Posturing While the World Ends

My wife and I are in Minnesota, my home state, for our 33rd wedding anniversary. Friday, before visiting relatives outside town for the weekend, we spent the day in Minneapolis, mostly at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Rather, my wife did. You know how it goes at art museums, guys. She wants to look at every piece twice. You pick a couple of paintings, look at them a while, then go out for coffee or a beer or a nap, depending on time of day. I went for a nap at our hotel, but not before pondering Pierre-Jacques Volaire’s painting of “The Eruption of Vesuvius” (1771).

What struck me about the painting is the three gentleman relaxing on a safe ledge in the foreground. Even their dog looks unconcerned. A caption alongside the painting suggested that the men were “consuming the scene with  an air of detachment, as though the eruption were a controlled experiment. It mirrors the way men and women of means consumed science at the time, as public presentations and social encounters.”

The men in the foreground didn’t make me think of science; their “detachment” or nonchalance led me to think instead of the collapse of our culture while the rich look on, getting richer while embracing each new progressive cause, walling out the disadvantaged with gates and private security guards while throwing money at the poor with invisible tax dollars. Ten billion for programs? Check! A dollar into the hat of the toothless man leaning against the building? Never! Better yet: take the man out for coffee. Are you serious?

My juices must have been stirred by the pope. On the plane from Boston I read Francis’s apostolic exhortation Evangelic Gaudium, or The Joy of the Gospel. As in his first encyclical, Laudato Si, our pope lays into the money world. “In this system,” he writes, “which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.”

One line struck me most forcibly: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

For me, as for Hamlet, the time is out of joint. Everything seems out of proportion, and we do not connect the dots, the only exercise that could possibly put things back in perspective.

L’Arche may be to blame for my sense of dislocation. I was always skeptical of philanthropy, as a sop to rich guilt, but since I began “sharing time,” as we say in L’Arche, with men and women having intellectual disabilities, I have grown appalled at my own ignorance, detachment, and nonchalance. A neighbor would call, ask for $100 for a cause, and I would write a check, never once trying to bridge the gap between my safe ledge and the uncomfortable lives of the actual human beings “beneath me” in the lava, the people my charity check allegedly benefited.

A few months at L’Arche Boston North in Haverhill, Massachusetts, changed so much for me. Beginning with me myself. To change I had only to get off my ledge and jump in. A terrifying thought? Yes. It was.

"Ghosts" at BAM: No Longer My Cup of Nihilism

I know what I would have made of the current production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music if I had seen this production 40 years ago.

I was a young actor who knew Ibsen as a key to the canon: one of the first “great” modern playwrights you had to read. I would have overlooked Ibsen’s anti-clerical jokes and nihilistic outlook. I would have admired the feminism and fine performances, and I would have stood with everyone else during the standing ovation.

Instead, last night, no longer a young actor, an old Catholic instead, I sat on my hands.

I felt sad over a New York audience wildly cheering a play in which—

Mark Knopfler’s “Tracker”: Guitar Poems, None Finer

If all you know of Mark Knopfler is Dire Straits, “Sultans of Swing,” the “Money for Nothing” video, and the theme song from “Local Hero,” you haven’t been listening for twenty or thirty years.

“Tracker,” just released, is Knopfler’s eighth solo album since Dire Straits broke up for good and all in 1995; and I have spent much of the past three days with it.

I own all of Knopfler’s albums—they’re all I buy on CD anymore—and I treasure each. Knopfler’s listed #27 among Rolling Stone’s all-time greatest guitarists, but that’s a joke. Factor in the poetry and Mark Knopfler is in a universe all his own.

I would love to claim Knopfler as a fellow Catholic, but I can’t, or if he is one, he isn’t saying. His songs are good ones for Holy Week, though. They might as well be subtitled the Broken Body of Christ.

Pierced by the Beauty of Our Liturgy

A dear, respected friend of mine sent me this link to The Lord’s Prayer, performed with full choir and orchestra by Andrea Bocelli.



Two things struck me in particular:

First, the prayer was sung in honor of those who died in the July 2013 train derailment near Santiago de Compostela in which 140 were injured and 79 died. As you may know, I have a fondness for Santiago de Compostela.

Second, my friend is a professed non-believer. I am not sure he would use the word atheist but it would not surprise me if he did. Yet he was so pierced by the prayer’s beauty that he was moved to send a link to several friends.

