When Wicked Men Blaspheme Thee

Do you remember this old Marian hymn:

I sing a hymn to Mary

the Mother of my God,

the virgin of all virgins

from David's royal blood?

It's a lovely song, and I sang it in my youth to a world where Mary was, if not celebrated, at least respected. The most negative things said came from the sola scriptura side of the house, that Catholics were worshipping Mary as a God. I often had it said to me and I wondered at the lack of subtlety in such minds. Would that that were the worst said about our Virgin Mother.

We're just back from a short visit to Amsterdam. It's a lovely city, full of lovely, healthy people. They're lively and bright, artistic, fashionable, mad about kooky design and....well, yes, that's the problem - kooky design. Our Lady, intercessor for the human race, is now a design element in these kooky knick knacks. I saw a water bottle, to be used while cycling, I suppose, with the inscription 'Holy Water' and a drawing of Mary feeding the water to Jesus. The caption was something like 'the water that refreshes sinners'. It's ironic, you see. Everything is ironic - cocktail shakers are shaped like cows and sharp knives look like soft bananas because it's 'ironic'. T-shirts slogans order people to look and also not to look at the wearer. Marlyn Monroe seems to be everywhere, laughing her great horse laugh, and poor old Che Guevara, once a symbol of revolution, is done in cross-stitch on comfy cushions - ironic. No harm, you say. But in one shop where I rummaged through bins of edgy stuff I saw a t-shirt with a print of the Virgin and the most, most, most disgusting suggestion underneath. Remember, this was a designer shop, not a sex shop or a joke shop or a head shop; this stuff is for educated people who fancy they have taste. In another shop I saw an altar with a plastic blow up version of Our Lady of Guadaloupe adorned with great plastic roses. Automatically I blessed myself, to the shock of the black clad shop assistants with their lacquered, bored faces. I'd forgotten that everything there was 'ironic'.

I suppose Buddhists have for a long time had to look at the Buddha's head in the form of garden ornaments or candles or guest soaps. Do they find it offensive? I don't know, but I never use the religious symbols of other faiths. It's just common politeness, if nothing else. There seems to be an extra delight, though, in demeaning the Blessed Virgin. Embodiment of purity that she is, there is more than irony, there is true viciousness, in these attacks upon her. The dark cannot bear the light to exist, and must try to cover it.

Hey, I wonder if my misplaced respect for the blow-up altar gives us the way to go? When people set up these ironic 'altars' in their shops, why don't we Catholics turn up and say a few decades of the Rosary? I'm sure the post-modern shop keepers would appreciate the irony. And when we see someone wearing a t-shirt with the Virgin's image, thank him/her for bringing the image to us and ask him/her to join us in a decade.

O teach me Holy Mary

a loving song to frame.

when wicked men blaspheme thee

I love and bless thy name.

The painting at the top is by Domenico Veneziano. Please enjoy its beauty. May God bless all the creators of loving, respectful images that bring us closer to our Mother, closer to God.

The Laughing Peasant: Sacred Art

This is an intersting website by the artist Jeff Lefevier. He works to make sacred art, a difficult task in these sad times. The scale of his work is important. See the dimensions of the banners above contrasted with the six foot man viewing them. I also like the clarity - absence of the muddy and the tangential. God is Great. God is Clear.

The Laughing Peasant: Sacred Art

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

Marion Peck is the artist of this haunting image. Not just in this, but in all her work, there is a sadness, a waste, a tragic unknown that clings to the psyche. It is a re-working of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch school flower pictures, and like all such pictures, it has surprising depth. In the average flower picture the blooms symbolise the transitory nature of beauty, joy, youth and all that delights. The flowers are beauties, but they will soon die, and what now delights will in a short time disgust. Here the poignancy is brought to an acute pitch: the flowers are actually souls, beautiful, vulnerable girls - will they fade and be discarded, like dead flowers?

