End-of-the-year thoughts

Today's sermon was about redeeming the time before we die. It's a line of scripture which always makes me think of the T.S. Eliot poem Ash Wednesday:

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

Well, of course, redeem the time we must. They are dying thus around us every day, as Mr John Jarndyce says in Bleak House. But my thoughts today are also lingering on the unread vision in the higher dream.

The unread vision. I suppose there are periods in everyone's life when they feel that the vision is unread, or indeed unreadable. There is lead in the shoes. The mental and affective spine has frozen as if to protect itself from further injury. But must it be this way? Is it excusable on our part?

I don't think this is just about keeping our eyes on a fixed end or goal beyond this life. That of course we must do. But I'm curious about what makes us stop reading the vision in the higher dream. By the dream I mean that which assures us of the larger vistas that lie beyond our stifled confines; I mean awareness of, or sensitivity to, something more enriching that the TV-dinner of commercial society; something therapeutic after the unredeemed quotidian has finished abusing our souls; something restorative after the wicked have pillaged our hearts' reserves and left us for dead. By the dream, I mean the realities that bring both mind and appetite into tune with truth, goodness and beauty.

Does it become obscure because of our circumstances? Do we obscure it by our own distractions? How do we end up moving through solid air? To me it's like losing the taste for food. Something happens to the palette, something in the central gustatory system goes wrong, and the faculty of taste, or in this case the faculty of reading the vision in the higher dream, becomes confused, unable to tell salt from sweet. But why do we flee the conditions of creativity? Why do we live in miserly fashion rather than generously? Why do we retreat from the challenge of the ludic, to a false repose in static inertia? What has poisoned the system so badly that paralysis has become the only safe option? Why are we counting out life in cans? Cause or consequence of ceasing to read the dream?

But, at that point, have we not simply arrived at the point where T.S. Eliot sat down ninety years ago and wrote:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

And have we caught up with him?

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So here I am at the end of the year, resolved to collect fragments. What else can one do? Stravinsky said rules were the condition of creativity in music. I wonder if it isn't the same with all action which is meant to make the mind blossom when it only feels like wilting. Collect fragments, examine them by candlelight, find the cool melodies to sooth the torrid tension, and hope for a better place in the months ahead. Hope for the dream.

I go into the new year - the new liturgical year - with spiritual goals reaffirmed. But I will fail unless I find somehow, somewhere the renewed desire to read the dream.

Redeeming the time and reading the dream might well be inseparable. For fragments are not so very far from fragile bodies and lost souls.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Good intentions

Yeah, well, what do you expect? I'm busy. I've also been distracted today, keeping my eye on a slow-cooking hand of ham. 3 kilos at 120C for 8 hours and, bingo, fantastic ham. You have to shove up the temperature as high as it will go just for the last bit to crisp up the skin.

If that was a side issue, the main business of the day was ploughing through Paul Claudel's La Nuit de Noël, 1914. What an extraordinary piece of theatre! Jean and Jacques, a seminarian and a secular school teacher, are killed by the same bullet as Jacques tries to rescue Jean from no-man's land. They appear in an antechamber of the afterlife, which resembles a propsect of Rheims cathedral, and discuss life, death and salvation with the dead children of the War and with a murdered priest. With the approach of midnight, the curé leads them all in prayer, as the German canons boom out twelve times, ostensibly to destroy the cathedral, but ironically marking the advent of Christ. That has to be symbolist theatre at its best.

Well, to bed now. I have much to do this week. This has hardly been soapbox piece, except for the boredom quota. That you can always rest assured of ;-)

When rights do not apply

On Thursday the Catholic Education Service responded to the government's proposals for Sex and Relationship Education. Notably they were responding to the proposal that Sex and Relationship Education be obligatory after the age of 15. In this respect they were disappointed 'that legal encumbrances mean that a blanket right of withdrawal can no longer apply', yet they welcomed the fact that the government was going to respect the rights of parents to withdraw their children from these classes up to the age of fifteen.

Did I miss something there? Is it the case that if the government honours your rights, that is all well and good, but if it dishonours them, it can be blamed on 'legal encumbrances'? What is a legal encumbrance anyway? A piece of fruit? A lawyer slumbering in the corridors of the Old Bailey perhaps?

And here is another thing. If parents are the primary educators, then unless they are proven abusers, their rights over their children cannot reach a point of inapplicability. When a right like that no longer applies in some political dispensation, then we should call such inapplicability what it is: a violation of rights.

Still, if that wasn't bad enough, consider this. Who - just who - exercises the right to withdraw their children from Sex and Relationship Education? It isn't the kind of parents whose children run amuck, share generously their STDs and keep the abortion services in work in these difficult times. It isn't, in other words, the kinds of parents whose failures as educators might spur any government into trying to make up for their lacunae. It is the kind of parents who object in principle to the morally relativistic or indifferentist dynamics of government-provided Sex and Relationship Education. It is those who object to the medicalization of abortion, as if it were not a moral issue. It is those who do not go doey-eyed over government proposals or proclaim the creed of 'attending to nurse' ('for fear of finding something worse').

So if the Catholic Education Service is not there to protect the position of such people, what is it there to do? The only Catholic thing about this response to the SRE proposals is the wafts of incense it seems to be sending in the direction of government pieties.

Bonfire of the vanities

While the rest of us are quietly ignoring Bonfire Night, the puppy-kicking author of Orwell's Picnic has devised another method to commemorate the Reformation.

Step forward and be heard Miss White.

Remember, remember ...

Do look at the Matt cartoon today.

My sentiments exactly!

Causa honorabilis

You know what drove me to the soap box? It was Stephen Fry.

He's never off our screens these days, and he has been in the news again this week when he said was going to give up Twitter because one of his many thousands of followers said he was a 'bit boring'. I've tried Twitter, and a 'bit boring' is something of an understatement. Still Fry's reaction - teddy slung from cot, threats of stopping Twittering, hurt feelings - just defy belief. He's a manic depressive of course and has our complete sympathy. But threatening to stop Twittering because someone thinks he's a 'bit boring' is getting beyond the realms of preciousness.

Any sympathy I feel for Fry evaporated though when I read last week about his remarks to a Nigerian archbishop during the Intelligence Squared debate.

'What are you for?' he growled at the poor cleric.

And on reading that, I thought it was about time I joined the melee.

Ahem, ladies and gentlemen ...

The odd thing about starting a blog is knowing that, for a while at least, nobody will read the thing. Not even the author! Still, since we cannot but start at the beginning, all I can say is that I am here to blog. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, I have to use a soap box to do it ;-)

I'm not going to define what this blog is about. Any reader with half an ounce of sense will know. And any reader without half an ounce of sense is invited to shut up and take notes.

And if that little bit of cheek makes you feel like criticizing, let me offer you this piece of advice from Victor Borge:

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. Then, when you criticize him, you'll be one mile away, and you'll have his shoes.

Back in a mo.

Innocent.