"Like a bomb exploding our hypocrisy" [UPDATED]

By [one in] his or her right mind I mean vital, interested, questing, conflicted, on to one's own myriad defects and myriad gifts, preferably with a secret incendiary devotion to some doomed love/project/cause that promises to bear absolutely no fruit, compromises your physical/emotional health, and makes you look like a fool, loser and/or psychotic in the eyes of the world . . . .

The reason to save your first kiss till the altar, in other words, is not because you are so listless and etiolated and body-despising and intent on being a straight-A Catholic that you’ll suppress and deny your own God-given erotic urge, but because you are so vital, so juiced, so wild with longing, so crazy about your spouse-to-be that you want to make your wedding night a work of art. You want to offer your wedding night to the whole world.

Read Heather King's recent post at Shirt of Flame. Above is the first movement, Allegro con brio, of the Beethoven Sonata op. 22, no. 11 in B-flat major, which she references (the moment I believe she is alluding to is at around 5:28, the return to the home key of B-flat -- not E-flat, as she has it -- after the exposition), played by Claudio Arrau.

UPDATE: Kissing before marriage is not a sin for Catholics, as Mrs. Darwin reminds us.  The priest Heather referred to in her original post seems to have been working instead from a list of ultra-Orthodox Jewish dating conventions. Maybe someone should send him this brief article from New York Magazine. An excerpt: 

[On] this moonlit Saturday night, standing on the outdoor esplanade of the Winter Garden [at the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan], Chaim Singer, a 24-year-old yeshiva student from Kew Gardens Hills, proposes to [Chavie] Moskowitz, who, bouncing on her toes, gleefully accepts.  Instead of embracing her fiancé, she blows him a kiss. "It's pretty tough not touching," she admits. "That's one of the reasons why we get married so soon." Soon means after three to twelve dates.

Tantum Ergo Sacramentum

While doing my dissertation research, I made the acquaintance of an elderly laicized priest. I got in touch with him because, though not a professional scholar or musicologist, he had published an important piece of scholarship in the 1990s in a semi-obscure journal -- the only work on its subject written in English. I can't emphasize enough how invaluable his research was to my own, and I cited him copiously -- almost reverently -- in my dissertation, and sent him a copy when I was done.

He has put me on some sort of email list now, and forwards items about the usual sorts of things that appear to preoccupy elderly laicized priests -- the ordination of women and whatnot -- so I usually delete them without reading. Today, though, the subject line of his email caught my interest: "Real Presence and Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration." I have a great love for the practice of adoration, so I read the email, only to find that it was the text of a recent article by Fr. Richard McBrien, well-known professor of theology at Notre Dame, in the National Catholic Reporter. McBrien's article purports to analyze the revival of interest in Eucharistic adoration, and in so doing he descends from the theologically sound -- explaining that during the Canon of the Mass, the bread and wine, though they retain the properties of bread and wine, are changed sacramentally into the body and blood of Christ -- to the insulting -- scoffing at traditional beliefs and pious practices surrounding the Blessed Sacrament. Even so, I found his concluding sentence -- "Eucharistic adoration, perpetual or not, is a doctrinal, theological, and spiritual step backward, not forward" -- shocking, and in fact felt almost physically ill when I read it. This sort of thing makes me wonder if the Traditionalists aren't right when they hint darkly that the priests and bishops are actively seeking to destroy the Catholic Church from within.

The irony is that the musicological work my contact did in the 1990s was on Father Hermann Cohen, a.k.a. Père Augustin-Marie du Très Saint Sacrement, who initiated the practice of perpetual adoration at Sacré Coeur in Paris.

Epiclesis

I just got the June Magnificat, and was astonished by the painting on the cover, Jan Davidsz. de Heem's Chalice and Host surrounded by garlands of flowers, above. De Heem (c. 1606 - c. 1683) was one of the greatest Dutch still-life painters,; this was my first encounter with a still life painting whose subject was the Eucharist, with the Host apparently already changed into the Body and Blood, or perhaps in the process of changing. The fruit, vines, and sheaves of wheat surrounding the niche housing the chalice are all standard pictorial elements of the genre, but de Heem's Host, suspended above the cup and glowing with brilliant light, dominates the scene, reminding me in a strange way of Wallace Stevens's poem "Anecdote of the Jar":

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere. . .