Guilty Pleasures

I don’t watch much TV when the NFL is not in season, but every so often my wife and I binge on a series. Last spring, we watched the first four seasons of “Downton Abbey” courtesy of Netflix; and the summer found us “Breaking Bad,” very bad, cramming seventy-plus episodes of that series into a mad four-week period.

“One more?” she asked. “Yeah, but just one more,” I repeatedly answered.

It must be all the snow—three storms in fifteen days—but we’re back at it now, catching up on “Downton,” season five, while getting in on the ground floor with “Better Call Saul.” The “Breaking Bad” spinoff stars Bob Odenkirk (picture) as the sleazy lawyer known in “Bad” as Saul Goodman.

Turns out that wasn’t his name originally, as the new series, a prequel, quickly establishes. Meth king Walter White’s lawyer started out as a decent-enough schmo named Jimmy McGill, just trying to make a buck.

“The Second Girl” is First Rate

It’s not every serious stage play with Broadway aspirations that begins and ends with the Salve Regina offered as prayer. Many plays today would make sport of it.

But “The Second Girl,” now playing at the Boston Center for the Arts presented by the Huntington Theatre Company, is no ordinary work, and Boston-area Catholics who can take it in before it closes February 21 will be happy they did so.

“The Second Girl” is a three-character “Downton Abbey” shot only in the kitchen. Upstairs—and through the swinging door to the dining room off left—is Eugene O’Neill’s semi-autobiographical Tyrone family living their “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

Thus Ronan Noone’s superb play is a wink at theatrical insiders. This, he says, is what might have been going on behind the kitchen door while the wealthy upstairs family was battling alcoholism, drug addiction, and each other, as they do in O’Neill’s famous play.

The Butler Did It

That could have ended very badly. My over-confident prediction of victory for the best football team everyone hates, the New England Patriots, looked good, then bad, then good, then very bad again.

After Tom Brady rallied the Pats to a 28-24 lead, the NE team was nearly done in by another miracle catch (do Google searches on David Tyree Super Bowl 2008 and Mario Manningham Super Bowl 2012, if you don’t know). And they should have been defeated by Marshawn Lynch battering into the end zone with few ticks left.

Instead, Pete Carroll and Company had a brain fart, tried to pass at the goal line, and Pats rookie Malcolm Butler saved the game with a heads-up interception (picture).

I predicted a final of 30-13, and taking the under (at 47 1/2) was a bad bet. I never expected Russell Wilson to put up that many points.

The predicted victory margin was thirteen points too large. OK, I’m a homer, I admit it.

But thanks to God, Tom Brady, and Malcolm Butler, we got the final result right. Though not as right as Madden 2015, which predicted the score exactly.

I surprised myself by enjoying Katy Perry’s halftime show, with costuming over which Gulliver in his Dulcinea days would have drooled.

Only truly objectionable moment of the night was Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth tarnishing the Patriots accomplishment with several references immediately after the game to what awaits the team in the coming weeks when the dreaded Ted Wells investigation on Deflategate makes its report.

Based on the latest intelligence, the report is likely to be a dud.

Then, of course, there’s this.

I Agree with Pope Francis! Lord of the Word is a Must-Read

Writing at Crux yesterday, John Allen suggested that Pope Francis is driven by a “sense of urgency,” and Allen thinks he knows why. During his recent airborne press conference, the Pope advised listeners to read Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 novel Lord of the World, a dystopian vision of a near future in which the Catholic Church has been marginalized and a charismatic, secular world ruler is taking hold. 

We’re not talking Oprah’s Book Club here. When the Pope recommends a book, it’s striking news that Catholics might well heed.

Trying to read between the lines, Allen notes that Lord of the World displays a “keen sense that the world is reaching a turning point and there’s not much time left to set things right.” This, Allen writes, may explain why the Pope has such an accelerated travel schedule over the coming year: not that the Pope thinks his life may be coming to a close but that civilization itself may be nearing a “turning point.”

I read Lord of the World nearly four years ago when I saw that it was recommended by some of the smart folks of Communion and Liberation. At that time, I posted a review at Goodreads, which is still there. This is what I wrote:

Catechism: Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, OCD, Meets the Saw Doctors

I love the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) for some of the reasons I love Pandora, the internet music-streaming service. You just never know who you’re going to hear.

