In Praise of Clunky Translations

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On November 17 the USCCB approved the final segments of a new English version of the Roman Missal.  A few have already criticized the Vox Clara translation as “slavishly literal” (here) and disrespectful of the “natural rhythm and cadences of the English language” (here).  On purely grammatical and stylistic grounds, I am actually inclined to agree with these criticisms.  However, a recent rereading of Liturgical Latin, Christine Mohrmann’s slim classic from 1957, has reminded me that slavish literalism and barbarous constructions have always been a hallmark of Christian liturgical language.

Mohrmann—at pains to show that early Christian Latin was hardly the Latin of the “common man”—notes that biblical Latin was marked by precisely those stylistic features most criticized in the new Roman Missal:

Gerrymandering Fundamentalism

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Intellectual laziness thrives on ambiguous words.  And “fundamentalism” may quite possibly be the plushest linguistic hammock on offer right now.  Media outlets are notorious for trading on the word’s elastic and emotive qualities.  This pattern holds even when the Boston Globe trots out a religious scholar of Harvey Cox’s stature to tell its readers “Why Fundamentalism Will Fail.”

Cox starts out arguing precisely enough, noting several of the “fundamental” tenets from which fundamentalism received its name. He deems the crown jewel of these to be the literal inerrancy of scripture, even in “matters of geology, paleontology and secular history.”  Fair enough.

Fundamentalism, however, quickly overgrows this rather precise definition, becoming instead a shapeless placeholder in the culture wars.

Isn’t it Ironic?

One of the things that confronts Americans daily is the way in which Irony has come to rule.  There is not much way to escape it.  The young delight in comedy, but it is comedy that is satirical and self-referential.  There is a constant dwelling on the falseness of appearance, the lie behind every apparent truth.  Occasionally up pops a inclination to go back to an age when Irony did not prevail, but this urge immediately is cut off at the knees.  Want to go back to the 50’s? Ah, our dominant narrative tells us, that was a black-and-white era of suburban repression, that yielded to the full-color tie-dye of 60’s authenticity.

I have no inclination to go back to the 1950’s (full disclosure: I do occasionally pine for the 1250’s).  Yet if one cares about anything seriously these days, it is hard not to be daunted by pervasive apathy in the face of any need to change.  David Brooks says we have lost our hope, our optimism.  There are cries of alarm at (15 years ago) couch potatoes, and (today) internet junkies.  As I said about texting a couple of weeks ago, so too I think the recurring alarm about TV and internet sapping our national energy is important, but often I think the alarm is misdirected.

What most passionately convinced me of this is David Foster Wallace’s essay entitled, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.”

Dying for Their People

I want to reflect on the deaths of six Jesuits and the two women who worked in their residence in El Salvador today.  On my way down on the bus during my “long experiment” – a period of four months in the novitiate spent in a situation of poverty in the Third World – I had the feeling that these men probably deserved it, mixing up in politics that way.  And then on the second day I was there, as I sat in the rose garden now covering what was the courtyard where they were killed, and heard the stories of torture of fathers and sons from mothers and wives, I became aware of the depth of what they had done.  As Paul wrote to Philemon, expressing his profound solidarity with Onesimus: “I am sending him, that is my own heart, back to you,” so their solidarity with the people of El Salvador had become so perfect that when the people died, so did they, and when they died, it was on behalf of the people.

Jesus once said: “The Kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘look, here it is,’ or, ‘there it is.’ For behold, the Kingdom of God is among you.  But, first he must suffer greatly and be rejected by this generation.”

Poems of the Day: Franz Wright

Two by Franz Wright for your consideration. The first is from his book Entry in an Unknown Hand (1989), and the second is from The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes (1982). Both poems can be found in ill lit: Selected and New Poems by Franz Wright. Included in ill lit are some pieces from Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Wright. Both of these poems are great examples of how imagery creates mood and tone. The first is a bit grim, the second much lighter. Both, though, are accurate descriptions of morning. Perhaps the first is Monday morning, and the second is a Saturday morning.

Morning Arrives

Morning arrives
unannounced
by limousine: the tall
emaciated chairman

of sleeplessness in person
steps out on the sidewalk
and donning black glasses, ascends
the stairs to your building

guided by a German shepherd.
After a couple of faint knocks
at the door, he slowly opens
the book of blank pages

pointing out
with a pale manicured finger
particular clauses,
proof of your guilt.

(1989)

Morning

A girl comes out
of the barn, holding
a lantern
like a bucket of milk

or like a lantern.
Her shadow’s there.
They pump a bucket of water
and loosen their blouses,

they lead the mare out
from the field
their thin legs
blending with the wheat.

