Why I Am Not A Trad

I see now that, in the recent post here in which I suggested that I'd go to great lengths to avoid an Extraordinary Form Mass, I didn't enumerate the reasons clearly enough. Because there is also this.

To quote Mark Shea on the same topic:

It brings the faith into disrepute, it causes honest and good people to stumble when they might enter in, it harms innocents . . . and, worst of all, it even tempts new Catholics who think they are embracing “hard truths” but are, in fact, embracing ancient evil to become twice the sons of hell that the Trad anti-semite is.  It is pure filth and every Catholic, but most especially every lover of the EF, should smash it flat.  People have died by the millions because of this crap.

The rite may be beautiful. But its contemporary association with abject hatred, and with those who attempt to justify it -- and even seem to delight in it -- is enough to make every person of good will shudder.

This day you will be with me

Elizabeth Duffy is one of the best writers I've read in a long time, in any genre. Read this.

Easter, Grocery Shopping, and the Transformation of the Self

My sister phoned me yesterday to complain about my father, who had driven several hours to spend Easter with her and her family. He was being his usual surly self, his surliness tempered only by the sentimentality that often overtakes him in his cups. I noted that he hadn't changed much since my mother's death in December. "Unless you're committed to self-transformation," my sister replied, "you're not going to change much."

As I've mentioned here before, my sister (once a daily Mass-goer) is now a committed Buddhist, so, while I'm not sure what Easter means to her, I am aware that the notion of self-transformation is a powerful part of her religious practice.  But even for faithful Catholics, if there's ever a time to be "committed to self-transformation," Lent is it. And I don't know how other people manage it, but I seem to fail miserably at this attempted self-transformation each year.

This year, my Lenten penance was a diffuse attempt to rely on God more radically by striving to consume the copious stores of food in my pantry. I would allow myself to go grocery shopping only when they had run out. This meant curbing my usual practice of buying several of something on sale if the something is a thing I use regularly.  This way, I told myself, I would be identifying with the poor: buying only as much as I needed at one time, buying the cheapest things possible, and eschewing my usual penchant for shopping in the gourmet and organic sections of the supermarket. I worried that I had a tendency to hoard food, and I imagined flinging myself on the mercy of God and relying on him to provide for all our needs.

This didn't work out for several reasons. One was that I realized how time-consuming and costly it was to dash off to the store when I'd run out of an essential item like eggs, instead of buying an extra carton on my regular grocery-shopping trip even if the carton at home in my refrigerator still had four eggs left in it -- even if, in other words, my egg stock wasn't yet depleted. So I soon gave up identifying myself with the inconveniences, logistical difficulties, and annoyances that the poor put up with every day -- because I could.

I failed even in the small matter of coffee. As with most comestibles, when it comes to coffee I'm a fearful snob. My favorite coffee is Peet's Major Dickason's Blend, but, in some pre-Lenten paroxysm of penance, I had told myself that ten dollars was too much to pay for a bag of coffee beans, and I bought Eight O'Clock French Roast instead when it was on a buy-one-get-one sale. I made myself drink it during Lent, and it made me pretty sad -- so sad, in fact, that I cheated, and snuck in a bag of Starbucks toward the end of the forty days (I consoled myself that it was a bag of Starbucks Holiday Blend that I'd found as a deeply-discounted overrun at the local job lot). On Holy Saturday, with palpable relief, I threw out the remaining several-cups'-worth of Eight O'Clock coffee. So I failed to identify myself even with people who couldn't afford to drink expensive coffee, but who still needed, as I do, the buzz that coffee confers.

And then there was the other small matter of anger. I stayed mad at practically everyone I knew during the entire forty days. I found it very hard to let go of my everyday frustration with, and self-righteous indignation at, people who don't do the things I want them to do, or who don't do them in the ways I want them to be done. I cursed and swore many times a day, almost always in a room where I was momentarily alone, but even so. I wanted my family to be different. I wanted my three-year-old to stop acting like a three-year-old; I wanted my autistic son to stop being autistic; I wanted my husband to be less like a man and more like a woman in his emotional presentation and responsiveness. At the same time, I wanted everyone to like and admire me.

