Crazy About The Traditional Family

     How would you like to live in the state governed by America’s “Craziest Governor”?  We’re not often in

Does this man look crazy to you?

the national spotlight here in Maine, but the left-wing political/media outfit Politico bestowed that honor upon us in this recent (hit) piece on our esteemed governor.  Of course, to Politico, if you’re conservative, pro-life and don’t speak politicorrectese you’re a certified nut.  Still, crazy is crazy.  And I have to admit, Governor LePage has, on occasion, expressed himself a tad too colloquially; but there are plenty of politicians on the left who have done the same, and Politico finds them perfectly sane.  So, I was inclined to laugh off Politico’s dubious honor . . .at first.

     I say "at first" because Governor LePage did something today that has caused me to think that maybe he is just a little bit nuts.  He didn’t invite anybody to kiss his posterior, and the word “Gestapo” never passed his lips.  He’s running for reelection in a state increasingly dominated by the political left, and yet he made a public appearance at the state’s largest annual pro-life rally, “Hands Around the Capitol.”   And he didn’t just slip in, wave to the crowd and slink out again.  No, he took the stage and made an impassioned speech defending the traditional family, here in the only state where the people (rather than the courts or legislature) have ever formally approved gay marriage.  Politically, it was the most insane thing since Howard Dean’s famous scream.  And yet I have rarely heard a political speech that was a more accurate, insightful and courageous explication of the truth.

     Actually, it wasn’t really a political speech at all, because the Governor was not talking so much about law or policy as he was about a crisis of culture; for instance: “The more I look at the data, the more I’ve come to understand that children need two parents: a mother and a father.”  That qualifies as hate speech in many places (just ask ousted Miss California Carrie Prejean).  How about this: “We can have all the early childhood intervention in the world, but nothing will supplant good parenting.”  Not that pro-lifers shouldn’t work to change abortion laws; he urged us to continue doing so, but added: “The next big challenge is to put the family back together.”

     Whatever faults he may have, this is a guy who gets it.  He sees clearly that the disintegration of the traditional family is heavily implicated in all the various social pathologies that currently plague us.  He knows, and is not afraid to say, that strong families with a loving father and mother can prevent more problems than government programs, however well-intentioned, can ever solve.  In other words, he simply describes reality as it is, which is, I believe, the essence of sanity.  In fact, Paul LePage may be the sanest governor in America.

Bach does it again . . .

Time for a little more music - Bach's "Magnificat".  Who could possibly object?

Be Perfect

     It’s funny how different things can look from just a slightly changed perspective.  I remember as a fallen-away Catholic college sophomore responding to what must have been a Divine prompting  by picking up a copy of the New Testament and starting to read.  I can’t say why, as a cradle Catholic, I didn’t first seek out the sacraments or a priest, but that’s what I did.  I began  with the first chapter of Mathew’s Gospel, and things were looking  pretty good until I came to the Sermon on the Mount.  Here I began to entertain the unpleasant suspicion that a Journey of Faith might entail some Demands (horribile dictu!) upon me.  I continued nonetheless until I came to Chapter 5, verse 48: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  This was asking way too much, I thought.  I put the book down. It would be almost another ten years before I gave serious thought to returning to the practice of the Faith.

     And yet that passage troubled me on and off for a long time.  Odd that as a Classics major, and later a Latin teacher, it didn’t occur to me to look up the Greek word that was translated into English as “perfect”.  If it had, I might have found Jesus’ pronouncement in Matthew 5:48 less forbidding – although at the time, I may not have wanted that badly to be saved from  my sins. 

     Eventually, of course, it did happen.  As an older and (somewhat) wiser man I was explaining to my students that the Latin word perfectus had not yet completely taken on it’s modern connotation of flawlessness or moral perfection; it’s primary meaning was “finished” or “complete”, which is why the verb tense denoting completed action is called the perfect tense.  That’s when the proverbial light went off in my head: was this the word St. Jerome used in translating the Gospel from Greek in the fourth century, and if so, what did the Greek word mean?

  

  What I found changed my entire perception of the passage.  The Latin is indeed  perfectus, and is a translation of the Greek word teleioi. Teleioi is related to the noun telos, “end”, and the adjective signifies something that has reached it’s proper end, or fulfillment, i.e., is complete. I also realized, for the first time, that verse 48 is intended as a conclusion to the verses preceding (notice the word “therefore”; oun in Greek):

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 
so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 
For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 
And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 
You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.  MT 5:44-48

What Jesus is saying is just as God loves completely (i.e., everyone), and forgives completely, so must we.  Now, that doesn’t mean that Jesus isn’t calling us to strive for perfection as we understand the word today: he certainly is.  In this passage, however, he is primarily concerned teaching  us to love with a perfect love.  That’s still a pretty tall order, but somehow it seemed less hopelessly impossible when I could see more clearly what form that perfection was meant to take.

