Contra Keillor

My chief pleasure for the past, oh, eighteen years, or so, was being a good student. (Like many people at institutes of "higher" "education", I suspect I am better suited to be a student than to go into any sort of useful career. But I am attempting to correct this by means of honest employment, if music can be called honest employment.) Now that this is no longer an option, I find one must savor life's little pleasures, like discovering a new, good, artist while listening to Pandora. Or the lime yogurt, served in a waffle cone, at Arthur's. Or the luxury of an off switch when I hear Garrison Keillor, that old windbag, on the radio.

Do not misunderstand me: I think Minnesotans and Lutherans owe a debt of gratitude to Mr Keillor for all those years of good PR. I was once a great fan of A Prairie Home Companion, and I still tune in to it regularly. But invariably I will turn it off within a few minutes. Sometimes there may be good musical guests on the program, but the rest is quite dispensable. Oh! Another quaint anecdote about Wobegonians! Oh! Another sketch based on puns! Oh! He's singing again. Really it is Keillor's singing that is the worst. It is emblematic of the sort of sentimental self-indulgence that has come to define the program, which has been coasting — I think — for years, now. I rather hope they don't find a new host to replace Keillor when he finally quits milking the cash-cow that is public radio in a few years.

Acedia

Occasionally when I am in a fit of melancholy it leads to acedia, as has happened these past few days. I would describe acedia, but I find that the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus did so far better in his Praktikos:

The demon of acedia, which is also called the noonday demon, is the most burdensome of all the demons. It besets the monk at about the fourth hour (10 am) of the morning, encircling his soul until about the eighth hour (2 pm). First it makes the sun seem to slow down or stop moving, so that the day appears to be fifty hours long. Then it makes the monk keep looking out of his window and forces him to go bounding out of his cell to examine the sun to see how much longer it is to 3 o’clock, and to look round in all directions in case any of the brethren is there. Then it makes him hate the place and his way of life and his manual work. It makes him think that there is no charity left among the brethren; no one is going to come and visit him. If anyone has upset the monk recently, the demon throws this in too to increase his hatred. It makes him desire other places where he can easily find all that he needs and practice an easier, more convenient craft. After all, pleasing the Lord is not dependent on geography, the demon adds; God is to be worshipped everywhere. It joins to this the remembrance of the monk’s family and his previous way of life, and suggests to him that he still has a long time to live, raising up before his eyes a vision of how burdensome the ascetic life is.

While we are perhaps not monastics, the affliction is much the same.

On Cheap Language

Liturgy can, and ought to, be an uplifting experience. At its best it can free us, albeit temporarily, from the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to. At its worst it is not only inane, but maddening. I regret to tell you, dear reader, that the Mass I attended this evening was far closer to the latter than the former.

Chief among its problems was the priest. He was one of those who is fond of coming up with what he considers to be exemplary ritual improvisations; that is, he made stuff up. This wouldn't've been a problem, but for the fact that these improvisations only served to distract from the order of the Mass. (Just stick to the rubrics, Father.) Then there was the homily. As a Protestant, I place a far higher premium on competent preaching than Roman Catholics. But even by Papist standards, this priest had a tin ear for turns of phrase. This is, I suppose, the end result of decades of wrong ideas about what constitutes good language. What sort of prose is being fostered by the language of the 1970 Missal, by the New American Bible, and by the hymnody of Breaking Bread and Gather? Ugly language begets ugly language. The point I'm trying to make here is that what we read affects how we write and speak. (Compare the language of Abraham Lincoln, who grew up reading the noble and glorious Authorised Version, with that of most modern politicians, who have read... well, it's not quite certain whether they've read anything. Is Sarah Palin a voracious reader of Jonathan Swift?) If we're going to use the vernacular, we should take it upon ourselves to employ translations that are not, quite frankly, ugly.

If priests are incapable of minimally proficient sermonizing, they ought to deliver the homilies of the great preachers of the Church. Would you object to hearing the sermons of John Chrysostom, or Augustine, or John Henry Newman, instead of the underdeveloped ramblings of a man who thinks "Gather Us In" is excellent poetry? I certainly wouldn't.