I see now that, instead of striving to be holier during Lent, I became obsessed with grocery price-points and whether or not I was getting the respect I felt was my due. And I see that this doesn't make me so different from my non-committed-to-self-transformation father, or from anyone in the world who doesn't observe Lent, since I had substituted material things and material results for that which is real.

And what is that which is real? I long for transformation every week at Mass -- for a transformation that can be felt. I beg God, when I receive him in Holy Communion, to transform me, to make me different,  in a perceptible, lasting way. I want the miracle of transubstantiation to change me, too, utterly. I want to see my old self go up in a conflagration, a holocaust upon the altar.

More often than not, however, I leave Mass feeling the same way I felt when I came in:  angry, petty, frustrated, drab, lifeless, irreparably broken.

The Easter flowers were beautiful on the altar today, and the music, while not exactly good in any Platonic sort of way, was much better than usual. In a few weeks, the flowers will be gone, and the choir will be back to its usual quality. And I will be the same. Or will I?

Perhaps we are all constrained to believe that, through our longing for Him, and through His gift of self to us, God is transforming us in ways that, though they may be imperceptible to us, are truly radical. We may pray for the sensation of knowing, of feeling, this transformation, but this is just as materialistic as my Lenten grocery obsession. We need to believe without seeing, and also without feeling. As T.S. Eliot wrote in the "East Coker" section of Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

A blessed and joyous Easter to all.

Ubi Petrus

I came back to the Catholic faith ten years ago. I was a graduate student and a working mezzo-soprano with a busy performance schedule, and I had a part-time job crunching marketing data for a pharmaceutical company. Every morning I would kneel beside my bed -- a bed that was, no doubt mercifully, too big for me for the first time in a long while, and I would weep, and would pray that God would give me a true conversion. Sometimes now, when I think back upon all the many things I've prayed for subsequently (among others, for a happy and holy marriage and family, that my unborn children would survive pregnancy, that a miracle would heal my mother of the rare neurological disease that killed her, and that I would be able to find a friend in the barren new place I now live), it strikes me that that earlier, ten-year-old prayer was by far the most important.

Not long after my reversion, I discovered the existence of a subculture almost entirely unknown to me previously, that of Traditional Latin Mass Catholics (I say almost entirely unknown, because my boyfriend at the time had told me about Mel Gibson's separatist church with a kind of stunned bemusement, and I thought, mistakenly, that Mel and his coparishioners must be some kind of bizarre outliers). I discovered the beauty of the Traditional Latin Mass, and also the painful sort of group neurosis that seems to afflict many of its adherents -- the combination of a siege mentality with a kind of gnosis demonstrated in the belief that they are the keepers of true knowledge and that the majority of Catholics are either stupid or damned, or both. I even went out with a Traditionalist who had some commendable qualities, but who turned out to be a truly scary and unbalanced man (I still thank God, when I remember it, for giving me the momentary wisdom to turn down his proposal of marriage).

I am thrilled beyond belief by the election of Pope Francis. I'm no doubt projecting my own neuroses onto him, for we know little of him as yet, but I feel as if he's a man after my own heart. I was deeply moved by his appearance on the balcony in his plain white vestments, and by the simplicity of his greeting, and that little gesture he made -- so Italian, and, so the people who know the culture of Buenos Aires say, so porteño -- when he said, in his charming Italian, "Fratelli e sorelle . . . buona sera." And by the photos of him washing the feet of the poor, the cast-off, the rejected. And by his words about poverty. And by his taking the name of St. Francis of Assisi, which seemed to me a symbol of his profound humility.

