Saints and Sinners, Warts and All...

Given Michael Gove's habit of enthusing about a new idea every ten minutes or so, and equipped as he is with the most protuberant of eyes, I often think he'd do well in a tweed suit and goggles, driving a motor car, shouting 'poop poop!', and telling all and sundry of his magnificent plans. It's not that he's a fool -- far from it -- but that I think he'd be better off having fewer ideas and thinking them through properly.

I was reminded that the other day, with the Guardian reporting on how the University of Edinburgh's Tom Devine is deeply opposed to the Secretary for Educations plans to remodel how history is taught in British schools, or English ones at any rate:

'I am root-and-branch opposed to Gove's approach. It smells of whiggery; of history as chauvinism. You cannot pick out aspects of the past that may be pleasing to people.'

Somehow I'd missed this story when it first reared its propagandist head last autumn. Here's Gove in Parliament back in November:

'The changes we are making to the national curriculum and to accountability, through the English baccalaureate, will ensure that history is taught as a proper subject, so that we can celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world, from the role of the Royal Navy in putting down the slave trade, to the way in which, since 1688, this nation has been a beacon for liberty that others have sought to emulate. We will also ensure that it is taught in a way in which we can all take pride.'

Now, if this honestly reflects what Michael Gove thinks history is for, and what it's about, and indeed what he thinks British history really consists of, then he should be kept a long way away from the history curriculum. While schools-level history shouldn't be an exercise in national self-flagellation, neither should it be a glorification of the march of history or a celebration of how wonderful our respective countries are. Despite Niall Ferguson's moneyspinning screeds, history isn't about propaganda. It's not about cherry-picking the bits you like, so that you can celebrate the good things your country has done. 

It's messier than that. Hell, life is messier than that.

Paying for Patriotism

Chesterton wrote a wonderful short essay once upon a time called 'Paying for Patriotism'; I first read it in the posthumous collection The Common Man. It's very short and well worth quoting in full:

'Somebody was recently remonstrating with me in connection with certain remarks that I have made touching the history of English misgovernment in Ireland. The criticism, like many others, was to the effect that these are only old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago; that the present generation is not responsible for them; that there is, as the critic said, no way in which he or I could have assisted or prevented them; that if anyone was to blame, he had gone to his account; and we are not to blame at all. There was mingled with his protest, I think, a certain suggestion that an Englishman is lacking in patriotism when he resurrects such corpses in order to connect them with crime.

Now the queer thing is this: that I think it is I who am standing up for the principle of patriotism; and I think it is he who is denying it. As a matter of fact, I am one of the few people left, of my own sort and calling, who do still believe in patriotism; just as I am among the few who do still believe in democracy. Both these ideas, were exaggerated extravagantly and, what is worse, erroneously, or entirely in the wrong way, during the nineteenth century; but the reaction against them today is very strong, especially among the intellectuals. But I do believe that patriotism rests on a psychological truth; a social sympathy with those of our own sort, whereby we see our own potential acts in them; and understand their history from within. But if there truly be such a thing as a nation, that truth is a two-edged sword, and we must let it out both ways.

Therefore I answer my critic thus. It is quite true that it was not I, G. K. Chesterton, who pulled the beard of an Irish chieftain by way of social introduction; it was John Plantagenet, afterwards King John; and I was not present. It was not I, but a much more distinguished literary gent, named Edmund Spenser, who concluded on the whole that the Irish had better be exterminated like vipers; nor did he even ask my advice on so vital a point. I never stuck a pike through an Irish lady for fun, after the siege of Drogheda, as did the God-fearing Puritan soldiers of Oliver Cromwell. Nobody can find anything in my handwriting that contributes to the original drafting of the Penal Laws; and it is a complete mistake to suppose that I was called to the Privy Council when it decided upon the treacherous breaking of the Treaty of Limerick. I never put a pitchcap on an Irish rebel in my life; and there was not a single one of the thousand floggings of '98 which I inflicted or even ordered. If that is what is meant, it is not very difficult to see that it is quite true.

But it is equally true that I did not ride with Chaucer to Canterbury, and give him a few intelligent hints for the best passages in The Canterbury Tales. It is equally true that there was a large and lamentable gap in the company seated at the Mermaid; that scarcely a word of Shakespeare's most poetical passages was actually contributed by me; that I did not whisper to him the word "incarnadine" when he was hesitating after "multitudinous seas"; that I entirely missed the opportunity of suggesting that Hamlet would be effectively ended by the stormy entrance of Fortinbras. Nay, aged and infirm as I am, it were vain for me to pretend that I lost a leg at the Battle of Trafalgar, or that I am old enough to have seen (as I should like to have seen), ablaze with stars upon the deck of death, the frail figure and the elvish face of the noblest sailor of history.

Yet I propose to go on being proud of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Nelson; to feel that the poets did indeed love the language that I love and that the sailor felt something of what we also feel for the sea. But if we accept this mystical corporate being, this larger self, we must accept it for good and ill. If we boast of our best, we must repent of our worst. Otherwise patriotism will be a very poor thing indeed. '

This, I think, is a very sensible attitude. We cannot take pride in the heroic deeds of our ancestors unless we also feel shame in their villainous ones. True patriotism -- and true history -- must paint our portraits as we are and as we have been warts and all.

1688 and Slavery... seen with both eyes

Putting that another way, I think British schoolchildren should indeed learn the role Britain played in suppressing the Atlantic slave trade; they should also learn how Britain first became rich through that selfsame slave trade, and at a cost of so much African life and liberty. 

Likewise, they should indeed learn about the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688, but what they should learn shouldn't be limited to how the 1689 Bill of Rights played so important a role in underpinning the American colonists' shirking off of their British yoke. They should learn too of how the Revolution was a deliberate attempt by Parliament to block religious liberty and to shore up a uniformly Protestant state; further they should learn that the Glorious Revolution marked the last time Britain was successfully invaded by a foreign army.

And yes, it was. The Dutch forces outnumbered those of the Crown, and the Dutch viewed the invasion of Britain and the usurpation of the English and Scottish crowns as a way of precluding an Anglo-French alliance against them. It means nothing that Parliament invited them in; it's regularly been the case that invasions occur because some in a country tell foreigners that their support would be appreciated, and given how few people had elected that parliament, I don't really think it's tenable to claim that it had any democratic legitimacy. Oligarchic legitimacy, maybe.

In short, if Gove's willing to have British history taught in a warts and all way, then that'll be great. But if he wants to airbrush it, well, I really hope this idea gets packed away back into Michael Gove's Big Box of Whims.

A whistling sentinel...

When I heard Patrick Leigh Fermor had died, one of the first thoughts that struck me was to wonder who takes his place. If Paddy had been the greatest living Englishman, as I've long maintained, sometimes drunkenly, who now can lay claim to that title?

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, T.H. White, yet to become the author of the twentieth century's supreme reworking of the tale of Arthur, clearly had a similar thought, and addressed his pupils to tell them his conclusion.

Boys, he said, 'G.K. Chesterton died yesterday. P.G. Wodehouse is now the greatest living master of the English language.'

I like that.

It's been three quarters of a century since Gilbert died, and he keeps delighting people and changing lives. Terry Pratchett was surely right to say that small doses of Chesterton, taken regularly, are good for the soul -- and how I wish he could take his own advice now -- but great gulps of the Wild Knight of Battersea can transform us.

Just speaking for myself, I think I'd like semi-colons a lot less were it not for Gilbert, and I'd almost certainly not be a practicing Catholic -- or even the most lukewarm of theists -- were it not for him. Even now, whenever I revisit him, I return refreshed and thinking anew, always remembering that when you get down to it where faith is involved,

'It is not a question of Theology,
It is a question of whether, placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch, you will whistle or not.'

It's worth reading what Mark Shea has to say about him, as well as Sean Dailey, who points out that were GKC to be added to the canon of the saints amongst whom is surely already rejoicing, today would almost certainly be his feast day.

Atheist Buses and Religious Labels

Just reading the Guardian this morning I saw that the Atheist Bus campaign is moving to its second -- and apparently final -- phase. You remember the campaign, of course, where buses were festooned with large ads declaring 'There's probably no God. No stop worrying and enjoy your life.' I know, that slogan could do with a lot of unpacking, but then so could all the ones for, say, the Alpha Course, so I'll let it lie for now.

