All the light you can see without

Awesome shot of last week's solar eclipse
from Mallorca, Spain, by my brother-in-law Urs Schoop.  
Used without permission.

Just because the lights are off does not mean it is dark. 

We have just traversed the stretch of weeks on either side of the solstice that offers the most marvelous skies and morning light already at half past five when I walk over to the church for early Mass.  Inside still it is dimmer, but the illumination is underway and the stained-glass glows, the colors of the windows entering the dance with the colors of the sky as the gentle and golden light fills the contours and corners of the holy place from every direction and none over the next spectacular half-hour.

The routine of the others who come to the church first thing is to find and flick the switch that ignites a bulb or three, the blaze of which paradoxically casts the church back into harsh shadows and darkness.  I groan.

Just as some people swear they cannot hear unless the voice be amplified through a loudspeaker, there will always be people who are convinced it is dark unless the electric lights, and all of them, are switched on.  In so doing, they often demand their own disadvantage.

When I was a Boy Scout, we once had a night-hiking exercise in which we found our way along unfamiliar paths by designated markers as we went.  It did not take long for my group to discover that our flashlights were not helpful; instead, they blinded us to everything except what was in the bright small disc of their beams.  Practicing ‘light discipline’ and keeping all the lights in the group switched off allowed us to see revealed the sky itself with moon and stars, and the gentle illumination they provided to the piney woods through which we picked our way.  Once eyes grew accustomed to the light present in the darkness, there were both greater awareness and fewer surprises as we made our way toward the goal.    

As it has long seemed obvious to me that with less amplification, there is more that I can hear, so it is that up to a certain point with less artificial light there is far more to see.  How could light-discipline be applied fruitfully to our days to enhance our sight in other ways as well, to help us see what would otherwise go unnoticed, and perceive what under normal circumstances is invisible?  If stilling the noise around us is the first step to hearing the voice of God, what artificial light sources must we switch off to see what He is showing us?    

The adage about lighting a single candle still applies when there is complete darkness.  Just this week as the approaching equinox began to exert its restrictions on our daylight, holding back the sun more and more each morning, I have reluctantly resorted to switching on the bare minimum of lights myself when I open the church, for the sky stays mute and unyielding in its inked solidity.  I regret this violence, but the church would otherwise be too dark, and while that is something I can othertimes enjoy, it is impractical for the folks with work to be done and prayers to be said before the morning sacrifice is offered.  Only just before go-time at 6:30, through the sacristy windows that give out to the field, the rising sun sets fire to the treeline along Saint Lawrence, no small spectacle itself.   That, too, comes noticeably later each morning.  The slope of day’s decline grows steeper as the season’s change comes nearer.  

As summer dwindles and its sweetness yields to autumn and its decay, night claims more and more from our days.  Remember, though, before you reach for the switch earlier and earlier each evening: just because the lights are off does not mean it is dark. 

Monsignor Smith

So much foam

 

Can you imagine what she would say?

They didn’t talk like that back then.

It is one of the aspects of any production that can turn me away most quickly: anachronistic dialogue.  That is, one of the characters says something that a person would not have said at the time and place being depicted.  Whether a movie or other video production, stage play, or book, if one of the characters speaks in a way that is not consistent with the setting of the drama, for me, the whole thing collapses.

Ironically, it is our own time that stands out in the arc of history as the anomaly.  There are many things that characterize speech both public and private in our time that would never have occurred at any other time in recorded history. 

Neither during the Civil War nor the Revolution, nor in medieval times nor in Roman times, would anybody have spoken about his own feelings at all, much less as much as our modern depictions would lead one to believe. The constant gushing about affections and disaffections, hopes and dreads, and disappointments real and imagined, not to mention the endless romantic soliloquys that pass for plot drivers and denouements, simply would never have been uttered in any but our own self-obsessed time.  They say such things make for good cinema, but even that I question heartily.

Almost every other society that has managed to survive for any time on the face of the earth has valued some degree of form and formality in its discourse.   We have projected our insistence on constant and unrelenting casual familiarity onto situations and civilizations that would have found such a thing repellant.