In spite of my (admittedly small) experience of Traditionalists, I have to say that I was really shocked by the apparent contempt that many are demonstrating towards our new pope. A friend of mine was unfriended on Facebook by a Trad, who was horrified by the picture my friend had posted of Cardinal Bergoglio washing the feet of impoverished mothers in a maternity home in Buenos Aires; "I'm sorry but Our Lord didn't do that" was the Trad's explanation in a comment. Seraphic demurred, offering the hedge that the papacy was really not that important before JPII.  Charming Disarray, a former sedevacantist, articulates Traddy distress at the election of this clearly holy and doctrinally-orthodox man particularly well.

This is why I never go to the Latin Mass anymore. If it were offered at a parish across the street from me, I might even go a considerable distance to find a novus ordo Mass instead. The Mass itself is beautiful and reverent. The first time I really understood the sacrificial, rather than the celebratory, ethos of the liturgy was at a Latin Mass. But the people are, often, unapologetically mean-spirited and uncharitable.

May God bless our beloved Pope Francis, and may he lead many to the truths of our holy faith.

Poetry Friday: The courage that my mother had

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she'd left to me
The thing she took into the grave!-
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

More Poetry Friday at Check It Out.

How Not to Do It

No, they probably shouldn't have done that.

My cousin (who, incidentally, is pro-life) posted the video in the link to Facebook. I'd say it's a pretty textbook example of how not to protest abortion. Ironic that one of the protesters is carrying an image of the Divine Mercy.

Recordare

Ultra-light blogging, I know. I'm up against some intractable deadlines in my real-life projects.

In the meantime, there is this, from Mozart's Requiem. 

I think if Mozart had written only this one number and nothing else, nothing at all, he would still count among history's greatest musicians. I love the way that the piece's anxiety resolves into confidence in Christ's mercy.

The conductor is John Eliot Gardiner, the orchestra is the English Baroque Soloists, and the solo quartet is the exceptionally fine foursome of American soprano Barbara Bonney, Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie Von Otter, and the English tenor and bass Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Alastair Miles. The tempo is on the fast side, because the orchestra is playing period and period-replica instruments, whose sounds have a rapider decay than their modern counterparts.

The translation:

Remember, kind Jesus,
my salvation caused your suffering;
do not forsake me on that day. 

Faint and weary you have sought me,
redeemed me, suffering on the cross;
may such great effort not be in vain. 

Righteous judge of vengeance,
grant me the gift of absolution
before the day of retribution. 

I moan as one who is guilty:
owning my shame with a red face;
suppliant before you, Lord. 

You, who absolved Mary [Magdalene],
and listened to the thief,
give me hope also. 

My prayers are unworthy,
but, good Lord, have mercy,
and rescue me from eternal fire. 

Provide me a place among the sheep,
and separate me from the goats,
guiding me to Your right hand.

The Scared is Scared

This little video was made by some students at Middlebury College. It is lovely, and also quite moving.
the Scared is scared from Bianca Giaever on Vimeo.

Please

Pray for little Ronan and his grieving family.

Your Crooked Way

My children wake up during the five o'clock hour each morning, which means that I do too. I find waking up in the dark extremely demoralizing, though, and often am filled with dread first thing in the morning. In order to mitigate this sensation, I make a cup of strong coffee using this excellent device as soon as I get downstairs to the dark kitchen. The three of us then say a morning prayer, which always includes the petition that God will help us to make the world a more beautiful place that day, and we sing one verse of this, our morning song.

I've had a cold for the past few days, so the other morning, because I was losing my voice, I told my older son to lead the singing. "You can sing, Mommy," he encouraged me, "in your crooked way."