Anyway, phase two is, I gather, intended mainly as an attack on Faith schools, and is based around the slogan, 'Please don't label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.' Apparently adults shouldn't tell children what to think; the irony of the slogan, supposedly voiced by a child, almost certainly being composed by an adult is difficult to ignore.

It seems to me that there are two major problems with this campaign, the first of which is that I'm not convinced its authors actually understand what religion is.

Take a look at the posters, and look at all the labels that the poster's backers have cited: Agnostic Child, Atheist Child, Scientologist Child, Mormon Child, Jehovah's Witness Child, Buddhist Child, Catholic Child, Protestant Child, Zoroastrian Child, Muslim Child, Sikh Child, Post-Modernist Child, Humanist Child, Anarchist Child, Libertarian Child, Conservative Child, Socialist Child, Capitalist Child, Marxist Child...

I think the point being made here is that all of these are, in the views of the poster's backers, belief systems, and that it's abhorrent to label children with beliefs held by their parents. Presumably if there were space we'd see such terms as Jewish Child, Hindu Child, Orthodox Child, Bahá'í Child, Wiccan Child, Rastafarian Child, Animist Child, Shintoist Child, Nationalist Child, Unionist Child, Fascist Child, Feminist Child, Pacifist Child, Modernist Child, Social Darwinist Child, Objectivist Child, Existentialist Child, Logical Positivist Child, and so forth.

The first questions we need to ask when looking at this sort of litany of belief-systems are whether it's a valid list, and where this whole anti-labelling mission comes from.


Because It's Always Fun to Quote Richard Dawkins
The intellectual underpinnings, and I use that phrase generously, of this thesis seem to lie in chapter nine of Professor Dawkins' lazy and ignorant The God Delusion. If I may quote:

'To put it another way, the idea that baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one religion to another at a stroke seems absurd -- but it is surely not more absurd than labelling a tiny child as belonging to any particular religion in the first place. . . Even without physical abduction, isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about? . . . Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place. . . I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life, and of morals. The very sound of the phrase "Christian child" or "Muslim child" should grate like fingernails on a blackboard. . . Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them -- "Catholic child", "Protestant child", "Jewish child", "Muslim child", etc. -- although no comparable labels: no conservative children, no liberal children, no Republican children, no Democrat children. Please, please raise your consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening. A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents.'

Sometimes Children Can See Shades of Grey...
Where do you start with this? Well, back when I started secondary school, my very first religion class began, once we'd settled down, with an open question to the class from our teacher: 'Can anyone here tell me what the word 'religion' means?' After an awkward silence, I put up a tentative hand, and ventured, 'The belief in and worship of a deity or deities.' That was chalked up on the board, and the discussion began.

Now, I'm not saying I'd quite stick with that definition now, but I think my twelve-year-old self was onto something significant in identifying religion as requiring both belief and worship. As a rule, religion's a matter of both creed and cult; it's about what you do just as much as it is what you think.

This, I think, is why people who describe atheism as a religion are essentially wrong; atheism may be a belief system, but it generally lacks a cultic element, save in regimes where race, nation, state, class, party, leader, or something else is deified.

And therein lies a huge part of the problem with this thesis. Religion is only partly about what you think, and is very much about what you do, whereas political ideologies and philosophical stances are at heart simply about what you think. As such, I think it's pretty easy to make the case that it's reasonable to describe children as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and so forth, in a way that it's not reasonable to describe them as Conservative, Marxist, or Postmodernist.

In short, Dawkins' thesis, to which his acolytes and fellow-travellers have so unthinkingly signed up, is not so much incorrect as it is simply invalid. It's not even that he's comparing apples and oranges; he's comparing apples and tractors.


Post-Protestant Atheism in Action
Why might he be doing this? Well, part of the problem is that Professor Dawkins clearly retains a somewhat Protestant worldview; by his own terms a cultural Christian, he is, rather like Philip Pullman, an Anglican Atheist. Indeed, in the tail-end of his God Delusion chapter on 'religion as child abuse' he bangs on for a handful of pages about how great the King James Bible is, and how we should all be familiar with it as a literary reservoir.

Until the Printing Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, as Karen Armstrong has pointed out, religion was usually at least as much about orthopraxy as it was about orthodoxy. It was about doing -- whether in terms of rituals or ethics -- at least as much as it was about believing.

Religion changed, at least in Europe and the West, after Luther posted his theses and issued his battle-cries of 'faith alone' and 'scripture alone'. Out went prayers for the dead, clerical celibacy, pilgrimages, penance, Our Lord's command to commemorate him in the mass, and active participation in other sacraments as visible rites that make present divine grace. St James's emphasis on good works and compassion was nudged aside, and for many people the definition of a good Christian became someone who believed in Jesus and who read his or her Bible.

It's this essentially Protestant understanding of Christianity that nestles in the mind of Professor Dawkins, and indeed that leads blowhards like Christopher Hitchens to limit the term Christian to those who have read the New Testament, a criterion that would exclude most of history's Christians, most notably the Apostles.


Practising, not Professing
Religion, then, can be a practical thing, and this surely lies at the heart of the idea that a child who goes to Mass can be fairly described as a Catholic child, or a child who observes the Sabbath can be no less accurately described as a Jewish child, or a child who prays facing Mecca five times a day can be with equally good reason be described as a Muslim child. I can't help but think of how bemused the then unitarian G.K. Chesterton used to be when first getting to know the woman who would eventually become his wife:

'She practised gardening; in that curious Cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it.'

This incomprehension surely lies behind Professor Dawkins' failure to grasp that terms such as 'Catholic child' and 'Jewish child' can be meaningful in a way that 'Marxist child' and 'Logical Positivist child' can not.


Not Just What You Do... But What You Are
Betraying his prejudices most thoroughly, though, is his dismissal to understand the Catholic -- and indeed Orthodox -- understanding of what happens at Baptism. Here he is:

'It was a central part of the Roman Catholic belief-system that, once a child had been baptized, however informally and clandestinely, that child was irrevocably transformed into a Christian. . . Amazingly, for a rite that could have such monumental significance for a whole extended family, the Catholic Church allowed (and still allows) anybody to baptize anybody else. The baptizer doesn't have to be a priest. Neither the child, nor the parents, nor anybody else has to consent to the baptism. Nothing need be signed. Nothing need be officially witnessed. All that is necessary is a splash of water, a few words, a helpless child, and a superstitious and catechistically brainwashed babysitter. . . the idea that baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one religion to another seems absurd.'

Leaving aside his apparent failure to grasp that extraordinary baptisms ought only to be performed in situations of dire necessity, and his evident ignorance that the Church only regards such baptisms as efficacious if performed by someone who genuinely intends to perform what the Church performs when administering the sacrament, what's striking here is that he sees baptism as simply something that changes someone from one religion to another.

For Dawkins, as we've seen religions are simply belief-systems, and if we define them as such then it goes without saying that baptism has no real effect whatsoever: it's a washing of the head, not of the brain! The thing is, though, that they're rather more than that.

Catholics and Orthodox Christians see baptism as a sacrament that enacts an ontological change in the recipient. It is a mechanism by which, in the words of the Catechism, 'we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers into her mission.'

Baptism, then is a process of divine adoption, wherein we are reborn as sons of God, and as part of the Church that is the body of Christ. The word 'Christian', in its original form, basically means someone who belongs to Christ. It has, in its essential form, surprisingly little to do with belief. This shouldn't be surprising, given Christianity's Jewish ancestry. After all, what is a Jew?

'A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism. It is important to note that being a Jew has nothing to do with what you believe or what you do. A person born to non-Jewish parents who has not undergone the formal process of conversion but who believes everything that Orthodox Jews believe and observes every law and custom of Judaism is still a non-Jew, even in the eyes of the most liberal movements of Judaism, and a person born to a Jewish mother who is an atheist and never practices the Jewish religion is still a Jew, even in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox.'

Professor Dawkins, who has some interesting opinions about Jews, would doubtless dismiss this as nonsense, but that doesn't the change the fact that the traditional definition of Jewishness relates to what one is, rather than what one does, let alone what one thinks.