Crack a green kernel
in your teeth. Mist
in the fields,
along the clay road

the mare’s footsteps
fill up with milk.

(1982)

 

“Be Perfect” (or, Of Steeples and Gargoyles)

“Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  Not “do the best you can.”  Not “try hard.”  Be perfect.  In one sense, Christians must necessarily be hypocrites: they preach a way of life they cannot live.  They preach perfection and live imperfectly.

Said another way, Christianity is a religion of failing to the clear the bar, of coming up short.  The question is, what does one do with the bar after coming up short time and time again?  Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B. muses over this problem in his recently published memoirs, A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church.  Recalling his theology studies as a young monk, he writes,

The courses in moral theology left me with the conviction that the Church’s traditional approach was to set the bar high, perhaps too high in theory, but to mitigate it by counseling compassion in practice.  While Europeans seemed very comfortable with this approach, it made us Americans uneasy.  

Speech!

Have you ever noticed just how many things are left out when you speak?  We drop subjects all the time, starting sentences just with verbs or adjectives: “Great to see you the other day.”  “Love that hat you’re wearing.”

In written English we demand “complete sentences” (I can hear my sixth-grade teacher’s voice right now) because in the written word there is often less context available than is needed for comprehension.  As a teacher, if I’m grading quizzes, it is a huge help if the student writes in a complete sentence for every answer, because I get a clear sense of what he thinks he is answering.  I much prefer to see “3. Pepin the Short was crowned king of the Franks in AD 752” than simply find on the paper “3. Pepin the Short.”

Yet this requirement for complete sentences in written English is not absolute.  Look, here’s a sentence discussing George Clooney, from this week’s New Yorker, a magazine legendary for its grammatical fussiness:

The most handsome and capable star in the world, and he doesn’t mind coming across as a total dork. [emphasis original]

It is an incomplete sentence, joined to a complete sentence.  In this sort of conversational and familiar writing, we tolerate incomplete sentences because we have the context, we have the flow of thought. When writing imitates the easy flow of speech, many of the grade-school rules of grammar drop away.

The Magisterium and History

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I’m currently taking a course on the thought of Joseph Ratzinger, so his thoughts tend to show up a lot on these posts.  Here’s an interesting quote from him in light of Nathan’s post, in which Ratzinger, as prefect, comments on the relationship between theologians and the Church’s teaching authority:

[Donum Veritatis] states—perhaps for the first time with such candor—that there are magisterial decision which cannot be the final word on a given matter as such but, despite the permanent value of their principles, are chiefly also a signal for pastoral prudence, a sort of provisional policy.  Their kernel remains valid, but the particulars determined by circumstances can stand in need of correction.  In this connection, one will probably call to mind both the pontifical statements of the last century, especially the decisions of the then Biblical Commission.  As warning calls against rash and superficial accommodations, they remain perfectly legitimate: no less a personage than J. B. Metz, for example, has remarked that the anti-Modernist decisions of the Church performed the great service of preserving her from foundering in a bourgeois-liberal world.  Nevertheless, with respect to particular aspects of their content, they were superseded after having fulfilled their pastoral function in the situation of the time (The Nature and Mission of Theology, 106).

Given the context of Metz (no magisterial “yes-man”), the “bourgeois-liberal world” would probably have been the milieu of German, Protestant academics, who proved generally accommodating to the Nazi party.

On the PBC and Some Dangerous Tendencies in Biblical Scholarship

This post is going to move around a lot.  I just have some ideas I want to throw out and get some feedback about.  My reflections are prompted by the reappearance of an article about Tom Rausch, SJ, professor of theology at LMU, in the news as of late. Because he has played a prominent role in the recent dialogue with the Anglican Community, an old speech he gave in 1997 has been dug up.  Or rather an article written about the speech in the San Diego News. The first line of the article:

These are the men most dangerous to authentic Catholicism today: Karl Keating, Scott Hahn, Peter Kreeft, Dale Vree, and Thomas Howard.

The Good Thief: A Reflection

For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 1 Thess 5:2.

Accomplished thieves leave no evidence. The very best thieves, if we are to believe Hollywood, leave calling cards.  Paul encourages his listeners in Thessalonica telling them they have no reason to be caught off guard by the “day of the Lord.” Since the Thessalonians are “children of light” and are not “of the night or of darkness,” they have no reason to fear Jesus’ thieving ways. Like the Thessalonians, we are also “children of the light” and have no reason to fear the thief of the night. However, there are times when we might let our guard down, times when we hang up the helmet of hope and lay aside the breastplate of faith and love. What are we to do when we, or our brothers and sisters, slip into the darkness. In this darkness, we need the Lord to come, but in our strange, dark comfort we fear the light of Christ. It’s ironic isn’t it? When we need the Lord the most, we tend to be most frightened of his coming.