     I don’t want to make it seem that my difficulty with one scripture verse held me back from rejoining the Mystical Body of Christ for a decade.  I needed more experience of life, of realizing the futility of trying to do things “my way”, and particularly of  the Mystery of the Cross to soften my heart and lead me back to the Lord.  Nevertheless, coming to a new appreciation of Christ’s call to perfection in Matthew 5:48 removed one small but significant barrier on that journey.

Caveat Architectus

My use of modern church architecture as an example in my recent discussion of poetry has struck a chord with a number of readers.  I don’t have time to go into all my thoughts on it now, but here’s a link to a treatment of  the topic that I ran across some years back in the Australian magazine AD2000.  I especially like the title: “Modern Church Design: ‘Spank the Architect’.”

Poetry for Homeschoolers, part 3

     In my two previous posts on this topic I discussed criteria to use in choosing poems for Catholic home schooled students.  There’s another very important consideration, one that functions mostly on the level of the unconscious: what is the form of the poem telling them?   Poems, even poems that we don’t think of as “narrative”, tell a story: there is a beginning and an end.  There should be a coherent progression from the one to the other.  Again, I am not suggesting that images or information cannot be fragmentary or obscure; after all, part of what draws us into a poem is the challenge of putting the pieces together, which is why a poem is not just a story but an experience.
What sort of experience, then, is the poem creating for them?   My point is that we ought to be able to put the pieces together: there must be coherence.  Just as a piece of music that ends abruptly, or on a dissonant note, leaves us with a dissatisfied feeling that the music is incomplete, so too a poem that does not combine its elements in a meaningful way.

     By way of example, we might also want to consider church architecture.  The church building

Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, Lewiston, ME

was traditionally considered a microcosm, literally  a mini-universe (from the Greek micros = small, cosmos = universe).  The harmony of the architectural elements working together was intended to represent the coherence of God’s creation, with columns and soaring arches drawing our eyes upward past stars and angels, all the way to the apex representing the Creator Himself.  Most of the time, of course, we don’t consciously analyze the architecture, but we feel the order and experience it on an unconscious level.  The medieval cathedrals have been called ‘sermons in stone” precisely because they show worshippers, at a very deep level, the beauty and order of God’s universe.  One of the chief criticisms of much modern church architecture is not only that it is ugly, but that by employing disjointed and seemingly random elements it preaches an incoherent and meaningless universe.  In fact, its incoherence is in large part why it is ugly, because order is an essential element in true beauty (an observation which would have been considered obvious and unremarkable up until a century or so ago).

     "The Heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands" -Psalm 19:1. As with the church building, so with the poem.  It can teach our children, on the deepest level, either that the universe is a coherent and beautiful place, even if stained by original sin; on the other hand, it can create an experience of a world that is random, meaningless and fragmentary.  If we want our children to become adults who feel at home in a universe that “proclaims the glory of God”, we should immerse them in poetry of the first sort.

Tallis Scholars - Allegri: Miserere

Another unspeakably beautiful piece of sacred music - I saw this clip on Fr. Z's blog (http://wdtprs.com/blog/) today. Allegri's Miserere had been jealously guarded by the Vatican, which did not allow the score to be published for a century and a half, until the fourteen year old Mozart heard it once, and promptly went back to his room to write down the musical notation from memory (http://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/guides/mozart-allegri-miserere/).  Vertitas alienior quam Fictio est.

Beatus Vir - Monteverdi

 Absolutely beautiful piece of Sacred Music - this is as close as we can get in this world to the sound of Angelic Choirs!

Poetry for Homeschoolers, part 2

     In my last post I discussed some of the criteria we use in our family for choosing poetry for our homeschool, and how we apply St. Paul’s standard of “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise.” (Phil. 4:8) As an example of what not to choose I discussed Wallace Stevens’ “The Anecdote of the Jar”. 

     I’ve chosen my example of a suitable poem below not because it’s a great poem (it’s not, although it is certainly good), but because my students have had success with it, and have enjoyed it, in the past.  It’s called “Barnacles”, and I came upon it in a little volume called Poems Every Child Should Know, published in 1904.  I had never heard of the poem or of Sydney Lanier, its author, but I could immediately see its appeal:

MY soul is sailing through the sea,

But the Past is heavy and hindereth me.

The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells

That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells

About my soul.

The huge waves wash, the high waves roll,

Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole

And hindereth me from sailing!

Old Past let go, and drop i' the sea

Till fathomless waters cover thee!

For I am living but thou art dead;

Thou drawest back, I strive ahead

The Day to find.

Thy shells unbind! Night comes behind,

I needs must hurry with the wind

And trim me best for sailing.