So much for labelling, anyway. That leaves the second big question, which concerns whether parents should be free to educate their children in accordance with their beliefs, or whether they should be compelled to educate them in accordance with, say, those of Professor Dawkins. I'll get into that in a day or two.

What Qualifications are Needed for a Job like this?

There's a fine passage in Chesterton's introduction to The Everlasting Man where he comments on the character of so many opponents of the Church in his day:

'They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda.'

I've found it difficult not to think of this over the past week, when following Ruth Gledhill's Twitter feed and Blog. Ruth has apparently been nominated as 'Digital Journalist of the Year' in the British Press Awards. I've been reading her stuff for years, though I've done so in the full knowledge that she doesn't seem particularly highly regarded among Catholic bloggers, with Mark Shea, for example, dismissing her as 'perhaps the single most clueless religion reporter on earth', and Jimmy Akin regularly refering to her as Ruth 'I'm Too Dangerously Unqualified To Keep My Job' Gledhill.

After this week, I'm starting to understand why. The Times ran an article by her a couple of days ago under the heading 'Give up Tweeting? Tell it to the birds, your Holiness' in which she said:

The Roman Catholic Church in Italy wants us to give up texting, Tweeting and other tecchie messaging services for Lent. This is the organisation presided over by a Pope who claims he did not know Bishop Richard Williamson was a Holocaust denier when he lifted the excommunication on him last month. [...]

This was even though Italian blogs had been writing about it, The Catholic Herald in England had covered it and I had blogged and reported it extensively for The Times.

These reports were easily accessible online. They had been the subject of debate on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. But they were not picked up by clerics who, we now know, believe texting is tantamount to sin.

Now, as I mentioned a couple of weeks back, it's a regrettable fact that as a rule you should never trust what the mainstream media says about religion. Seriously. Take anything you read or hear with a barrel of salt. In this case, take a look at the premise, itself not quite accurate, but let that go, that 'The Roman Catholic Church in Italy wants us to give up texting, Tweeting and other tecchie messaging services for Lent' and then look at the assertion that these clerics 'believe texting is tantamount to sin'.

Right. So the Religion Correspondent for the Times is reporting that the Church in Italy is recommending that we stop sinning for Lent, presumably being free to start again afterwards. Does that sound remotely likely to you? It's the nature of Lenten fasting that in order to develop our self-mastery we renounce good things, not bad ones! We're not meant to be doing the bad ones at all!

The rest of the article's pap too, but the fact that such a fundamental misconception underpins it should be fair warning that the whole thing needs extensive unpacking. For what it's worth, though, yes, the Archbishop of Modena has indeed suggested that young Italians might indeed 'cleanse themselves from the virtual world and get back into touch with themselves' by fasting from text messaging and social networking sites, say, over Lent. Although other bishops have echoed this call, not one of them has even hinted that these things are wrong in themselves, instead merely pointing out that they can all too easily become obsessive behaviour, the sort of thing from which we might do well to free ourselves.

The point of Lenten fasting, after all, is that 'by denying ourselves these good things we encourage an attitude of humility, free ourselves from dependence on them, cultivate the spiritual discipline of sacrifice, and remind ourselves of the importance of spiritual goods over earthly goods.'


And then there was the Trad Mass
The other lowlight of Ruth's week was her attendance at an Extraordinary Rite Mass at the SSPX church of St Joseph and St Padarn in Holloway in north London. In itself this would hardly be a bad thing, you might think, but Ruth appears to have gone mainly with a view to catching a glimpse or even exchanging a few words with Bishop Richard Williamson, a buffoon on whom I'd rather not waste words at the minute. Throughout the service she twittered away, reporting the mass as it happened with a view to having the whole affair explained to her -- and her readers -- by Chris Gillibrand of Catholic Church Conservation, who tweeted back over the course of the morning.

She's edited the conversation down into something fairly manageable on her blog, but I've managed to assemble a slightly less coherent but more comprehensive version of it here.

RuthieGledhill: Church absolutely packed men in black women in lace headscarves. No sign of Bishop Williamson. My neighbour is two-year-old old girl... priest wearing biretta like my dad used to wear on moped when doing parish visits in gratwich kingston and uttoxeter
Gillibrand: What better place to celebrate St David's Day than a church dedicated to St Padarn, with St Teilo a companion of St David.'.. If it wasn't so packed -- people tend to sit near the front rather than at the back at Latin Masses.'
RuthieGledhill: No sign of Bishop Williamson.
Gillibrand: Suspect the SSPX will have locked the Bishop in a chapel at Wimbledon and be tempted to throw the key away.
RuthieGledhill: Priest delivering homily. Warns against speaking to the press in case we 'twist' words.
Gillibrand: Expect a long sermon. Traditionalists sometimes in far-flung places don't get to a Latin Mass so often... so priests preach long and repeat in different ways to get many messages across.
RuthieGledhill: Priest says desert fathers in Egypt determined to stamp out bodily desires in order to raise up the soul... the derts the hermits monasteries prayers fasting charity the love of God... What is the relevance of fourth century hermits to 21st century life?
Gillibrand: Epistle has a message for the Bishop - "Give no offense to any man that our ministry be not blamed."
RuthieGledhill: What should drive us is the desire to imitate the desert fathers - do similar great works for Lent.
Gillibrand: Back to the early church was the watchword of Vatican II.
RuthieGledhill: Homily over, Nicene creed. Genitum non factum. We all kneeling. A lot of kneeling and standing.
Gillibrand: In a modern Mass, there is no longer a requirement to kneel at the mention of Incarnation which I find strange!... Will be kneeling again at the Incarnation during the Last Gospel -- John 1 which will be read at the end of Mass.
RuthieGledhill: Two young men at back leading the sung recitation. Surprised priests don't have backs to us but facing across sanctuary... Put two pounds in collection plate. Not the kind of place that gives receipts. Can I claim it on expenses? Every penny counts these days.
Gillibrand: They turn their backs to the congregation for the canon of the Mass.... Your reward will be great in heaven.

RuthieGledhill: Maybe I will let the two pounds go for the good of my soul. Lavabo inter. Hand washing and sprinkling tinkling sounds. Sit kneel stand. Find nice young intelligent girl at back of church to show me where we are in missal.
Gillibrand: I was wondering if you had the texts.
RuthieGledhill: Bell rings loudly. Sanctus spiritus. Even I recognise this...
Gillibrand: I wash my hands among the innocent, and. ... and tell of all Thy wondrous works, O Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy house and the place where Thy glory dwelleth
RuthieGledhill: adoration and elevation over. stand. Pater noster, qui est in caelis
Gillibrand: Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord ... which is said by only the priest. Some people familiar with Latin but new to the old Rite sometimes join in.
RuthieGledhill: Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi... priest reading in silence we skip three pages. Love the singing and the long amens.
Gillibrand: Symbolism being that it is the prayer Our Lord teaches us and the priest is acting in persona Christi. ... Agnus Dei and prayers of penitence prior to communion
RuthieGledhill: Libera me. yup i go along with that.
Gillibrand: ...also in Gregorian Chant - the music of the church... are there three or just one priest celebrating?

RuthieGledhill: [Holy Communion.] Do i go up for a blessing? As my mind has been on work and not the service praps not. what do you think Chris? ... 'Turn off that f*****g mobile' says woman.
Gillibrand: Ask the priest afterwards - wouldn't want to alarm the faithful.
RuthieGledhill: woman tries to grab BlackBerry and raises fist at me. Heart beating v fast.
Gillibrand: If you had asked the priest before hand it would be easier and would have been given. ... Retreat.
RuthieGledhill: Nice woman whispers: 'Don't let her worry you. We have quite a lot of nutters here. We have normal people too.'
Gillibrand: Home for sinners, the lonely the dispossessed and the just plain angry... All OK?
RuthieGledhill: 'I've a good mind to hit you,' says woman. 'Please do,' I say thinking of the copy.
Gillibrand: rather I suggest retreat to the doors and carry on.
RuthieGledhill: 'Oh you'ld love that wouldn't you,' she hisses, and backs off... Angry woman comes back for the killer blow. 'You aren't even wearing a headscarf.'
Gillibrand: She has hit you?
RuthieGledhill: Placeat tibi. Isn't what I am doing a form of homage to truth and justice? No-one asks me to leave, so I don't.
Gillibrand: Exactly.
RuthieGledhill: Angry woman left. I feel sad. Obsequium servitutus meae.
Gillibrand: May the tribute of my worship be pleasing to Thee, most Holy Trinity, and grant that the sacrifice which I, all unworthy... And now comes the Last Gospel sending Christians out into the world... Deleted from the new Mass, where the belief is that the Holy Spirit comes during the Mass rather than in the Commission. ... at the end
RuthieGledhill: Retreat to empty side chapel. sing beautiful hymn.
Gillibrand: Pray for her. When early Christians turned the other cheek, they weren't thinking about copy.

