{bits & pieces}
The weekly “little of this, little of that” feature here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!
(This will all look and work better if you click on the actual post and do not remain on the main page.)
Phil’s book Lost Shepherd came out last week. We were in DC for an event, and Phil was being interviewed by Raymond Arroyo on The World Over. I think if you watch that interview you will get a good idea of how Phil reluctantly came to the realization that the book had to be written. There have been a plethora of radio interviews and book reviews — be sure to read this one.
I had the pleasure of getting together with the St. Greg’s Pocket that Sukie had started when she lived in the area. What a fantastic group of ladies! And about a bajillion little kids!
These women understand the importance of sharing good reading and discussion as well as taking care of each other in neighborly ways — bringing each other meals, watching each other’s kids when there’s a doctor’s appointment, and helping each other live the Liturgical Year. Even though their group is probably more in flux than others, due to the area, they will find in ten or fifteen years’ time that they are very grateful for the community they will have made.
Awhile back I explained about the St. Gregory Pocket:
You need friends — a good solid community — for the future.
So, maybe we [here at LMLD] can’t meet all of you [although we’d love to!], but we can help you meet each other!
You don’t want to have to join a club or drive an hour or go to a conference just to meet someone who shares your faith and your desire to live differently. You definitely don’t want to make all your friends online.
You want to find the women in your area who share your goals and your philosophy.
The St. Gregory’s Pockets are just that — little “pockets” of people in a given geographical area. Pockets of people who would like to get together naturally, to share the seasons together, to help out when a mom has a new baby or someone is sick, to have kids who can play together, to have picnics where men can talk to other men who care about raising strong families in a counter-cultural way.
One of the links below is about a Czech dissident, Václav Benda, who noted that totalitarianism is resisted primarily by two means: the family and the small societies and groups of friends that build up the bonds of solidarity without the taint of politicization or commodification.
But — it will be much better to nurture such bonds before we find ourselves under the cloud of some sort of tyranny, for perhaps then we may stave it off and spare ourselves and society a desperate fate.
At our other event we had a lovely conversation with John Cuddeback of Bacon from Acorns fame, and his wife Sofia. When I mentioned my devotion to John Henry Newman, he brought up Newman’s gift for friendship, which I’m sure Václav Benda would agree is the virtue that makes us whole in our relations with each other and helps us resist overwhelming power. You can read a short essay by Fr. Juan R. Vélez on Newman and Friendship here.
On to (more!) links:
Jane Austen demonstrates that marriage gives sexual love its meaning! And frankly, the marriage plot is what makes for a great novel! If it were me I’d make my teenagers read this article, but of course, they first have to read dear Jane, because there are spoilers. (I am the object of laughter in my family because I had no idea of how either Pride and Prejudice or Emma would end! Totally did not see either of those matches coming! So I feel protective of your possibly equally clueless — but probably not — offspring.)
A good article about chant in liturgy My thought about chant and polyphony is that neither is so very difficult if the culture supports them. Children can be taught both. Search this blog for our many posts about “garage scholas” and chant. And then those children who love it and are good at it will be the music leaders in about ten years, which isn’t so very long after all.
Self-demonstrating grammar rules. Fun.
Lost art of bending over. It is a good idea not to be droopy, posture-wise. This is a challenge for me.
The Architectural Sacking of Paris.
“And so Mayor Hidalgo’s first high-rise, the Triangle Tower, will be built in the 15th arrondissement. Shaped like an enormous, flattened pyramid, it will challenge the Eiffel Tower for dominance of the skyline. Neighborhood residents violently oppose it. The project’s Swiss architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, are thrilled. ‘This evocation of the urban fabric of Paris,’ they offer, ‘at once classic and coherent in its entirety and varied and intriguing in its details, is encountered in the facade of the Triangle. Like a classical building, this one features two levels of interpretation: an easily recognizable overall form; and a fine, crystalline silhouette of its facade, which allows it to be perceived variously.’
“Like so much else written about new architecture, this is nonsense. The building does not evoke the urban fabric of Paris. To the contrary, as NKM correctly observed, the urban fabric of Paris is low and classical. The triangle is neither a classical building nor is it ‘like one’; it is antithetical in shape, scale, proportion, texture, material, and ornament to the principles of classical architecture, to say nothing of height. Not one such structure existed in antiquity.”
Where are the poor? asks Dominicana Journal. A 2009 study makes “a quizzical suggestion: ‘the social atmosphere of many parishes may no longer be inviting to low-income Catholics.'” Catholics who attend Mass after Vatican II have become of one social stratum only, and the poor have dropped away.
“The Church teaches that the “preferential option for the poor” must prioritize the spiritual dimension of the person…” The article references a piece by Matthew Schmitz,in which he says:
“Mary Douglas, a great anthropologist and devout Catholic, saw this coming. When the bishops of England and Wales lifted the obligation for Friday abstinence, they suggested there was something untoward in the gusto with which Irish labourers observed the fast. Surely, the bishops believed, such outward observance would be better replaced by the more careful and thoughtful cultivation of an interior state of penitence and sorrow, perhaps complemented by a charitable gift?”
A long read, but a good one to go along with thinking about the St. Gregory Pocket — an interview with Flagg Taylor, author of a book about Václav Benda, a Czech dissident. As Taylor says, “The totalitarian temptation is very much with us in a variety of forms so his experience and thoughts are more relevant for us than we might think. He was particularly thoughtful about what we might call the theory and practice of dissent.”
“Like Kolakowski, Benda understood that the means for achieving the fictive totalitarian unity directed by the state included the breaking down of social bonds developed freely and naturally, from below, by the people themselves.
“Benda thought that people needed to be reminded of what they had lost with communism, that the Charter could help foster the rediscovery of meaningful social life. This is what he called the parallel polis. The Charter community ought to dedicate itself to developing parallel social structures to the official ones. This would reactivate people’s social natures. They could rediscover the deep rewards of friendship and devotion.
From the archives:
Recovering a sense of satisfaction by making time to be creative. (In this case it was quilting, but it could be anything!)
Early distant warning: Easter babka must be thought about soon.
Today is the commemoration of various saints and martyrs. Tomorrow we observe Laetare Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Lent in which a bit of celebration can take place! Maybe a little cake?
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