A Medieval Church

Above is a recreation of a medieval parish church. Medieval people loved bright colors. Notice how the sanctuary is truly a Holy of Holies, set apart from the rest of the church by the rood screen. Share

Rudeness on Facebook

A brilliant article. Sometimes I hate Facebook.

Why are we so nasty to each other online? Whether on Facebook, Twitter, message boards or websites, we say things to each other that we would never say face to face. Shouldn't we know better by now?

Anonymity is a powerful force. Hiding behind a fake screen name makes us feel invincible, as well as invisible. Never mind that, on many websites, we're not as anonymous as we think—and we're not anonymous at all on Facebook. Even when we reveal our real identities, we still misbehave.

According to soon-to-be-published research from professors at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, browsing Facebook lowers our self control. The effect is most pronounced with people whose Facebook networks were made up of close friends, the researchers say.

Most of us present an enhanced image of ourselves on Facebook. This positive image—and the encouragement we get, in the form of "likes"—boosts our self-esteem. And when we have an inflated sense of self, we tend to exhibit poor self-control.

"Think of it as a licensing effect: You feel good about yourself so you feel a sense of entitlement," says Keith Wilcox, assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School and co-author of the study. "And you want to protect that enhanced view, which might be why people are lashing out so strongly at others who don't share their opinions." These types of behavior—poor self control, inflated sense of self—"are often displayed by people impaired by alcohol," he adds. (Read entire article.)

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Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen

And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them...And he said to me: Write, for these words are most faithful and true. ~Apocalypse 21: 2-3, 5

I behold you, noble, glorious and whole woman, the pupil of purity. You are the sacred matrix in which God takes great pleasure. The essences of Heaven flooded into you, and the Great Word of God dressed itself in flesh. You appeared as a shining white lily, as God looked upon you before all of Creation....Now let all Ecclesia shine in joy and sound in symphony praising the most tender woman, Mary, the bequeather of God. Amen. ~ from Ave Generosa by St. Hildegard von Bingen

In the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be love. ~ from The Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse of Lisieux

As a child growing up in the 1960's and 70's, my Catholic education was a bit sketchy in some areas, a fact which I spent years remedying. The CCD books at the time had lots of pictures of wheat fields, dancing crowds and sunsets, but very little doctrine. We all knew we were supposed to love God, be nice, and protect the environment, but that's about all we learned at CCD, with a few rare exceptions. If my parents had not insisted on family Bible studies and if my mother had not given me a copy of The Imitation of Christ, I would have been a perfect heathen (like everyone else my age.) It was not until I was in my twenties that I learned that the Sacrament of Holy Orders is for priests alone, not for nuns. Nuns make solemn vows, they are not ordained; only priests are ordained. I once asked a cloistered nun the reason for this and she explained that a sacrament is an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace. When a man is ordained he becomes an alter Christus, another Christ. When a nun makes vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, she becomes the Bride of Christ, a microcosm of the Church, which is also the Bride of Christ. Being a nun does not need to be a sacrament pointing to a hidden reality, because being the Bride of Christ is in itself a powerful, cosmic reality.

The same nun gave me a book called Christ in His Consecrated Virgins by Ludwig Münster, which cleared up matters for me. The following passage moved me so deeply that I jotted it down in a notebook:

 When the Church speaks of a virgin, she means a human being who becomes powerful and strong, austere and noble, from the altar. The sacred power of the altar enters into the virgin....The sacramental re-enactment of Christ's death, which takes place on the altar and moves the whole cosmos towards God, seizes the virgin and consecrates her to the very center of her personality....The virgin's strength, drawn from Christ's death summons God's kingdom into the world dark with sin. There is in Christian virginity a victory over the powers of darkness, a victory which comes from the desire to be drawn into the Sacrifice of Christ.(Ludwig Münster, Christ in His Consecrated Virgins, pp13-14)

This is a mystical reality which St. Hildegard von Bingen, now a Doctor of the Church, explored in all its heighth and depth. One of the most extraordinary figures of the Middle Ages, St. Hildegard was not only a mystic but an author, a musician, a foundress and a director of souls, learned in the natural sciences as well as in theology and philosophy. She wrote some of the first mystery plays, laying the groundwork for modern drama.  The mystery of the Church as the Bride of Christ is present in Sacred Scripture and the writings of many saints, even into modern times. St. Hildegard was able to see the full transcendent beauty of her vocation as a microcosm of the Church, the Bride, and like St. Thérèse of Lisieux many centuries later, she strove to be Love in the heart of her Mother the Church. Hildegard's idea of Love was nuptial love, with all the glory and joy which accompanies it. The pain and suffering, of which there was plenty in her long life, were part of the tokens of genuine love for Christ her Bridegroom.