The Catechism is a direct experience of the communion of the saints: all those voices, all that heavenly music. Tune into a chapter on any subject and you may hear St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, or a chorus sung by the Second Vatican Council.

Likewise Pandora. I enjoy what you might call Celtic folk rock: traditional tunes from Ireland and Scotland played with electric instruments, often with a helping of punk. If you start a Pandora station with the Irish band The Saw Doctors, as I have done, you’ll end up hearing songs not only by other Irish bands like The Pogues but also from Scotland (Runrig), Brittany (Tri Yann), Newfoundland (Great Big Sea), and even the USA (Flogging Molly and Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys). Except for the Dropkicks, I didn’t know any of these bands before starting the station.

Just as I didn’t know Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity until I reopened the CCC this afternoon. A French Carmelite nun, Blessed Elizabeth was a sort of Little Flower Junior, who died at the age of twenty-six in 1906, nine years after Thérèse of Lisieux.

Here’s how I met Blessed Elizabeth:

Kilpatrick: The Sensitivity Movement was Damaging to the Catholic Church

As an American Protestant born in 1951 and converted to the Catholic Church only in 2008, I missed a lot of the “good stuff” that cradle Catholics of my generation had to endure.

Like Vatican II. Like priests and nuns marrying each other, strumming guitars, and feeling OK/OK about themselves. Like much of the abortion wars. Like the abuse scandal that began to rock Boston and then the entire Church in 2002.

Missed all that. Came to the Church in 2008. Said, “Hey, wassup? Golly, this is a beautiful place.”

One thing I did not miss on my long and winding road to the Roman Catholic Church was the sensitivity movement that began carpet-bombing the American landscape with love, love, love in the 1960s and 1970s. Several chapters in my memoir, excerpted above as Lilliput, Europe, and Dulcinea, show that I got both sensitized and bombed.

Why Pilgrimage? Why Today?

Each episode of PBS’s new series “Sacred Journeys” begins with a challenging statement. In a cheery, inquisitive voice, host Bruce Feiler says, “Today organized religion is more threatened than ever, yet pilgrimage is more popular than ever.”

The juxtaposition is puzzling and meant to be. It’s what you call a teaser.

First of all, good for Feiler for pointing out religion’s precarious position in today’s culture. He does not expand on the thought. He only posits it: “Organized religion is more threatened than ever.” The second statement, about the popularity of pilgrimage, clearly is meant to make us wonder, to evoke interest, to get us to watch. 

I am convinced of Feiler’s goodwill and bona fides. He seems a genuine enough searcher. But I wonder whether, as he states the circumstances, pilgrimage’s popularity is such a good thing.

Is it necessarily ironic that “pilgrimage is more popular than ever” in a world that threatens organized religion? Or is it a symptom of our new, relativistic, necessarily shallow approach to religious devotion that we happily substitute a two- or three-week experience in “cultural tourism” for the real, arduous, day-by-day, lifelong adventure that is discipleship? In the case of the Christian, I mean the adventure of following Christ.

“Sacred Journeys” Worth Taking

There’s a lot to move you in the first installment of PBS’s “Sacred Journeys,” a series of six one-hour documentaries hosted by Bruce Feiler. My wife and I watched last evening—our first side-by-side, beneath-one-blanket viewing experience since a recent “Breaking Bad” bingeathon.

As St. Ignatius might have, I discerned a different quality of experience. More consolatory on balance, I would say.

The series follows American pilgrims on six forms of pilgrimage observed by six religions: Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Yoruba (in order of the installments). Two installments are being shown on three consecutive Tuesday evenings: December 16, 23, and 30.

Wisely, the series begins in Lourdes and will take viewers to Jerusalem next Tuesday, during Christmas week.

Powerfully, the first segment follows a group of American war veterans to Lourdes. All bear wounds, physical, psychological, emotional. Only half are Catholic. Many are visibly changed by the experience.

A few notes:

Richard Shindell, The Singer I Most Want to Be

I took my wife on a mystery date last weekend. We were celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary for about the sixth time. You see, my wife likes stretching celebrations, so we did this big anniversary up big, though in little pieces.