You can sing in your crooked way: I thought about this later, and the expression seemed apt. Hadn't I spent years, after all, singing in my crooked way? I remembered the period in my life when I thought that singing was all I had, my only pathway to salvation. As a young woman, growing up and going out on my own felt like launching a cobbled-together boat into dark and perilous waters, or flinging myself off a cliff into some dark void. The world struck me as unkind and unreliable, and love as fleeting and evanescent. If there was something I could do extremely well, I imagined, it could be my shield against the inevitable bitterness and heartbreak that love and the world would deal out. I could not trust love, nor my fellows, but I could wield my singing like a weapon to cut through the dangers they proffered. Other people might have more and better gifts than I had; other people might have the gift of love. But I could sing, and I loved to sing, and I developed a rigorous self-discipline that enabled me, over the course of years, to become a highly-skilled and effective practitioner of that art.

It's not uncommon even for singers at the highest levels to sing flat. I've heard it happen many more times than I can possibly count, including at the Met. Indeed, I've heard mediocre and even lousy performances there, as well as great performances marred by mistakes, bad notes, miscalculations, and musical train wrecks. It happens to everyone. I remember feeling particularly bad for Plácido Domingo one Saturday afternoon when he was singing the title role in the rarely-performed opera Sly, which ends with a tenor aria, and he flubbed the final sung note in the opera, leaving the audience not with the memory of a compelling performance but with that of a single lame high note. There's something touchingly human, though, about singing flat; it's as if the heart, the moment's emotions, the character's words, all cause one's voice -- or, to be technically correct about it, cause one's ability to accurately replicate pitch -- to fail, and doesn't that happen in everyday, non-singing life, too?

There was a period in my career when I was singing in the wrong fach.  I was a small-ish young woman, and my size, combined with my high energy, quick wit, and fast conversation, led some in the field to assume that I was the kind of soprano capable of high, fast, virtuosic singing. As it turned out, I could do the fast singing part, but I could never reliably sing the notes above high C, which is what the fach requires. A famous coach commented on my low speaking voice and the disparity between it and the high-sitting roles I was singing; an assistant conductor at the Met told me that if I even "went one fach lighter" I'd be "working everywhere." I tried to be lighter, higher, faster, perkier. Finally, though, when things were falling apart in my everyday, non-singing life, I began to remember the advice of people who'd known me and my singing for a long time, including members of my own (musical) family, who had always suggested that my voice would darken and deepen. I had wanted to be something else, someone else, but I was not, in fact, that person; and how can the voice be compartmentalized, treated as its own entity separate from the singer's own body and interior suchness?

I listened to my lesson tapes and watched my coaching videos and realized that, when I deviated from pitch, I was not singing flat; I was singing sharp -- above the pitch, even in repertoire that was, really, too high for me -- and I came to see that particular dysfunction as a metaphor for forcing myself into a box (fach, after all, means box) that was not the right size for me. Singing sharp, too, seemed very much in keeping with the use of singing as a weapon -- a sword is sharp, after all; a knife is sharp; so is  a switchblade. I switched to the lyric mezzo-soprano repertoire, a switch I've written about in more detail here, and everything settled into place technically; it felt comfortable, like finally finding clothes that fit after you've been wearing someone else's for the longest time.

I sang in my crooked way for years, and my aims, as an artist, were crooked too, in the sense that everything was predicated upon my singing. It was my heroin, the drug I immersed myself in when I was devastated, frightened, falling apart; it was my consolation when girls around me had husbands and families -- had love; I didn't need those things, or so I thought, since I could sing. It came before everything else in my life; I did not know how to have a life that did not heliotrope like a vine around the trellis of musical discipline and accomplishment. In fact, it was my life.

Even in the time since my own life has settled into patterns more closely resembling other, more usual ways of living, I haven't quite known where to fit singing into those alignments. I still sang, taught, researched, and performed after becoming a mother, but without the same . . . graspingness. I still believe that the ability to sing is a gift which, I now realize, God would have me cultivate (like all His gifts) in the interest of bringing beauty and consolation to others. I'm still trying to understand how to do that.

But I don't know if, in this life, I can ever leave my crooked way behind. I'm reminded of Auden's poem "As I Walked Out One Evening," in which the narrator, on a walk through London, overhears a lover declaiming the usual platitudes. Suddenly the declaration of love is cut short by "all the clocks in the city," who argue that

In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day. . .

and exhort the lover and his listener to

. . . stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.