Mary Sharratt's radiant new novel Illuminations captures both the joy and pain of Hildegard's life which she lived out in her vocation as a twelfth century Benedictine nun in what is now Germany. The story opens with the eight year old Hildegard being given as a tithe by her family, not to a monastery of nuns as was customary, but to a teenage anchorite named Jutta, who lives in a small cramped hermitage adjoining a monastery of monks. The girls are literally walled in without so much as a door; they can not leave of their own volition and only have a small courtyard in which to walk and plant a garden. Jutta does not live according to the Benedictine rule but according to her own inspirations, which means constant fasting and harsh penances. Cut off from her family, Hildegard struggles for emotional survival in the austere environment, totally unfit for a child. It explains why later in the novel she must overcome with intense infatuations and inordinate attachments, which naturally occur in people who are denied all normal familial affection. Hildegard's existence is soothed by her visions, which are one of the reasons why her mother wanted her locked away from the world. Also a young monk named Volmar, who becomes a lifelong friend and later her confessor, brings her books to read.

As time goes by, Jutta dies, and Hildegard is joined by other girls whose families are donating them to the monastery. With masterful practicality and ingenuity, Hildegard builds a vibrant community of sisters, in spite of the constant interference from the Abbot, who is always searching for a hint of heresy in Hildegard. The nuns soon need a larger place to live and Hildegard must overturn Heaven and earth to obtain the land and the funds in which to build a new monastery.

Mary Sharratt, a careful researcher, whose novel Daughters of the Witching Hill I thoroughly enjoyed,  accurately conveys the vicissitudes of monastic life, the personality clashes, the efforts to obey unreasonable commands of superiors, the emotional and physical deprivations. There are temptations of the flesh as well as temptations to pride and vainglory. Hildegard exercises wisdom and compassion when counseling others but is always firm with herself. She never flinches from fighting for what is right.

I do question whether Hildegard would really have referred to God as "Mother" as the novel portrays her doing. Early on she has visions of Ecclesia, the Church, as her Mother, as well as visions of the Virgin Mary, who plays an integral part in her spirituality. The Church, as exemplified by Mary the Mother of God, was her Mother so it does not make sense to me that she would also call God the Father her "Mother." Also, one or two times the narrative refers to the nuns as being "ordained" or in "holy orders" which, as I pointed out at the beginning of this review, would not historically or metaphysically have been the case. 

Written for a wide audience of believers and nonbelievers, Illuminations depicts nuns and religious life in a positive manner, with its the many spiritual and temporal benefits for society in general, in spite of the corruption in the Church at the time. The book shows the happiness of the consecrated life when it is lived as it should be lived, under a superior who brings harmony, order and cheer. Hildegard is a Bride but she is also a mother, and the growth of the mothering aspect of her vocation is a steadfast theme in the book. I applaud the author's respect for the strong supernatural element in the story of Hildegard which is not downplayed or whitewashed in any way. The sacraments of the Church are likewise mentioned reverently. Ms. Sharratt's genuine regard for Hildegard shines in every word. It is a happy coincidence that this novel's release occurs near the day of Hildegard's becoming a Doctor of the Church. May St. Hildegard guide us all!

I also recommend the film Vision, a German production about St. Hildegard.

(*NOTE: Illuminations was sent to me by the author's representative in exchange for my honest opinion.)

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Trial By Fire

Savonarola revisited. (Via Joshua Snyder.)

Yet nothing is simple about Savonarola, as Donald Weinstein shows in his luminous and learned biography. Machiavelli’s close friend Francesco Guicciardini, who matched him in cynicism and perhaps more than matched him in political insight, praised Savonarola. A man of great learning, he had promoted “decent behavior” and reestablished the city’s republican government. Even if Savonarola had been a false prophet, after all, he had succeeded in fooling the public for many years: “He must have had great judgment, talent, and power of invention.” Where Guicciardini reserved his final verdict, others did not. Savonarola’s supporters secretly gathered his ashes from the river and revered them, along with his vestments, his hair shirt, and pieces of the gallows he had died on. His spiritual writings found hundreds of readers: his Manual for the Instruction of Confessors, unpublished when he died, was printed at least forty-two times over the next two centuries. Religious women in particular found inspiration in them for passionate, introspective prayer, and sometimes for visions like his. Almost a century after Savonarola died, a condemned heretic, Pope Clement VIII considered making him a saint. (Read entire article.)