I often tell my students that a poem is a “multi-media presentation”, which is perhaps not strictly true, but by which I mean that the poem engages us simultaneously in different ways:  it engages our sense of hearing the with sound of the words themselves, our tactile sense by the rhythm created by meter and rhyme, our visual sense with the images it creates in our minds, and by the elegance and sophistication of expression.  In a really good poem all these things work together to create a unified effect,  and we may not even be consciously aware of them, but after experiencing them we say to ourselves, “Yes, that’s right!”  

     I think that “Barnacles” is such a poem.  Read it aloud and just listen to the sounds, feel the wave-like rolling rhythm, and how the half-line in the middle of each stanza creates an effect like the “hindering” action of barnacles on the hull of a boat  (or of certain events in our past).  Euphony (literally, “good sound”) is part of the beauty of a poem.  This is not to say that there is no place for cacophony or harsh sounds, but they should not predominate; rather, they should be used as a contrast, or to highlight harsh or ugly details.  

     Notice also the universal applicability of the image of barnacles (at least once we know what they are!).  Unlike the images in “The Anecdote of the Jar”, which can signify anything at all (or maybe nothing?) , the dragging effect of barnacles on the hull of a boat clearly correlates to the common human experience of trying to escape the unwelcome effects of our past.  All the elements move toward the same goal, and reinforce each other.

     In my next post I’ll wrap up with a brief discussion of the importance of the form of the poem, particularly in a Catholic homeschool context.  

Rock Me Amadeus! Mozart's First Symphony . . . At Eight Years Old

Please take the time to listen - this is just over eleven minutes long (symphonies were shorter in 1764)  and the composer was only eight years old (eight years old!).  Peter Schaffer's cartoonish play and the subsequent movie was wrong about Salieri (he wasn't a killer), wrong about Mozart himself (he wasn't a babbling buffoon), but was dead on its title, the composer's middle name: "Amadeus".  Not because God loved Mozart more than the rest of us, but because the dazzling genius be bestowed upon Mozart was God's gift of love to all of us.

Poetry for Homeschoolers, part 1

“Besides being just plain fun, poetry introduces children to beautiful, complex patterns of language, and shows how words can both communicate thoughts and also move the emotions.”

–Linda Milliken, “Poetry for Busy Moms”

     I have been truly privileged to see my five children flower into enthusiastic but discerning readers under the loving and inspired tutelage of my wife Linda. The passage above (from an article she wrote for a homeschooling magazine called Mater et Magistra which, alas, is no longer published) is right on target; it also raises the question, “can any poetry accomplish this end, and if not what criteria do we use in choosing poetry for our children?”  I’ll offer some thoughts on this question over the next few posts.

     A good place to start any discussion of the arts is with St. Paul’s famous dictum:  “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil. 4:8).  Not coincidentally, this is one of Linda’s favorite scripture quotes, and one she frequently reminds our children to use as their benchmark in evaluating any music, literature, movies, etc. that they come across.  In fact, while Keats may have been oversimplifying a little when he wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all”, it does seem that there is always something beautiful in truth, and that the (truly) beautiful must be an expression of the truth.

     You may be wondering how I intend to apply these abstract thoughts to the practical matter of choosing poetry for your children.  Well, to answer the first question I raise above, no, not all poetry is suitable, because not all poetry is an expression of what is true, honorable, and so on; much poetry, in other words, especially that written in the past century, introduces patterns of language that may be complex, but fail to be beautiful, and communicates thoughts, but fails to move the emotions (or when it does move them fails to move the emotions in the direction of the true and honorable, just, pure, gracious and excellent).  

Beautiful? I think not . . . 

     I’d like to offer a couple of examples.  Consider the following, “The Anecdote of the Jar”, written by Wallace Stevens:

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 every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee

The Wikipedia entry on this poem tells us: “This famous, much-anthologized poem succinctly accommodates a remarkable number of different and plausible interpretations”.  Indeed it does: when I first read this in a college-level literature course we had a very stimulating discussion in which not a few of that number of “plausible interpretations” were entertained.  More recently, when I introduced the poem to my junior high school and high school aged children they raised more fundamental questions, like “what was he thinking?”  followed by “what was he drinking?”  All kidding aside, my purpose is not to bad-mouth Wallace Stevens, who was a skilled poet, nor is it to suggest that the poem above is without merit.  I do contend, however, that while “The Anecdote of the Jar” does offer patterns of language that are complex and clever, few of us would call them beautiful.  I think it’s also fair to say that this poem does not engage most readers on an emotional level.  Whatever else one might say about it, I would not recommend using it in your homeschool curriculum.

     In my next post, we’ll look at a more or less randomly chosen example of a poem appropriate for young minds.