I know now that my singing isn't the only thing I have; the only thing I have is my crooked heart. And because it's all I have, it's all I can give to this world; my crooked heart is the only means through which I will ever be able to live out my daily prayer to make the world more beautiful.  I pray that God will bring beauty and consolation out of my own crookedness.

The Unfortunate and the Infamous

The post-abortive condition fits Victor Hugo’s description of the distressed and despairing, given in his explanation of  the title of his epic novel, Les Misérables:

"…There is a point where the unfortunate and the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word, the miserable; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity be all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?" (Vol. III, Book VIII, Ch. V)

-- Br. Humbert Kilanowski, O.P.

My Friends

Twenty or so years ago I found a little pile of copies of this slim novel on the remainder table at the legendary and lamented Coliseum Books (just seeing their logo with the doric column, which was imprinted on the bookmarks that the cashiers, almost all of them aging grad-school refugees, would stick in the store's black plastic drawstring bags bearing the same logo, gives me a painful sense of nostalgia. Où sont les neiges d'antan?).  I bought one and read it, and it became, and remains, one of my favorite books of all time. It's the first-person account of the bumbling attempts of World War I veteran Victor Baton to maintain a life of modest freedom without having to work and to find some sort of meaningful human companionship in 1920s Paris. He fails fairly miserably at both, and the book is sweet and funny and suffused with an aching melancholy. Emmanuel Bove, himself a veteran, asserted upon its publication that he had created a new genre, the novel of impoverished solitude. If you can find a copy, you will love it.

I've thought lately about my own friends, and my own solitude, which is not now, as it once was, impoverished, and which endures only for the brief period each day when my big son is at school, my husband at work, and Jude napping, time during which I'm pledged to work on my scholarly book for the English publisher in between the scores of mundane tasks that need to get done and the occasional snuck-in mystery novel. One of the things I miss most about New York, apart from teaching, is my friends there, although the truth is that many of the dearest ones of my youth left New York long before I did, which makes me wonder if nostalgia is really the sense of longing for things misremembered, for the mistaken recollection of things that were really quite differently arranged or never perhaps even existed. It's such a cheerful thing, though, to have friends who are peers -- who are at the same stage of life, or engaged in the same activities, or love the same things that you do. While I had those friendships back in New York, here I have not found them. Perhaps such friends don't live here, or maybe it's just that it's so much easier to make friends there: everyone is out on the street walking around all the time; there's the sense of a flowing stream of humanity, and there are so many self-selective places where like-minded people can go and engage with one another, that one is sure to make some friends. I've always thought that, no matter how obscure your interests or obtuse your personality, there are at least 2,500 people in New York who are just like you.

My friends here in northern Appalachia are unlike me in my own forms of obscurity and obtuseness. While my New York friends were artists and intellectuals, my friends here include a heavily-made up Greek housewife whose American husband abandoned her for what we would call, back where I come from, a puttan; a hairdresser who's taught me everything I know about how to help my autistic son; and a Rwandan refugee I met at church, who works the night shift as an aide in a home for developmentally-disabled adults. There's the doctor's wife who taught me to drive and, when she found out my mother was dying, offered to, and did in fact, drive me and my children three hours to my mother's bedside, since I'm not a confident enough driver to make such a trip and my husband couldn't leave work until the following day. There's also an unemployed Iraq War vet whose biracial son is in my son's first-grade class, and who always treats little Jude with great warmth and respect. I'm the room mother in the classroom, and as such have all the children's addresses, and when I realized that he and his family lived in the worst house I've ever seen in my life (owned by an absentee landlord in New Jersey), and noticed at school pick-up that his children didn't have winter coats, I asked my husband, in lieu of a Christmas gift, to let me get them a Walmart gift card in an amount that would allow them to buy some, along with boots and hats and gloves (I did do this, and the card was passed along to them anonymously through the school social worker).