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Hugo (2011)

 Hugo Cabret: Maybe that's why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn't able to do what it was meant to do... Maybe it's the same with people. If you lose your purpose... it's like you're broken.~from Hugo (2011)

 One of the most delightful films of 2011 is indubitably Martin Scorsese's Hugo, about an orphan boy in 1920's Paris who lives inside the walls of the Gare de Montparnasse. The son of a watchmaker, Hugo Cabret winds the many clocks in the train station for his drunken uncle, who has abandoned him, leaving him without food, which he is compelled to steal. His only possession is a broken automaton, which he is trying to fix so he will not feel so alone in the world. In the meantime, he meets a charming little girl named Isabelle, the goddaughter of the crusty old toy seller in the station. Together they are determined to discover the mystery of the automaton. Told with a fairy tale quality, what begins as the adventure of a lost child becomes a story of the rediscovery of a great artist and inventor, Georges Méliès.

 According to The Guardian:

Hugo has more secrets: he is trying to repair and restore a remarkable automaton which had come into the possession of his late father (Jude Law), a kindly watchmaker. But without Hugo quite realising it, this robot hides within its workings the secret of the 20th century's great new art form. Young Hugo is to come into contact with Isabelle (Chloë Moretz) and her formidable old grandpa, who runs a toy stall on the station platform: he is, in fact, M Georges Méliès, the great film-maker and innovator, now fallen on hard times. Ben Kingsley plays Méliès, and gives him the melancholy air of a deposed and exiled king, or at any rate someone who has been marginalised by great historical forces which he himself has brought into being: a little like Robert Donat's William Friese-Greene, the British cinema pioneer, in John Boulting's 1951 film The Magic Box. The illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, on which this movie is based, was inspired by the nonfiction study Edison's Eve, by British author Gaby Wood, which discussed Méliès's lost collection of automata.

Many clips from the amazing films of Georges Méliès are woven into the movie. To quote a review from science fiction site io9.com:

Silent movie director, inventor and magician Georges Méliès is easily the grandfather of science fiction film. We even included his adaptation of Jules Verne's 1866 novel The Adventures of Captain Hatteras "The Conquest of the Pole" in our Top 50 Scariest Films of all Time. But you probably know him best as the man who launched a rocket into the eye of the moon. This turn-of-the-century film maker is a very important part of Martin Scorsese's new movie Hugo, you could even argue that this entire movie is Scorsese's love letter to Méliès. Hidden inside Hugo are loads of real-life facts about the grandfather of science fiction.

  As one would expect from Scorsese, Hugo is a lavish, magnificently crafted film, celebrating the wonder of childhood. Not that Hugo is necessarily a children's film, in fact some small children might find parts of it distressing. It nevertheless captures the childlike sense of awe with which all of us are born, and which filmmakers like Méliès and Scorsese are able to capture.

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Les Grands Thermes

I once visited Bagnères-de-Bigorre, which is a spa about an hour's bus ride from Lourdes through the mountains. I did not know at the time that Marie-Antoinette's daughter had laid the foundation stone of Les Grand Thermes in 1823, which in her honor was called Les Thermes de Marie-Thérèse or the Marie-Thérèse spa. The princess found the warm baths to be highly therapeutic.

Via Vive la Reine. Share

La Grenouille

The secrets of a classic French restaurant.

If you walk into La Grenouille on a Monday morning, you will find Masson arranging his flowers for the week. The normally orderly dining room looks like a botanical crime scene: banquettes and floors draped with tarps, tables covered with waiting vases, everything buried beneath a forest of leaves and stems and clippings. Even Masson is out of his suit—a sight as disconcerting as glimpsing Mickey Mouse with his head off at Disney World. He strides back and forth amidst the foliage he picked out early that morning, in Manhattan's flower district, adding a wispy stalk of purple delphinium here, a Creamsicle-colored lily there. The bouquets, when done, will be displayed in clear glass vases, an act of mad floral hubris that necessitates that the water be siphoned with a rubber tube and replaced each morning.