Saturday’s date was the last little piece, since it was November 1, and the statute of limitations had run out on October anniversaries. It was a mystery date because my wife didn’t know where we were going, and even if she had known, she wouldn’t have known what or who we were seeing.

A Dandy Article on Randi

I have hung about the fringes of stage magic long enough to be fascinated by today’s New York Times feature by Adam Higginbotham on the Amazing Randi.

Born James Randall Zwinge the now-86-year-old “Randi” started out as a mentalist (reading minds, foretelling the future), then became an escape artist (in imitation of Houdini). But at midlife he found his true calling as a debunker of the paranormal. The spoon-bending Israeli “psychic” Uri Geller provided Randi with a perfect straw dog, and for the last forty years of a long career, Randi has been exposing anyone like Geller who claims to have exceptional psychic powers.

Too Corporate by Half

Note to Mr. Kraft: Turn the Patriots over to your son Jonathan and spend more time in the sun, with or without 30-something arm candy.

Your New England NFL franchise, like the Red Sox, has become too corporate by half. As my friend Ferde said this morning after Mass in disgust (I know that sounds contradictory but the Mass was after the Patriots game, and we were both disgusted): “You have to play this game like a pack of angry dogs. The Patriots looked like they were on a business trip.”

And afterwards Coach Bill sounded much like an aging CEO who should be kicked upstairs:

The Mourning After

I’m wearing black today, OK? It has nothing to do with MLK Day, everything to do with the Patriots’ loss to the Ravens last night. I couldn’t help feeling that midnight was tolling for this proud franchise, with its three Super Bowl championships and five Super Bowl visits in this young century. That was around 10pm when my brother and I snapped off the TV and said good-night with two minutes left and the Pats down 28-13.

We knew three or four weeks ago, when the Giants bowed out, that this year wouldn’t see a repeat of last. Now I’m wondering if we’ll ever see a repeat at all, like any one of the Super Bowl victories in 2001, 2003, and 2004. Not in the Belichek-Brady era, I don’t think.

That’s because—

Random, Possibly Connected Thoughts on Faith, with a Bonus Song of the Day

It is the unstated buzz phrase of every extraterrestrial tale from “War of the Worlds” to, well, “ET.” The phrase is “We are not alone.” Science calculates the probability of there being life on other planets. Note to sci-fi believers: Phone home. Of course, we’re not alone. The universe screams His presence.

“He loved us,” John tells us in his first letter today, more of a whisper. “His heart was moved with pity for us,” Mark says, before Jesus fed the five thousand. But “Faith is a personal act” (CCC 166). It is our “free response . . . to the initiative of God.”

“But faith is not an isolated act.” I usually think so, though less now that I’m a Catholic. In the Protestant churches of my childhood and especially in the heady Protestant-based liberal-arts schools of my adolescence, it came down to me and God. Did I believe? I?

A Brit Who’s Lived a Parallel Life to My Own

Thanks to Carl E. Olson at Catholic World Report for an article telling me that somewhere across the Pond I have a double. I swear I don’t look that old, my eyes are better, and I have more hair, but otherwise I recognize A.N. Wilson (left) as just like me. 

In an article Friday in the Daily Mail, Wilson tells of leaving Christianity only to return later in life, but not before passing through the fires of the sexual revolution. His title is self-explanatory: “I’ve lived through the greatest revolution in sexual mores in our history. The damage it’s done appals me.”

Born just nine months before me, Wilson has written books on Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, and Jesus Christ. He returned to Christianity in 2009, a year after me. 

Here are some highlights of his article:

Song of the Day: Classic Dire Straits

I heard “Sultans of Swing” when it first came out in the late 1970s, but tuned out for another ten years or so.

Since then, I’ve been a big Mark Knopfler fan, as my recent thumbs-up shows in his face-up with (thumbs-down) Dylan. (Fans of the Bobster were not happy with me for that post, which said the septuagenarian former hipster danced as though on a walker.)

Here’s a classic mid-1980s cut. It’s long, but you can bring it up on YouTube and use it as background music.

September: “Croquet is Pro-Life”

In September, I wrote one of my most popular posts of the year. It was about croquet.

If you didn’t know that croquet is for Catholics, you might want to check out the post.

As for a resolution, it’s about playing all year long instead of 2-3 weeks a summer in Maine. And getting my handicap down from 10 to 7.

Like you care.