I find something suggestive of abortion in this image. The artist herself says only that the images come from her dreams. She pins no particular meaning on any of them, which is normal in the surrealist genre - dreams are accepted, not interpreted. But yet, I see the troubled innocence of the faces, the human features on the insects - suggestive of larvae or foetuses - and above all the overall impression of something beautiful (the flowers, or our modern pleasure centred lives) with a sickening core (death/abortion). Copy this picture to your desktop, look at it over and over again. You will find it troubling, as I have.

May God send His grace to stay the hands of the abortionists, and give confidence to the women who fear the births of children.

Wrapped Him in Swaddling Clothes

Swaddling clothes consisted of a blanket that was softly wrapped around the baby to keep him warm, and linen bands bound more tightly to keep the blanket in place and the child immobile. Hundreds of thousands of generations of children were swaddled all over the world without any seeming harm or deformity. Apparently it promotes sleep and passivity. They don't cry. They feel safe. It would seem babies need less freedom than we give them. The freedom to thrash their limbs wildly and cry out for someone to hold them, someone who might or might not come, is not all that much appreciated by babies. They like the feeling of being held tightly and safely, of all decisions being made for them, of others being in control. With the baby nice and swaddled, trussed up like a larva, the parents could work. The baby would not begin to look for food until the bands were loosened, so the mother could very much set her own feeding schedule.

Jesus is, of course, the most famous swaddled baby. We hardly ever see him in the full get up, however. Medieval artists would depict a baby in a pretty gown, as worn by an older, mobile child, and renaissance artists progressed to portraying him nude or loosely draped in a cloth. The reason for not showing the confining bands was possibly located in an area of tension between the divine nature of the child and the purpose of swaddling, which was plainly to restrain the baby. Swaddling was also considered necessary to ensure the baby's limbs grew straight, and - some said - to prevent the baby plucking his own eyes out. So it was unseemly to show Jesus in bands. But it was such a part of childbirth - to immediately swaddle the child - whether in Bethlehem, Judea, first century Rome, or tenth century Germany, that it had to be in the Gospel. What sort of a birthing would it be if the baby were left unswaddled?

I love this Madonna and Child by Guariento d'Arpo because it shows the place of swaddling in the average family's life, and it's such a warm and intimate moment between mother and child. It could be any mother and child. It's the primal emotional bond of the human race, that same bond that worked our salvation. Here Mary has finished her work and is now seeing to the baby. She has unwrapped the bands and loosed the underblanket so Jesus can move his limbs. The first thing they do is have a cuddle, cheek to cheek. This is their moment for play. The blanket falls about him in graceful folds, still showing the wrapping pattern over arms and feet.

I sense the painter was a man with happy memories of being swaddled or of his own children in their swaddled phase. I love it. May God save the souls of all the painters who made such images for our delight. Amen.

Mourning Becomes Impossible

There's no mourning anymore. That's just a fact. In Jane Austin novels it's six months in black and six months in violet. In my youth it was six months in black for the women and armbands for the men. But I don't know what it is now. It's a few days, if anything. Everybody wears black so much anyway: look into any hairdressing salon - they look like everyone belonged to them just died. And you didn't call to the house in my youth, unless specifically to make a mourning call. The bereaved were still invited to weddings and so forth, but were expected to decline. People left them alone, and that was o.k.

Now no-one leaves anyone alone.

I'm bereaved and I don't want to meet anyone. Your loved one dies and at first you're busy making sandwiches and answering the phone, then you're busy replying to messages and thanking people, then you're busy clearing up and paying people, but there comes a day when you're not busy anymore. Then you just want to sit in your house and look out the window.

It's very much frowned on, I know, and I get told I cant let myself go and I need to seek closure (whatever that is) and I should 'get out there' and so on. I get told this by people who are afraid all this sitting and looking will end in depression. They love me and they don't want that to happen. But they truly don't understand the difference between me and them. They have no religion. They don't understand what I'm doing when I'm just sitting....I'm letting God explain to be why my loved one had to die, why all my loved ones will die, why I will die.