More than simple decoration, flowers are a kind of guiding metaphor for Masson. "In France, your flowers come from the same garden as your fruits and vegetables," he says, sounding like Alice Waters by way of Provence. "It's all part of the same harmonious thing." When lilacs and peonies give way to sunflowers and hydrangeas, he knows it is time to switch from the spring to the summer menu.

Masson's highest term of praise, the word he uses to describe the goal of every decision that goes into running La Grenouille, is harmony. And he maintains an almost mystical faith that the secret of harmony is rooted in the country of his parents' birth. The staff, from busboys to captains, is still expected to speak at least some French. And you would be hard pressed to find an ingredient on the menu that wasn't used in Escoffier's time....

One of the greatest enemies of harmony, Masson believes, more pernicious even than foreign herbs, is the cult of the celebrity chef. "When you make a restaurant all about one person, you're putting one person's ego ahead of the pleasure of your customers," he says. No cook's name appears at the bottom of his menu, and Masson does not bestow such titles as executive chef. Nor will you ever see a cook schmoozing with clients. "Remember," says Masson, "it used to be that a maître d'hôtel started in the kitchen and was eventually allowed into the dining room."

 [....]

To whatever extent Masson has kept his chefs in their traditional place, he has also restored waiters to theirs. "Just carrying food to the table, that's not a career," he says. "That's a messenger." Dishes like frog's legs, which are cut into three-inch segments, soaked in milk, and then sautéed in fresh butter and garlic, get a final, theatrical deglazing in the dining room. (They would make perfect Super Bowl food, especially if followed, as they are at table, with a gleaming silver finger bowl.) The waiters must also be able to expertly dismantle a roast chicken grand-mère, fillet a sole using only a fish fork and a flat sauce spoon, slice kidneys for rognons de veau moutardier into uniform strips, like meaty little mushrooms, and then flambé them with Cognac and mustard in a whoosh of old-school flame. (Read entire article.)

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Communism: The Forgotten Holocaust

Why have we stopped teaching our children about the horrors of Communism? To quote:

We have failed to teach the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution specifically and of communism generally. Those horrors include over 100 million corpses generated by communist governments, starting with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917—that is, “St. Petersburg 1917.” For perspective, 100 million is twice the combined deaths of World War I and II, the two deadliest conflicts in history. Even then, 100 million dead, which is the estimate provided by the seminal Harvard University Press work, "The Black of Book of Communism," is a conservative figure. The latest research claims that Mao Tse-Tung was responsible for the deaths of at least 70 million in China, and Joseph Stalin alone may well have killed 60 million in the USSR.

We now have an entire generation of Americans born after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and USSR. They didn’t live through the mass repression and carnage that was Soviet communism. They need to learn about it, just as my generation learned the evils of Nazism. (Read entire article.)

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Caregiver Stress

Here are some helpful articles and videos for caregivers of the elderly. To quote:

 Home Instead provides resources to help family caregivers understand the many emotions of caregiving. Among those tools are a video series about understanding the feelings of caregiving and a Family Caregiver Support Web Seminar Series.

In addition, the Home Instead Senior Care network and caregiving expert Dr. Amy D'Aprix recommend the following process to help caregivers come to grips with the rigors of caregiving and avoid depression:

1. Acknowledge feelings. It's OK to feel conflicting emotions as a family caregiver, Dr. D'Aprix notes. "Think of it as a pie. Perhaps 30 percent of the pie is anger and 20 percent is guilt, but the rest of the pie is love. Seeing it as a pie helps caregivers realize that caregiving comes with a range of emotions, and that's OK."
2. Release feelings in a safe way. Journaling is one effective way that family caregivers can get their feelings out. Joining a support group or talking to a therapist or non-judgmental friend are others.
3. Manage the situation. Oftentimes there's no other way around it: caregivers need help. If you can't find that support with family, go to trusted friends, faith community or consider professional caregiving support.
4. Find solutions. "Make a list of the things you enjoy doing to reduce stress," Dr. D'Aprix advises. "Reading, watching a favorite television show, attending a faith service, exercising, visiting a museum, meeting friends and listening to music are all activities that many caregivers enjoy. Keep a list and build in mini breaks or bite-size getaways - 15 minutes at a time. It's not all or nothing."

(Read more.) Share