RuthieGledhill: Priests processing out. All my sins I now detest them, Never will I sin again, we sing...
Gillibrand: Dedicated to which saint?... What's the hymn?
RuthieGledhill: Waiting at back of emptying church to see clergy and apologise for upsetting worshipper... Hymn was God of mercy and compassion
Gillibrand: 'French Melody, adapt. from G.B. Pergolesi, d1736... Au sang qu'um Dieu, lyric writer unknown... French... Hymn magnificent espec for Lent where even the French put aside joie de vivre... Canadian possibly.
RuthieGledhill: Nice whiskered man apologises for angry woman and says best way to speak to priest would be join confession queue. I do... pulled from confessional by a bald worshipper bloke before have chance to apologise or receive absolution... Priest intervenes in corridor and hears my apology and thanks me, says he can make no comment... Go for coffee. Nice whiskered man says I can join him...
Gillibrand: Suspect he would give a blessing if asked - absolution is a different matter.
RuthieGledhill: Afro-Carib from on our table asks about Williamson. Whiskered man says he won't be leaving Wimbledon... afro-caribbean man from deptford produces a pic of him and family with Rowan Williams. I start to feel better... going now. if u have come late to this and are puzzled see blog. timesonline.co.uk/gledhill On Chris's advice go back and asked for blessing. Was freely given....
Gillibrand: That's a relief.

I suppose I ought to feel slightly impressed that she went at all, and Chris Gillibrand defends her actions by saying 'As someone who, albeit at a distance, could be considered an accomplice, I think Ruth should be congratulated on boldly going where Protestants rarely if ever have gone before and indeed via twitter to take others with her, even if only in a virtual sense. An enlightened idea and enlightening to others.'

The thing is, though, I can't help but be disheartened by her observation on her blog that 'Today, as Richard Owen reports, the Catholic bishops in Italy have said the faithful should give up texting for Lent. I know from personal experience now that some Catholics detest people who text.'

That's hardly fair, is it? The angry woman may well have been out of line with how she behaved and what she said, but I can kind of see where she was coming from. I'd be aghast if somebody sat beside me at mass spent the whole service texting away -- I'd find it generally rude, but probably contemptuous towards both the congregation and indeed the object of worship Himself. To be fair, I'd not be impressed if I went out for dinner with someone, and they did that throughout the meal.

Ruth defends her own conduct by saying:

'I was as far to the back as I could be without being outside the church, and when I sensed my neighbours were finding the constant movement of my thumbs an irritant, I slipped into the side chapel or a corridor. At no point did I make a call on the phone, which was switched to silent. Maybe I did cross a line, but I reckoned at the time that given this was a church that regularly welcomes a Holocaust denier to speak, any sin I committed in reporting a service there was under the circumstances forgivable.'

I'm not sure that works, though. Most of the 'traditional' Catholics who'd attend such services seem to go because of what they see -- rightly or wrongly -- as the beauty, the purity, and the authenticity of the liturgy. They don't go to hear crackpot political or historical theories.

It seems to me that if she really wanted to report the news, rather than make the news, she ought to have done her research in advance, maybe by reading something like Ronald Knox's old and elementary but genuinely excellent The Mass in Slow Motion, and then gone along with a Catholic friend, with whom she could have discussed any points of confusion after mass.

After all, would her actions have been greeted any more favourably in an Anglican church? Or a mosque? Or in synagogue?

Is it 'Lent' or 'Loaned'?

Well, I'm glad to see that Rosmuc, An Aill bhuí, which I raved about here the other day, narrowly beat the equally fantastic Cliffs of Moher III in the Brother's competition.

He'd posted a set of five paintings to ask which one people thought should be put up for auction on EBay to raise money for Rape Crisis Network Ireland and St Patrick's Hospital and Marymount Hospice, the two charities supported by this year's Irish Blog Awards. It's his way of saying thanks for his paintings having been included in the event.

If you can’t join in the bidding, he says, you can still help by linking, blogging, tweeting, etc. If you can bid, though, it's surely well worth it. I mean, take a look.

Your wall'd look good around that, wouldn't it?

Having mentioned the Brother, his American Hell cartoon yesterday was a tad less bleak but rather more seasonal than usual, and it reminded me of Ardal O'Hanlon's spiel about Lent from a few years back:

One thing I found bizarre about the Catholic religion is the season of Lent, y’know, forty days, ends on Easter Sunday, and it corresponds to the time that Jesus spent fasting in the desert. You’re encouraged to make a little sacrifice during Lent, to show solidarity with Our Lord, who was cold and hungry and sandy, and all alone. And most major religions would have a period of sacrifice where they’d give up food completely and they’d nearly die of starvation, but not Catholics, ‘cause we know how to look after ourselves.

What do we give up?

Sweets.

Yeah, just ask somebody next year, ‘Ah, hello Brendan, what are you giving up for Lent?’
‘Eh, Crunchies. No more Crunchies for me for a whole month.’

Bloody hypocrite! If he really wanted to make a sacrifice he should give up something he really needs. Like oxygen, for example.

To be fair, we probably ought to be a bit tougher on ourselves than we tend to, but the Church has always recognised that people can go to extremes on this one. Indeed, if we look at the history of early Christianity, it may strike us as ascetic to a degree that may border on fanaticism, but if we compare it with the myriad other cults and heresies that sprang up at the time, what's staggering is that the Church stood against their pessimistic tide by insisting on the inherent goodness of creation, and in doing so it insisted that our sacrifices should have limits: we might deprive ourselves of the good things of this world, but we ought never to hold that the world itself was not good. To quote Chesterton, as is my wont:

The early Church was ascetic, but she proved that she was not pessimistic, simply by condemning the pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not declare that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did. The condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned as something crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth the very proof that the Church meant to be brotherly and broad. It proved that the primitive Catholics were specially eager to explain that they did not think man utterly vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy. They were ascetic because asceticism was the only possible purge of the sins of the world; but in the very thunder of their anathemas they affirmed for ever that their asceticism was not to be anti-human or anti-natural; that they did wish to purge the world and not destroy it.

[...]

That the early Church was itself full of an ecstatic enthusiasm for renunciation and virginity makes this distinction much more striking and not less so. It makes all the more important the place where the dogma drew the line. A man might crawl about on all fours like a beast because he was an ascetic. He might stand night and day on the top of a pillar and be adored for being an ascetic, but he could not say that the world was a mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic.

Which isn't to say that we mightn't do a smidge more than refrain from Crunchies. Am I fasting, and if so from what? None of your beeswax, as they say.

Lessons in Loyalty

There's a marvellous interview with Roy Keane in today's Irish Times, conducted by Tom Humphries, who I tend not to think of as one of Ireland's best sports journalists, but rather as one of Ireland's best journalists, and one who just happens to write about sport. He has quite a history with Keane, of course, having conducted the interview that precipitated the whole Homeric Saipan affair -- thus ultimately inspiring I, Keano -- and seems to be rather good at getting Keane to open up.

I never liked Keane as a player -- for all his talent and industry, I felt he was basically a thug. Sure, when he was in green he was our thug, but a thug nonetheless. As a manager though, I keep being impressed, being struck by his intelligence, his freshness, his openness, and indeed his humility. This little detail is very telling.

Things are changing with him anyway. Sunderland has infected him. For instance he pays some attention now to the wisdom of crowds. A few weeks ago against Everton in the Black Cats' own backyard he heard a voice behind him having a pop. He swivelled around and caught the end of the it. "Playing for 75 minutes with one up front and it isn't effin working ya . . ."

His face darkened and then.

"Do you know what? He was spot on. We had five in the middle and one up front and it wasn't working. It's like that. He was right. I don't always agree but a lot of time fans are spot on. Sometimes we get nasty letters. Sue in the office, well I don't think she shows me many, just the odd one when she thinks I should know what is going on. She gave me one last week. This man was having a go at the way we played (pause). So I rang him up."