What is left for the Lord to do but to steal our hearts back for himself? In the darkness of an addiction, for example, the addict puts up the strongest walls against the good thief: these are walls of denial, shame, anger, self-preservation, and self-sufficiency, etc. He barricades against the coming of the thief.

The darkness of sin has been compared to the prison of addiction. In the darkness of sin, we think the best way out of the dark is to hunker down deeper into ourselves. It would never occur to us to open up, spread out, let down the defenses, and become vulnerable to the thief. Like the addict, the sinner thinks the Lord will come with a vengeance, smashing down walls and laying waste to every obstacle. It’s just the opposite; the Lord becomes crafty like a fox, outsmarting our well-laid battlements. Before we know it, we’ve been robbed.

How does this dynamic work in the real world? It’s works when we “encourage one another and build each other up.” Here’s how the Lord works around our defenses. When we put down our weapons of criticism and judgment and pick up the trowels of unity and the shovels of love, then we help the Lord in his thievery.

“The Encroachment of the Buzz”

In a recent issue of America Magazine (10/26/09), there is an article from Mark Bauerlein, calling current U.S. teenagers “The Dumbest Generation.” What the article notes is that the current generation of teens is not necessarily more or less intelligent, in raw terms, than any other generation.  Yet Bauerlein goes on to use this term “Dumb” to describe these teens because he believes the technology they employ confines them to immaturity.

This article fails on a number of different levels.  First, there is the major problem of his audience.  Bauerlein and the editors of America are making a clear statement that they expect no one under the age of 30 to be reading this article.  Anyone who texts with any frequency, anyone part of the Dumbest generation is surely not going to be brought to enlightenment by use of such pejorative language.

Good Quote

From Origen’s On First Principles:

This being so, we shall now outline the manner in which divine scripture should be understood on these several points… The aim was that not everyone who wished should have these mysteries laid before his feet to trample upon, but that they should be for the man who had devoted himself to the studies of this kind with the utmost purity and sobriety and through nights of watching, by which means perchance he might be able to trace out the deeply hidden meaning of the Spirit of God.

God grant us more scripture scholars of this kind.

The Society of All Souls

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Few things are more opaque to folks of contemporary sensibility than the longstanding Catholic practice of praying for the “poor souls” in Purgatory.  I can easily recall my Mom encouraging me to “offer up” my suffering on their behalf—a counsel that she often dispensed to put the kibosh on my whining.  I admit, I never quite understood the efficacy of “offering it up” back then, but I did understand that Mom was deferring my complaints to the adjudication of a higher power.  And no favorable decisions ever seemed to return from that court of appeal.

The practice of interceding for the poor souls remained obscure because it supposed a deeper interweaving of human destinies than I had either the vision or courage to acknowledge.

That in Majorca Alfonso Watched the Door

This post is going to do three things I usually try avoid when blogging: commenting about matters pertaining to the Society of Jesus, writing spiritual reflections, and posting things that are essentially another’s work.  But I cannot resist a word about St. Alphonsus Rodríguez.

Today—as the secular world celebrates Halloween and most of the Church observes the 30^th Saturday in Ordinary Time—the Society of Jesus remembers the lay brother Alphonsus Rodríguez, who died on this date in 1617.  When we think “Jesuit saint” the type that comes most readily to mind is a heroic missionary priest or a valiant martyr.  Think Xavier, Jogues, Campion.  Alphonsus was none of these things.  The task assigned to him was different: answering the door at the Jesuit college in Majorca.  For nearly four decades, answering the door.  That, at least, was what seen on the exterior.  In his interior life of prayer—unknown until after his death—Alphonsus was blessed with the highest mystical graces.  The students at the college came to the holy porter for advice and encouragement—including the future “slave of the slaves” St. Peter Claver, whom Alphonsus urged to the missions.

This month began with the remembrance of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the great saint of “Little Way.”  Today, the month ends with another “Little Way” saint, Alphonsus Rodríguez, who reminds us that holiness need not come through martyrdom in a foreign land, but can come—and in fact, for most of us, will come—through our everyday tasks, even if they be as humble as opening the door in an ordinary Jesuit college.

Alphonsus’s confrère Gerard Manley Hopkins has captured the spirit of this saint’s life perhaps better than anyone, and so I close with the following Hopkins poem:

In honour of

St. Alphonsus Rodríguez

Laybrother of the Society of Jesus

HONOUR is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.