Contra Academicos

I worry, as I am wont to do (despite certain advice to the contrary). Lately, I've been worrying about the MSM program at Notre Dame (among other things). Are we students wise to commit ourselves into the hands of a group of people—that is, professors—who have dedicated themselves to the life of the mind? How many of my professors know where their food comes from? (They need not know how to prune an apple tree, or plow a furrow, but ideally they'd know people who can.) More importantly, how many of them live within an hour's drive of their families? How many of them have a real sense of place? (I don't mean to besmirch any of my teachers, mind you. I respect and admire them a great deal. One must think about these things, is all.)

I wonder about the future of the program. I don't mean to say that churches don't need qualified musicians; indeed, I'd like to think that sacred music is a ministry of great importance, one that should have well-trained ministers. But I wonder whether we students are being trained for real jobs. The organists, I suppose, should be able to find some work: nearly all of us can sing and conduct, even if we're not very good at it. I worry, though, whether those students being trained in singing or conducting alone will be able to find churches that can support them if they cannot play organ (or even piano) well enough to lead a congregation. (And the program is being expanded to include more of them! Where are all these churches big enough to hire a full-time choral conductor? As for full-time cantors, well, I don't know if there is such a thing.) Perhaps I'm just being pessimistic. I just hope that the goals of the program are grounded in reality—as grounded, ideally, as the teachers should be.

De Civitate

The Bible, one will note, begins in a garden and ends in a city. This seems to imply some sort of progression from rural to urban life, a progression which I am not sure is real progress at all. Let me explain.

My travails started when I agreed, most agreeably, to drive some friends to Union Station in Chicago, the train ride from South Bend being inconveniently timed for a transfer to the train to Milwaukee (their home). I had not anticipated that this would necessitate my driving into the very heart of downtown Chicago (and on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, no less: the very time when, it seems, the totality of the citizenry of the Windy City departs, by car, for greener climes). Suffice it to say that the experience was not pleasant: what is normally a four-hour drive from South Bend to home became a seven-hour ordeal. The more I visit the city, the more I am convinced that I hate it beyond reason. This is mainly due, I suppose, to traffic, which provokes in me a most powerful misanthropy.

Does city life have any redeemable qualities? Surely it must; surely something must counterbalance the infernal drudgery of commuting. Or is it only for money that people work in such an environment? If this is so, then I cannot understand people, in general, at all. It is far better to live in a bare cell in heaven than a McMansion in hell.

O-lim-picks

Christopher ("Christ-bearer"! Ha!) Hitchens may be an intolerable blowhard, but he happens to have some interesting thoughts on the Olympics (which, I understand, are going on now).

Have you ever had a discussion about higher education that wasn't polluted with babble about the college team and the amazingly lavish on-campus facilities for the cult of athletic warfare? Noticed how the sign of a bad high school getting toward its Columbine moment is that the jocks are in the saddle? Worried when retired generals appear on the screen and talk stupidly about "touchdowns" in Afghanistan? By a sort of Gresham's law, the emphasis on sports has a steadily reducing effect on the lowest common denominator, in its own field and in every other one that allows itself to be infected by it.

As usual, Hitchens has overstated his case in his rush to be "controversial", but there's something to be said about the sports-mania that afflicts our society. It is certainly obvious that international sports have very little, if anything, to do with promoting goodwill among nations. Bread and circuses, I say. Bread and circuses.

The Left End of the Porch

For all the things the Front Porchers get correct, there certainly are a lot of stupid comments made there. (Environmentalism equals communism, for example. Or, Obama is Kenyan.) Every few weeks, upon becoming enraged by an assortment of asinine comments posted at FPR, I resolve to stop reading the site. And then I see something like this article, which reminds me why I started reading it to begin with.

All the same, I'd say there's a dangerous amount of teabag-level crazity present among certain commenters. It's my humble opinion that we need a few more people on the left side of the Porch (like Mr Russell Arben Fox, one of the few posters sane enough to admit that de gummint isn't intrinsically evil). I tire of the self-righteousness of those reactionary Front Porchers who assume a localist attitude must necessarily entail belief in the One True Church (whichever particular brand they prefer, be it Papist, Greek, or Calvinist), complete denial of the Democratic party (communiss, all of 'em!), and disdain for any culture beyond that of small-town America. I will not forsake Bach and Mahler, thank you.