And I do have a friend here from New York -- A., the young single mother of three children who moved here in the hopes of giving them a better life. While she was able, here, to get a minimum-wage job and off welfare, it appears that improvement may have been short-lived, since her children's father, who joined the family here and stayed home with the children while A. worked, recently abandoned them, forcing her to quit her job because of the lack of child care. I went to see her last night, and found that she'd been inside with her children for two weeks and had no food in the house, having been unable to get them bundled up and down three flights of stairs by herself and marched off to the supermarket a mile away with one stroller in the freezing cold. I went to the store and got diapers, soap, and toilet paper and filled her refrigerator, though she didn't want me to, with food.

All of this makes me wonder whether perhaps we idealize friendship unrealistically in the same way we idealize romantic love. Perhaps friendship is not all Anne of Green Gables and Diana, just as romantic love is not all Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. We are often instructed that love is a choice, an act rather than a feeling; perhaps friendship is too. My friendships here are not based on shared intellectual or artistic pursuits, nor on a shared love of certain music, books, places, or food, nor on a shared parenting style, but upon the idea of mutual aid, even if its mutuality is not readily apparent at this time. I would like that A. not always see herself in the position of receiver of my beneficence, but as my friend. Perhaps A. "does nothing" for me, but I, in turn, "do nothing" for the doctor's wife who has shown me such great generosity. So, as much as I would like to have a "bosom friend" like Diana Barry in Anne of Green Gables, perhaps this place is providing me with the chance to be formed in the school of true friendship. In true friendship, as in true love, loneliness is not forever banished, as much as our longing for its extinction may motivate us to reach out in friendship and love to others. Those whose friends or spouses share their aesthetic values and ways of looking at the world may be lucky, but those whose friends or spouses do not are not necessarily unlucky.  I think that, being away from New York, where everything is always already in place and you only have to advance toward it, I'm now in a place that's stripped bare of everything I formerly wanted and loved and strove towards, but perhaps here I have the opportunity to learn what it means to love in all kinds of ways.

The Apparitions at Vicksburg

I asked Jessica Rabbit at . . . the hell with it to draw a saint for me for 2013. She assigned me not a saint per se, but rather the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which struck me as both excellent and fitting. I will strive to focus my devotion on the Sacred Heart, and feel therefore as if I'm somewhat freed up to address some special prayers this year to an unofficial patron saint -- in this case, a man I've only recently learned about, whose cause has not yet been opened, but one day may be, which is one of my prayers. Read the remarkable story of Claude Jude Newman here.

Farewell to a Righteous Woman

As some of you know, my mother died on December 15. She had asked me to sing the great Negro spiritual "My Lord, What a Morning" at her funeral, which I was able to do in part because of the impressive sangfroid I'd developed over years as a professional singer, and in part because it occurred to me that this was the whole reason I'd become a singer in the first place.

My mother was a righteous woman who loved God, and who was inspired by this love to do good works in her community, especially for the benefit of disadvantaged urban children. In her long suffering I worried sometimes that she was losing her faith, but my worry, I now think, reflects on my own weak faith and understanding of God, for certainly God knows the effects of illness and medication, and, as we know, he did not send His son to condemn, but to redeem.

When I read the Mass readings for today, I imagined that Christ might be speaking these words to my mother (who, incidentally, did have a beautiful speaking voice):

Hark! my lover--here he comes
springing across the mountains,
leaping across the hills.
My lover is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
Here he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattices.
My lover speaks; he says to me,
"Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one,
and come!
"For see, the winter is past,
the rains are over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of pruning the vines has come,
and the song of the dove is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines, in bloom, give forth fragrance.
Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one,
and come!

"O my dove in the clefts of the rock,
in the secret recesses of the cliff,
Let me see you,
let me hear your voice,
For your voice is sweet,
and you are lovely."