At this point he allows a moment for you to picture the stricken features of the poor soul who hastily committed his frustrations to the vellum and sent them off confident perhaps that Sue in the office would either include the epistle in the bundle for the days shredding or hand it over in a sheaf heavy with disgruntlement. And here now was Roy Keane on the other end of the telephone. The thump, thump, thump of that vein in his temple audible down the line.

And?

"Ah, we had a chat. I said to him I knew what he was saying but it isn't time yet. In a few years hopefully we will have five maybe six players capable of getting forward but for now we have to survive. We need to play the way we do to stay in the division. Not to be a yo-yo club."

Patience is a virtue, after all, and realism matters. It's the kind of thing I wish legions of posters on Toffeeweb would keep in mind, that construction schedules for eternal cities are perhaps of their nature not so speedy as we might wish. It's interesting to see him cast a cold eye on loyalty in professional sport, too.

United. It's a surprise to hear him say he feels no affinity with any of his former professional clubs. Everything is changing though. He goes to clubs now as a manager where he remembers being booed, and fighting tooth and nail with the locals and hating the sight of their jerseys and they are wonderfully courteous and friendly to him. Good people. Arsenal couldn't be more decent. Arsene Wenger and Pat Rice. Rafa. Great. David Moyes. Excellent. He spent some time with Martin O'Neill after the Villa game and he could have sat listening to him all night. Everywhere he goes he soaks things up, looks for evidence of values and the right way to do things.

And affinity? It is with Rockmount AFC. Where he was made. The lads come over regularly. A couple of his old mates manage the team now and they talk about the old days and management. They were all over for the Villa game. Len Downey and Damien Martin are coming over for Middlesbrough.

The older he gets and the more he sees, the greater his appreciation of the innocence and the loyalties he saw at Rockmount. He went to Rockmount when he was eight and stayed till he was 16 or 17. That he believes now is what football is all about . He has seen the business side of the game and people suddenly begrudging you when you cease to be of use.

It still hurts. Forest tried to milk him for money he was owed when he was sold to Manchester United. The postscript to his playing career at Celtic was a mistake he feels. United still feel the sting of his venom. Their betrayal still hurts.

Having statements ready like United when you have served a certain amount of time for them and they don't even get the years you were there right in the statement. You think "Ah well, there you go".

"The day I left United, in hindsight, I should have stopped playing really. I lost the love of the game that Friday morning. I thought football is cruel, life is cruel. It takes two to tango also. I am fully responsible for my own actions but some things are wrong. I left on a Friday and they told me certain things before I left that day. I was told the following week I couldn't sign for another club. I had been led to believe I could. There were certain things I was told at certain meetings that were basic lies.

"That was part of the exit plans, I am convinced. Especially with my pride, I wasn't going to accept that. They had a statement prepared and they were thanking me for 11 and a half years of service. I had to remind the manager and (Manchester United chief executive) David Gill I had been there 12 and a half years. I think that might have been part of the plan. Then financial stuff was mentioned. I was thinking, my God. I am happy to leave. I won't go down that road. A week later they announced £70 or £80 million profit after telling me I hadn't played for six weeks and so they weren't prepared to do this and that. I told David Gill I had broken my foot playing for Manchester United against Liverpool. Pretty sad.

"I look back and think I should have said this and I should have said that. It is like Mick McCarthy at the World Cup. I always think when he said if you don't have respect for me you can't play for me, I should have said to him what I felt. I am not playing for you I am playing for Ireland. It is easy to be wise afterwards."

He talks for a long time about loyalty. Its meaning in his life. United hurts and Saipan hurts. They were times when he expected some loyalty back but he realises now when you outlive your usefulness to some people loyalty is too much to expect.

It's a telling point, really: loyalty to clubs is for fans, more than anything. Players can be fans and so too can owners, but ultimately players tend to play for money, for glory, and for fun; they're mercenaries, and owners are businessmen or moneylaunderers. But loyalty to teams? That's a fans' preserve.


I can't help wondering, when I think of this, whether fidelity in sport is related to fidelity in life; is it the case that people who are loyal in one thing are more likely to be loyal in other things? Are people who stick by teams through bad patches the kind of people who'll stick by friends and lovers through hard times? That's the real test: celebrating success is easy; it's enduring failure that's hard.

Chesterton wrote a fine essay on Kipling once, where he remarked that Kipling, ultimately, was a man who understood nothing of patriotism, as he lacked the faculty of absolutely attaching himself to any cause or community.

He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.

It's when success ebbs away that the true measure of the sports fan is shown. Whether this applies to other aspects of life is a different matter. Are Everton supporters less likely to cheat on their spouses than Chelsea ones, say? I reckon there'd be a Sociology PhD in that if someone wanted to give it a shot - Marital Infidelity and Football Fanaticism: A Study in Correspondence.


Just to wrap up, regarding the Keane interview, it's good to see that he's not quite as dour and earnest as he can sometimes seem.

Last year going for promotion everyone was getting uptight and the pressure was starting to tell. They were playing Wolves at home, a big game on the verge of the play-offs. They players were called in to their pre-game video analysis of Wolves. Instead they got that wonderful segment of Ken Loach's 1969 movie Kes where Brian Glover plays a teacher with a Bobby Charlton fixation. They just had a good laugh together. They never mentioned Wolves once. Then they went out and won.

You've not seen it? No, well, it'd been years since I did too, but don't worry, I've dug it out just for you. The Brother reckons it's one of the best passages in any film ever. Enjoy.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do

So says Uncle Gilbert, anyway, and I'm rather inclined to think that he was right.

One of my favourite short stories is an extraordinary work of horror, or dark fantasy at any rate, by the incomparable Fritz Leiber. Yes, I know, you've probably not heard of him. I've yet to meet anyone who hasn't scrunched their face up quizzically whenever I've mentioned Leiber. It's odd, really, as over the years there can't have been many writers as talented as him to have worked in the fields of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction. Certainly, there's surely been nobody as gifted to have excelled in all three genres; he's one of those writers to whom other writers line up to pay tribute: Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Terry Pratchett... you name them, they venerate him.

Certain themes and topics reappear with delightful frequency in Leiber's work, with theatre, fencing, sex, cats, and chess being the most distinctive landmarks in his fictional landscape. If you can spare the time, you should settle in to read the marvellous 'Space-time for Springers', a hilarious and heartbreaking tale which Neil Gaiman describes as 'a story that everyone who's ever tried to understand kittens should read'.

Rather less easily available is 'Midnight by the Morphy Watch', which I've heard described as the best piece of chess fiction ever written; I don't know about that, but it's a chilling study of obsession and madness, and a wonderful ode to the glories and dangers of the game which Leiber so adored. Try this for an opening:

Being World's Chess Champion (crowned or uncrowned) puts a more deadly and maddening strain on a man even than being President of the United States. We have a prime example enthroned right now. For more than ten years the present champion was clearly the greatest chess player in the world, but during that time he exhibited such willful and seemingly self-destructive behaviour -- refusing to enter crucial tournaments, quitting them for crankish reasons while holding a commanding lead, entertaining what many called a paranoid delusion that the whole world was plotting to keep him from reaching the top -- that many informed experts wrote him off as a contender for the highest honours. Even his staunchest supporters experienced agonizing doubts -- until he finally silenced his foes and supremely satisfied his friends by decisively winning the crucial and ultimate match on a fantastic polar island.

Promising, eh? Leiber's sinister little gem, nominated for a Hugo Award in 1975, tells the tale of an old, but not very good, chess player who one day in San Francisco comes across an odd shop where he recognises an antique pocket-watch that had been presented to Paul Morphy in 1859, when he returned to America in triumph after his victories in Europe. He buys the watch from the shop's owner, who appears to have no idea of its significance, and takes it home, and that night the watch begins to tick.

I'll not spoil the story on you, because you really should hunt it down, but here's another little taster, just to whet your appetite:

"Les échecs fantasques," he quoted, "It's a cynical madman's allegory with its doddering monarch, vampire queen, gangster knights, double-faced bishops, ramming rooks and inane pawns, whose supreme ambition is to change their sex and share the dodderer's bed."

Tempted? You really should be, you know.