Love in Daily Life

In many of the world’s great spiritual traditions there are strong themes of finding the presence of God in the mundane.  There is a call to “awareness” so that by becoming aware of the passions one might move beyond them to a higher reality.  What many Christians might not be aware of is just how much this mystical tradition exists also in Christianity.  Recently there has been some renewed influence of mysticism in Christianity, but often it is imported, so to speak, from other religious traditions. Yet there are thinkers who draw their origin and life directly from the Christian tradition who also can offer a profound link and connection to the mystical life, an awareness of the presence of God in all things.

The End of Celibacy?

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Amid the stir about the Vatican’s creation of “personal ordinariates” for Anglican communities seeking communion with Rome, the discipline of clerical celibacy has again become the focus of the media’s sensitive and admiring attentions.  It is still unclear whether these ordinariates will enjoy a permanent exemption from this Latin Rite discipline, or merely a non-renewable exemption (limited to those who are already Anglican priests or seminarians).  Either way, there seems to be some expectation in various quarters of the Church that the new provision will undermine the Latin Rite tradition of celibacy.  Depending on which quarters of the Church are canvassed, naturally, the prospect excites either anxiety or glee.

I often wonder whether the use of term “discipline” is not partly responsible for this insecurity about priestly celibacy.

Wendell Berry and the EcoDorm

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I am often struck by a story or article that I don’t have time to follow up on–at least right away.  Maybe that’s not all bad, since the transience of blog posts tends to discourage rumination and measured response.  In that spirit, I’m posting something I’ve been digesting for a fortnight.

Two issues ago, the New York Times Magazine featured a low-key and appreciative story on Warren Wilson’s new eco-friendly dorm (accessible only with on-line member ID).  The accompanying photo gallery is filled with young, self-consciously earthy students of European extraction.  They are depicted lounging in their dorm, drying clothes on a line, playing banjos and bending iron railings in their shop.  All in all, the article attempts to portray what the director of the school’s Environmental Leadership Center calls “an integration of life and values.”  They like their food home-grown, their furnishings hand-made, and their music unamplified.

The one incongruous picture, however, is the shot of an attractive young couple, lounging together in their dorm room (shown above and in the print edition, but not included in the online gallery).  The intimacy of the pose suggests a romantic relationship.  The caption informs us that the couple “met at a camp for home-schooled children when they were 14.  They share an EcoDorm room.  Two other couples cohabit in the dorm.”

The picture is notable not only because it adds little to the “integration of life and values” touted above, but because it goes so far as to contradict it.  Organic living lies cheek-to-jowl with industrial sex.

Two Years Later, A Different Colonialism

During his May 2007 visit to Brazil, Pope Benedict XVI made some controversial comments about pre-Colombian cultures which incited a vehement outcry against him.  The Holy Father claimed that the indigenous American peoples were “silently longing” for Christ.  He said that Christianity had purified these cultures and made them fruitful, noting that “the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Colombian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.”  The Pope concluded that it would be a step back, not forward, to try to go back to native religions and to separate them from Christianity.

Many reacted strongly.  Indigenous leaders were especially offended, issuing responses like that given by Jecinaldo Sateré Mawé of the Amazonian Sateré Mawé tribe, who called the Pope’s remarks “arrogant and disrespectful.”  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demanded an apology, noting the “genocide” which occurred with the arrival of Christianity.  And much of the Western media decried the comments as another instance of Pope Benedict’s intolerance and narrow-minded Europeanism.

Jesuits in Art and Science

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This is only a newsy post.  However, I often find it good both to remind and be reminded that the Jesuit tradition of ecclesial service in both the arts and sciences continues. A couple recent events have caught my eye.

With regard to the sciences, here is  link to Pope Benedict visiting and blessing the new headquarters of the Vatican Observatory (a work entrusted to the Society of Jesus).  Those who know Fr. David Brown, SJ of the New Orleans Province–recently assigned there after earning a doctorate in astrophysics from Oxford– will recognize him in the footage.

With regard to the arts, I find the mosaics of Fr. Marko Rupnik, SJ–installed in the recently dedicated Chapel of the Holy Spirit at Sacred Heart University–to be quite beautiful.  One can see both the mosaics both in situ and as a slide show.

Enjoy.

Does a song have any meaning if it’s not shared?

Sufjan Stevens is the most interesting musician I know.  To be clear: he is not the best singer, he is not the best lyricist, he is not the best songwriter or composer.  What he has done, up to now, is combine a love for complex, beautiful music, and a deep love for God.   It’s a combination that has fascinated me.

I had the rare privilege of seeing him in concert the other night at a tiny venue in Philadelphia called Johnny Brenda’s. Sufjan had not toured since 2006, and the crowd’s anticipation in the room seemed at times literally breathless — people hardly daring to exhale for fear of spoiling the moment. Is he going to play new stuff? old stuff? weird stuff?  And beneath it all, there lingered the dominant question – will any of his songs move me tonight the way they have moved me before?