It takes time to talk to God. It's not done in a prayer - it's started, but not done. No, God picks up the conversation sometimes ages later, when I'm just sitting and looking out the window. I cant speed that along. I wait for God. And I reckon that's what mourning is about, allowing people the time and space to talk to God and then feel the answers as they come slowly and whisperingly.

But the world wont wait for that. The world doesn't understand that vocabulary anymore, so we have short cuts - supposed short cuts - to the mysterious 'closure'. Counsellors and anti-depressants - sign up for a life time's addiction, but don't have a sad face at work and don't hide in your home (although your home is supposed to be your safe place to hide).

I wont go for that. This is too important to me. I'm going to mourn in the old fashioned way.

A Happy Death

My dear sister tried many times to talk to me about her impending death. Educated by a lifetime of soap operas I knew the right thing to do was refuse to hear - there would be no negative talk, no sad pauses, no acknowledgement of reality. So every time I visited was like a birthday: I had presents, gossip, music, fun. I would keep on and on until I made her laugh. On her behalf I refused to accept death. It must have been so trying for her.

Because, really, what business of mine was it? She was succumbing to a most terrible cancer, buying precious weeks with aggressive treatments that made the days won too painful to bear. What right had I to censor her attitude?

Of course, I wasn't the only one. the whole family was at it - being positive. Positive of what? Mainly, I think, we were scared stiff. Death had stalked into the middle of our village and was carrying off the fair maiden. And we couldn't do a thing about it.

Finally, when she wanted to get some business done she made me sit down and listen. I was to have a treasured possession of hers after her death - WHICH WOULD BE SOON. No, no, I cried, but at that stage she didn't have the time to waste indulging me. It would be soon and she had things to do in preparation. She arranged her will and her funeral in the kindly and efficient way she had lived her life. As I knelt by her coffin I was still saying 'no', in the selfish and inefficient way I have lived my life. I know she's in Heaven, or going there very soon. I know she forgives me, because she always did. I miss her very much, and I'm so sorry I could not contribute to her happy death.

The Old Home Town Looks Just The Same

I went back to the old home town at the weekend. I went to a local beauty spot, called to a cafe there and had a nice snack, then went for a walk on the pretty pier to look at the fishing boats and enjoy the peace. I was accompanied by a mentally disabled man. He looks quite normal except he says odd things out loud and has an exaggerated fear of nearly everything. He is autistic. I've known him all his life, as has that town because he is a native through and through.

There was a group of adolescent boys playing football across the path to the pier. We walked to one side to get by. They stopped to watch us. When we were much farther along I looked back and saw some of them watching us and talking. We looked at the boats and I read out their strange names. We spied the life-boat and that was a treat. We saw some kittiwakes and my companion opined they sounded like babies crying, which was true. We walked back to the exit, again passing as far as we could from the game. A ball came directly at us, flying with some force. I batted it away with a cry, and, instantly knowing the game afoot, laughed as if it were a huge joke. My companion shrieked. He was very frightened. Some of the boys, a fair haired one in particular, started mimicking his cries, the blond boy distorting his handsome face to make the joke visual as well as aural.

Forty years ago this man used be jeered at in the street. Back then street footballers were skinny looking, practically ragged boys, nearing the end rather than the beginning of their education. But these boys were well fed, beautifully clothed, with parents already talking to them about college options and course choices. Forty years ago the received wisdom was that it was deprivation that made people mean - deprivation and lack of public awareness. Now there's a sign as you enter the old home town saying it supports the Special Olympics, and it also calls itself a 'centre of excellence'.

One boy looked at me from the group, one boy, as I was pretending there was no malice involved and it was all a silly accident, so my companion wouldn't know immediately that the world was still not to be trusted, one boy gave me a 'sorry' look, as if to say 'what can I do about these morons'. One boy was secretly disgusted and afraid to show it. That didn't make it any better. Kid, do you think you get points for just 'knowing' the right thing to do? No, you must actually do it. I hope you change, even more than the others, I hope you change.