So why am I banging on about chess, you might wonder. It's been over six months since I've last done so, after all, when I warbled at length about a metaphor I'd carefully contrived between sips in the pub one night. I'm still rather proud of that one, as it happens, not least because things do seem to be coming to pass pretty much as I expected.

The thing is, I'm not very good at chess. No, scratch that; I suck at chess as badly as some people suck at Photoshop. I should be good at it: I'm pretty smart, I have a good memory, I've a fine visual imagination, and I've spent ten years of my life pondering strategy and tactics. I use chess language when I discuss problems, talking of forks, pins, binds, mobility, stalemates, endgames, king hunts, perpetual check, windmills, poisoned pawns, you name it. There's a whole tactical vocabulary there that I'm utterly at home with, and yet, sadly, it's all for nowt on that chequered board.

I have no idea why. Is it that I just don't concentrate enough? That was Poe's theory, wasn't it, in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', that in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers?

I haven't won a game, other than when I was teaching the basic game to others, since I was in Jerusalem about six years ago, when over the course of several balmy evenings a friend and I brushed aside advances from some comely lasses who had been attempting to persuade us to join them on the roof of our hostel. Later, we said, each night. The game was more important. The girls, sadly, didn't think so, but they kept trying, their patience eventually running out when we failed to hook up with them in Eilat a few days later, after our desert adventures.


Anyway, today, against my better judgment, I installed the Facebook chess application, and started to play, first begging my friend -- smarter than me, and surely far smarter at anything analytical or mathematical -- not to tell people of how badly he'd beat me.

Possibly because of my confessed ineptitude, or possibly because he prefers to respond to challenges rather than issue them, he allowed me the advantage of playing white. And somehow, I won.

I'm still not sure how. Every game I've played for the last few years I've overstretched within four moves and then been dismantled. This time, somehow, that didn't happen, and I was able to throw bishops, knights, queen, and pawns into a full-blown assault.

'Wow,' remarked my friend, somewhere in the middle of the bloodbath, 'I've never played anyone so aggressive before.' I think that may have been the first time anyone has ever called me aggressive, at least to my face. How much have the last couple of years changed me? I want the ball now, that's for sure. I never used to.

I've a feeling the Jerusalem Jinx is still pretty much intact, though. I reckon I'll be annihilated in the next few games.

Brighton Early

'A cow just blew past,' I remarked, peering through the blinds.

'What?' yelped my hostess from the corner, startled into wakefulness by my surreal comment on the weather.
'Well, not quite,' I admitted, 'but the lampposts are waving about.'

Not the best day to be visiting the coast, you might think, but I had plans for lunch in Brighton with an old travelling friend who I've not seen since the summer before last, so after braving the craziness of London's rush hour to cheerfully accompany my Fairy Blogmother to work I savoured a leisurely breakfast and had a quick gander around Gosh! Comics before strolling to Victoria Station, stopping on the way to gaze at some Life Guards on the Mall and to return the missal I'd accidentally borrowed from Westminster Cathedral yesterday.

I didn't have long to wait for a train to Brighton and spent most of the journey there perusing today's Metro, which reported that people had been warned to stay away from coastal areas lest they be 'swept away amid gale-force winds, rain and hailstones'. Just the day to be heading south, so.

I've a rough enough idea of Brighton's layout, but that counted for nothing as I squinted at my scrawled map outside the station, hunching up against the elements. This made less sense than my Chelmsford map. What the hell did that word say? Is that a road or a slip of the nib? Does that scribble mean anything? Eventually I shoved my Moleskine back into my bag and set off, guided only by instinct and the hope that asking for directions would solve everything. Soon enough I was able to find a kindly local who smiled and said I needed to go to the new Sainsbury's, before pointing me in the right direction.

Somehow, again, I arrived at exactly the right time -- I seem to be developing an alarming tendency towards accidental punctuality -- though, unsurprisingly, other problems arose. Still, resourcefulness won the day, and lunch and some long-overdue catching up were indulged in.


I'd a few hours to spare before I was due to head back north to London and thence to Cambridge, so I went for a wander, starting by going to have a proper look at St Bartholomew's Church, just round the corner and one of the most striking structures in a city that's not short of memorable sights. I'd had it pointed out to me when I was last in Brighton, and a friend had recently advised me to have a glance within, it being 'quite funky inside'. I wasn't sure that was an entirely auspicious description, but considering the hurricane that was blowing outside I was only to glad to step into the porch and be let into the church by an old dear who was tending some sort of stall.

The church's interior startled me, and not just because of how the walls seemed to go up and up and up -- rather there were stations and mosaics on the walls, an enormous neo-Byzantine baldacchino over the altar, and crosses and statues everywhere all draped in a mournful purple. Hang on, wasn't this an Anglican church? How high were these Anglicans?

A smattering of art students sat in the pews, and when a group of schoolchildren came in the old dear swiftly hushed them, saying that they mustn't distract the students. She was almost as quick to apologise to me for the children's noise, and then apologised that there were girls among the schoolchildren.

'We don't normally have girls as servers,' she whispered.
'You don't?'
'No,' she said, lips pursing, 'we're an A, B, and C church.'
'Oh,' I said, wondering how the Archbishop of Canterbury was involved. 'What does that stand for?'
'It means we don't have women priests, and we stick to the old traditions.'
'I see,' I said, frowning and clearly doing nothing of the sort. 'And A.B.C. stands for what?'
'Well, it just means that we stick to the old traditions, really. If it's not broken, why fix it?'

By this point I was feeling a bit like the bemused fellow on the Ship of Fools website who was greeted in St Bart's by a little old dear -- possibly the same one I met today -- who thrust a service sheet and a candle into his hand and whispered at him for ten minutes.

Like him, I hadn't the vaguest notion what she was on about, so just nodded, resolving to quiz my man in Cambridge about it tonight, and wandered about a bit before fastening my coat, hoisting my bag back on my shoulder, pulling on my gloves, and sidled out in the wind and rain. At least, I thought, there'll not be many seagulls about in this weather.


I wandered about North Laine, browsing bookshops and keeping a none-too-keen eye out for Shakeaway, as I'd been advised to try their choc brownie milkshake. I wasn't convinced that'd be a good idea; I was sure the milkshake would be fine, I just wasn't persuaded that a tempest is really ideal milkshake weather. Maybe next time.

Eventually I made my way down to the seafront, there to battle the elements along the beach as far as Embassy Court, my face being battered by wind, rain, and hail, my lips salty with spray and my camera almost being blasted from my hand whenever I tried to point at anything, listening to the ringing of masts and chimes, watching the waves crashing against the world of tat that is the Palace Pier and the beautiful charred skeleton of the West Pier, with the beach's infinity of pebbles glistening in the rare golden shafts of light. It was sublime.

The wind eventually dropped, just as I started back towards the station. I didn't hurry, though. I wanted to take another look at the Pavilion first, partly because it's a marvellously absurd building that has no place in any British city, and partly because last time I was in Brighton I'd entirely forgotten its signal importance in the opening chapter of Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

'I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool.'

If you wonder why the great Gilbert started his spiritual autobiography -- published a hundred years ago this year -- which such an image, you'll just have to read it yourself.

Theology the Viz Way

I came across this a while ago, and having read it to a couple of people, describing each scene as I did, I thought I may as well post it here.

'Theology is simply that part of religion that requires brains,' as G.K. Chesterton noted almost a hundred years ago in his copy of Holbrook Jackson's Platitudes in the Making. As such, I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that none of these problems has evaded the consideration of Christian theologians over the years. People have realised that there are certain paradoxes at work.

The efficacy of petitionary prayer, free will and predestination, the purpose of miracles, and overall questions of theodicy -- all these are subjects of debate and theological exercise even today. I'm not saying that they've all been answered, not by a long way -- they'd hardly still be subjects of debate if they were -- just that Christians tend to be aware that their faith isn't always a simple matter. After all, it'd be odd if these issues had entirely slipped the notice of the what GKC described as 'the one intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years.'

So don't worry, it's not as if any of this is news. Contrary to what some people tend to think, being religious doesn't mean being stupid, and shouldn't involve shutting down our intellectual faculties. After all, when Our Lord said he were to be like little children, he was exhorting us towards innocence, not towards ignorance.

