles, what intrigues, what connects, what sheds light. Father Stephen Wang is a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Westminster, London. He is Dean of Studies at Allen Hall seminary, where he teaches philosophy and theology. [Banner photo with kind permission of Matthew Powell]
As far as I know none of the image use in this blog is against copyright law. Images copied here are either (i) my own or (ii) out of copyright or (iii) used under a Creative Commons License [CCL], which means (roughly, usually) that the photographer (or copyright owner) has agreed the unedited image can be used non-commercially with proper attribution. If I mark an image as CCL it means that I have used the image under a CCL; it does not mean that I am now licensing this image with a CCL.