And when, I have to ask, did everybody become such a potty-mouth?   Soldiers in the trenches didn’t use language so vile as one customarily hears from four twenty-somethings sitting together at a baseball game.  To project such shameful behavior onto other people in other times only amplifies the manifest disrespect.

Almost thirty years ago, well into the era of films that depicted everyone at all times as if they were simply twentieth-century southern Californians in different period costumes, there was a movie that was different.  I saw it because it was about the Civil War era, not because it had Spider-man (Tobey Maguire) in it.  Ride with the Devil depicted life during that time of conflict and irreconcilable differences that were political as well as personal, but in western Missouri far from the battle fronts and capitols.  It was shocking that all the characters, even the ones depicted as young adults, spoke like denizens of the nineteenth century, which made their actions more intelligible because they clearly thought like denizens of the nineteenth century.  It was shocking and refreshing all at once.

Speech not only reflects and transmits thought, but also makes thought possible.  We consider our age enlightened and point to astonishing technology as proof, but the speech one hears most often suggests that our concepts and considerations and our ability to apply them have deteriorated, because our language certainly has.  

Dialogue that is post-modern in form and content renders all the characters engaged in it as puerile, selfish, and ignorant.  This may be intended as a judgment on our forebears’ shortcomings, but in effect it delivers a devastating assessment of our own.  They didn’t talk like we do back then.

Monsignor Smith

Up to snuff

Too far gone?

What’s new?  people used to ask before the more personal and probing How are you? became the norm.  The response used to be the news, before ‘the news’ became something else entirely, less informative and anything but new.

Many summers past I have sung the praises of August for its languor and its leisure.  Still I rejoice in this most wonderful month of the year, but languor is in short supply.  It seems that new stuff is the order and object of the days.  

In the school, LED lighting takes the place of fluorescent tubes that most of us associate with classrooms.  It will be a great improvement that none of the kids will notice, being preoccupied with seeing and learning.  There is new paint too, though we did most of that last year; and flooring, startling because I thought we already did that.   Maybe sixteen years of wear makes carpeting old?

If that be then case then twenty years made the carpet in the rectory offices beyond old and almost disgusting, or so the staff insisted.  So new carpet has arrived here as well, under bookshelves, desks, and file cabinets no less, all heavy and hard to move.  Some new paint is coming too.  Once the smell fades the change will be hard to spot, save that things will no longer look old.

You all saw the new deck, which is both great improvement and no big change.  The improvement is that it will not collapse under us as we come and go or linger round the table; the sameness is everything else – same size and shape, same features (no elevator, fountain, or self-cleaning function), save the improvement that the materials will last much longer before this new deck becomes old enough to require replacement.

Things fall apart, but first they get old.  First repair, then replacement are the requirements of having the care of things.   Think for a moment about your kitchen appliances, which seem to age out much faster now than twenty-five years ago.  How exciting can a new dishwasher or refrigerator be, except that it actually fulfill its function where its predecessor ceased to do so?   Once the memory of the tattered and decrepit past has faded, the new and functional elicits no more joy than yet another hot day in August.  Where is the fun and excitement of newness in all this? 

Stairs that do not make you fear disaster, lights that do not hum and flicker attract no wonder or awe nor move hearts to gratitude, but rather by the absence of grave shortcomings elicit a contentment that all is as it should be.  The absence of applause and excitement is not disappointing in these circumstances.  Everything renewed is simply doing what it is supposed to do, being what it is supposed to be.  

And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." (Revelation 21: 5)  The God who did so marvelously create us did still more marvelously REcreate us, through Christ our Lord.  That adds no features, nor electronics, nor Bluetooth; no fresh new color or radical redesign.  Simply by the mercy of God, we are made not different creatures, but fully and perfectly ourselves, doing what we are supposed to do, being what we are supposed to be.  

August this year is filled with the necessary tasks to achieve the near-invisible improvement of refreshment and restoration.  Some few will notice, but fewer still will want to be informed when, resuming our routines at the end of summer, they make the inquiry, What’s new?

Monsignor Smith