Putting his House in Order

Well, the first of my New Year's resolutions has been achieved. I have finally finished Bleak House.

It took forever, I'm afraid. I must have spent eight months stuck in the quagmire of the first two hundred pages, somehow making as little progress as any of the book's own cursed Chancery protagonists. Over coffee with a friend of mine back before last summer I asked what she thought I'd finish last, and before I'd finished reeling off the Gordian knots I was having so much difficulty unpicking last year she interrupted with a cry of: 'Bleak House! Nobody's ever finished that!'

I attempted another push over the Christmas, and in doing so made it past the three-hundred page mark. All of a sudden things began to change -- it wasn't so much that the fog of Chancery began to lift as that I got comfortable in it, that I learned to see in the fog, and that the story began to move.

Five weeks and five hundred pages later, and the book Chesterton describes as perhaps Dickens's best novel and the highest point of his intellectual maturity can finally be set aside. And oddly, I'm sad to put it down, because I've been riveted since the plot kicked in, and I'd like to know more of the characters, notably Caddy Jellyby and the wonderful Mr Bucket.

All told, even if it's a slow starter, the book's an absolute masterpiece. Mind, I've been primed to think this for years, ever since I was in my teens and read Death is No Obstacle, Colin Greenland's book-length interview with Michael Moorcock:

CG: I was very impressed when I read Bleak House last year by the way Dickens, writing it as a serial, obviously started by improvising, and then capitalised on his improvisations. In that virtuoso opening about fog and the law, the law and fog -- which starts with three paragraphs, sixteen sentences without a single main verb -- he tosses things out as wonderful queer incidental details: the 'little mad old woman' with her reticule of documents 'rincipally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender'; and the ruined plaintiff from Shropshire. Then later when he needs them, they turn quite unexpectedly into Miss Flite and Mr Gridley, significant characters each with a special function at some crux of the plot.

MM: Structurally, there's no better novel than Bleak House, in my view. Great Expectations may have something extra, but Bleak House is the best book of Dickens's to read to learn about his techniques: characters, moral theme, imagery, everything. All the pleasure of the social novel, what you get out of reading Henry James, say, or Jane Austen, can be found in Bleak House. It's the work of a talent absolutely at its prime, using its full range -- and he was doing it in weekly episodes. You can see it in the first edition. Everything breaks down into units of sixteen and thirty-two pages, because of the way a large sheet of paper is folded into pages when it's been printed. You can divide each episode of Bleak House into sixteen pages, and know that on each page there'll be another incident, a new character, a new revelation about an existing character, whatever -- something that develops what's gone before. Each episode ends perfectly, with a hook to pull you on to the next week's instalment. There's not a dead page in the book.

When he's been writing narrative full-tilt, you can almost see him stopping, catching his breath, with a bit of landscape. Where Dickens rested was on descriptive scenes, very often water: the Fens, or the Thames, the wharfs. He never rested on dialogue. If you rest on dialogue, people discussing the plot, talking to each other about where they are or what's just happened, that sort of bad, space-wasting dialogue, you slow the pace down where it shouldn't be slowed down. When you're writing fast, you need those pauses; but you mustn't stop writing! Stopping and taking a look around, describing space rather than action, is a totally natural rest. It ads to the illusion of reality. It gives the reader a breather too, and you're still filling the pages to get to your required weekly output.

I used to compare writing commercial fictions to flying a very ramshackle aeroplane. You got it off the ground. You got it into the sky. You kept it there by whatever tricks you could manage. And at the end of the day you landed it safely, by whatever means. The landing was always the difficult bit!

It's not just a supremely economical book, with astoundingly little dead weight -- Dickens indeed uses everything -- it's also a hell of a cautionary tale. It's hard not to suspect that Chesterton got it right when he described Rick Carstone's slow, obsessive, inexorable self-destruction as 'a truly masculine study of how a man goes wrong' and 'the one and only great tragedy that Dickens wrote . . . Rick is a real tragedy, for he is still alive when the quicksand sucks him down.'

So. One resolution down. It's a start.

More things in Heaven and Earth...

I mentioned a week or so back how, the subject of the impending canonisation of Cardinal Newman coming up, some friends of mine expressed some unease at there being a miracle attributed to him. I can't say I blame them, as if you hold to a wholly materialist understanding of the Universe, then miracles are, by their very nature, impossible.

C.S. Lewis puts it pretty well in 'Miracles', a 1942 essay which seems to have been the seed that later grew into his book of the same name:

The experience of a miracle in fact requires two conditions. First we must believe in a normal stability of nature, which means we must recognise that the data offered by our sense recur in regular patterns. Secondly, we must believe in some reality beyond nature. When both beliefs are held, and not till then, we can approach with an open mind the various reports which claim that this super- or extra-natural reality has sometimes invaded and disturbed the sensuous content of space and time which make our 'natural' world. . .

If we frankly accept this position and then turn to the evidence, we find, of course, that accounts of the supernatural meet us on every side. History is full of them -- often in the same documents which we accept wherever they do not report miracles. Respectable missionaries report them not infrequently. The whole Church of Rome claims their continued occurence. Intimate conversation elicits from almost every acquaintance at least one episode in his life which is what he would call 'queer' or 'rum'. No doubt most stories of miracles are unreliable; but then, as anyone can see by reading the papers, so are most stories of all events.

Each story must be taken on its merits: what one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation. Thus you may believe in the Mons Angels because you cannot find a sufficient number of sensible people who say they saw them. But if you found a sufficient number, it would, in my view, be unreasonable to explain this by collective hallucination. For we know enough of psychology to know that spontaneous unanimity in hallucination is very improbable, and we do not know enough of the supernatural to know that a manifestation of angels is equally improbable. The supernatural theory is the less improbable of the two.

When the Old Testament says that Sennacherib's invasion was stopped by angels (2 Kings 19:35), and Herodotus says it was stopped by a lot of mice who came and ate up all the bowstrings of his army (Hdt. 2.141), an open-minded man will be on the side of the angels. Unless you start by begging the question, there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of angels or in the action ascribed to them. But mice just don't do these things.

Granted, the absurdity of Herodotus' tale shouldn't lead us to automatically assume that the Biblical narrative is historically correct, but Lewis's basic point is sound: we can be absolutely confident that whatever thwarted the Assyrian invasion, it wasn't an overnight assault by a swarm of field-mice on their quivers, bowstrings, and shield-handles; we cannot be quite so confident about the behaviour of angels!

The first question, really, concerns whose side we take, Hamlet's or Horatio's. You know the line, of course: 'there are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosphy'. If you accept that, than all manner of things can fall into place.

I found myself pondering this quite a bit last April, when the papers were awash with stories of the curing of Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre. It's worth reading Matthew Parris's response to this:

During Holy Week we are treated to a variety of decent-sounding people in print and on the airwaves explaining that religion — or “faith” as they now prefer to call it — is basically all about shared moral values, making the world a better place and gaining a proper sense of awe at life’s mystery. We are given to understand that the great world religions are all really fumbling towards the same truth.

And by doveish voices we are urged to join what is essentially a campaign for increasing the amount of goodness in the world. Who could be against that? Such faith sounds so reasonable. Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded. How can we be so sure? And then this. A nun has apparently been cured of Parkinson’s disease through writing the name of John Paul II on a piece of paper.

Ecclesiastical authorities in the Roman Catholic Church have been investigating the alleged miracle, interviewing neurologists, graphologists, psychiatrists and medical experts. The diocese of Aix-en-Provence is now satisfied that it has a putative supernatural intervention on its hands, and this week submitted its dossier to Pope Benedict XVI, who may declare an official miracle and begin procedures for making the late Pope a saint . . .

Where are you, intelligent Christians? Where is your voice, your righteous anger? Where is your honest contempt for this nonsense? Take that claimed recent miracle, for instance. I know lots of nice, clever Catholics — friends, thoughtful men and women, people of depth and subtlety, people of some delicacy, people who would surely cringe at the excesses of Lourdes. Do they believe that John Paul II may have cured this nun from beyond the grave?

Where are the shouts of self-respecting bishops and cardinal-archbishops, raised against the woeful confusion of faith with superstition? I have a theory about their reticence. I think they know this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter. And they may be right. But what a melancholy conclusion: that the thinking parts of a religion should be almost extraneous to what moves it; far from the core; just a little fastidious shudder; a wink exchanged between the occupants of the reserved pews.

There is, of course, an alternative: that they too believe the nonsense; that the Prime Minister’s wife (and maybe the Prime Minister), and the Communities Secretary, and the Chancellor of Oxford University and former Governor of Hong Kong — not to mention several of my colleagues on these pages in The Times — honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.

You are living, dear reader, at a watershed in human history. This is the century during which, after 2,000 years of what has been a pretty bloody marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences . . .

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

Well, maybe He didn't, though if Mr Parris really accepts the possibility that there's a He who didn't do this, I'm surprised he's so closed to the possibility that this same He might have done so had he so wished. After all, Parris hasn't answered the question he poses. How can he be sure? That demands an explanation of why he is so certain, and he doesn't provide one. Instead he just shouts louder. Assertion is, however, no substitute for argument.

Let's look at the facts, as we know them. Back in 2001, a French nun was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and over time her symptoms worsened so that she could barely drive, walk, or write. By 2005, she could barely move the left side of her body at all, could hardly sleep for the pain, and could only write in an illegible scrawl. She couldn't bring herself to watch the aged John Paul II on television, trembling with Parkinson's himself. Her illness worsened after his death, and her order prayed for his intercession on her behalf. Then, one evening, she apparently heard a voice telling to take a pen and to write the name of the late pope. She did so, and was amazed at how her handwriting was clear and legible. She slept then, and woke the next day, at about half past four on the morning of 3 June 2005. She was cured.

I'm not saying that there's not another explanation for this, but it seems that nobody's got one. The whole scenario seems to be medically inexplicable. It really looks as though a miracle took place, and this possibility -- despite Parris's shouting -- can't be dismissed out of hand except on grounds of prejudice. Mark Shea tore into this impressively at the time, quoting extensively from chapter nine of Chesterton's Orthodoxy to do so. It's worth a read.

I've no idea what the miracle being associated with Newman is, by the way.

In the Company of Wolves

The other day, talking about Christopher Hitchens, morality, and the 'Golden Rule', I raised the question of whether being nice is the same thing as being good; I might as easily have asked whether it's the same thing as being right. I'm inclined to agree with Little Red in Sondheim's Into the Woods who -- chastened by her experiences -- declares that 'nice is different than good'.

Into the Woods was my introduction to Sondheim, long before I was captivated by Sweeney Todd; a musicologist friend of mine loaned me her copy, after raving about it for months, and washed away all my ingrained contempt towards musicals. Heavily influenced by The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim's fascinating study of the importance of fairy tales, it's immensely clever and really quite hilarious in how it interweaves and interprets the stories of Rapunzel, Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty to enthralling and enlightening effect. If you ever get an opportunity to see it -- whether in the theatre or in the American Playhouse version -- you shouldn't miss that chance.

Bettelheim's analysis of the Red Riding Hood story is primarily based -- like pretty much all modern retellings -- on 'Little Red-Cap', as the Brothers Grimm version of the tale in entitled. He sees this as a fairy tale for inquistive children who've outgrown 'Hansel and Gretel', and sees its value in how it allows children to give vent to their oedipal fantasies while ensuring that the natural order is ultimately restored.

While it's the Grimm version that interests him most, Bettelheim doesn't ignore the tale's prehistory and devotes special attention to Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Charles Perrault's 1697 French version of the tale, the earliest published form of the story. Unlike the Grimm version, Perrault's version is a cautionary tale that ends with the girl being devoured. There's no rescue by a woodman, no snipping open of the wolf's belly with a scissors, no filling of the wolf's belly with deadening stones. Nope. The girl and her grandmother are eaten, that being the end of them, and in case Perrault's point isn't blindingly obvious, he hammers it home by tagging on a moral:

Children, especially young ladies – attractive, courteous, and well-bred – do very wrong to listen to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide a wolf with dinner. I saw ‘wolf’, for there are various kinds of wolf. There is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy nor hateful nor angry, but tame, obliging, and gentle – who pursues young women in the streets, even into their homes. And alas! Everyone must know that it its these gentle wolves that are the most dangerous wolves of all!

Perrault also seems to have been responsible for introducing the red hood itself to the story; it doesn't appear to have been part of the oral tales from which he drew his Tales of Mother Goose, at least insofar as they can be established, although there was a tale current in the Eleventh Century of a red-capped girl found in the company of wolves.


It seems that Perrault may have toned the story down a bit too, removing elements he apparently deemed unsuitable for his polite audience; this rendering of the tale, taken with just one adjustment from Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, is representative:

Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother. As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going.
"To grandmother's house," she replied.

"Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?"

"The path of the pins."

So the wolf took the path of the needles and arrived first at the house. He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed.

"Knock, knock."

"Come in, my dear."

"Hello, grandmother. I've brought you some bread and milk."

"Have something yourself, my dear. There is meat and wine in the pantry."

So the little girl ate what was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, "Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!"

Then the wolf said, "Undress, and get into bed with me."
"Where shall I put my apron?"

"Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

For each garment -- bodice, skirt, petticoat, and stockings -- the girl asked the same question; and each time the wolf answered, "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

When the girl got into bed, she said, "Oh, grandmother! How hairy you are!"

"It's to keep me warmer, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big shoulders you have!"

"It's for better carrying firewood, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What long nails you have!"

"It's for scratching myself better, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!"

"It's for eating you better, my dear."

And he ate her.

Darnton has the girl taking the path of the needles rather than the path of the pins, but Bettelheim notes that early versions of the story describe the girl choosing the path of the pins, and explain the significance of the choice by saying that it is easier to fasten things together with pins than to sew them together with needles; as such the girl is choosing the pleasure principle over the reality principle, and suffers accordingly.

I first read this version of the story in a slightly abridged form in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, as told by Gilbert -- Gaiman's Chestertonian embodiment of a very special place -- to Rose Walker, the heroine of The Doll's House. It's apparently a pretty accurate reflection of the story as it was told among the peasantry of Eighteenth Century France, at around the same time as Perrault's somewhat sanitised version was gaining popularity among the literate classes; you'll probably have been rather startled both its cannibalistic element and by what Darnton describes as 'the strip-tease prelude to the devouring of the girl'.


Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, notes that other retellings seem to preserve a different tradition again. She describes how some versions indeed have the wolf tricking the girl into eating the flesh and drinking the blood of her grandmother, but with the girl refusing to get into bed with the wolf, saying that she needs to relieve herself. The wolf encourages her to join her anyway, saying she can relieve herself in the bed, but as the girl persists in her refusal he ties her to the bed post with a long cord that allows her to leave the cottage but go no further; once outside, the girl undoes the knot and escapes.

Warner makes much of how the wolf takes the place of the grandmother in the story, eschewing Bettelheim's psychoanalyical interpretation to point out that both the wolf and the grandmother are marginal figures in the story: both dwell in the woods away from people and are in need of food. This parallel seems to reflect and embody the peasant fantasies of early modern Europe, where the werewolf was a male counterpart to the female witch or crone.

If you've seen The Brotherhood of the Wolf, you might be familiar with the story of the 'Beast of Gévaudan', upon which the film is loosely based. The Beast terrorised a part of south-central France between 1764 and 1767, killing at least sixty people. More than a hundred years later, Robert Louis Stevenson described it as 'the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves':

What a career was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gévaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and ‘shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty’; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king’s high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender, and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for that.

It's not surprising that the locals had been so terrified, and indeed superstitious. The nightmare of the loup-garou -- the werewolf -- was deeply embedded in the collective psyche of the peasantry of early modern France. Throughout the Sixteenth Century, with the countryside apparently being plagued by lycanthropic attacks, thousands of people were accused of being werewolves. Although torture was often used to educe confessions, there were cases where the evidence against the accused was clear in relation to charges of murder and cannibalism, albeit not to association with wolves!

The whole phenomenon, strikingly similar to the witch-trials that were so common throughout Europe at the time, petered out after it was decreed in a 1603 trial that 'the change of shape existed only in the disorganised brain of the insane'. With lycanthropy now seen as a delusion rather than a real supernatural phenomenon, werewolves faded from the French courtroom, but they clearly remained fixed in the French popular imagination, being trasmitted down through the centuries through folklore, fairy tales, films, and even parlour games.