Lent 5: O Sacred Head

Put away whatever other version of this chorale you happen to be holding right now. THESE are the words you should be singing:

O sacred head, sore wounded,
defiled and put to scorn;
O kingly head surrounded
with mocking crown of thorn:
What sorrow mars thy grandeur?
Can death thy bloom deflower?
O countenance whose splendor
the hosts of heaven adore!

Thy beauty, long-desirèd,
hath vanished from our sight;
thy power is all expirèd,
and quenched the light of light.
Ah me! for whom thou diest,
hide not so far thy grace:
show me, O Love most highest,
the brightness of thy face.

I pray thee, Jesus, own me,
me, Shepherd good, for thine;
who to thy fold hast won me,
and fed with truth divine.
Me guilty, me refuse not,
incline thy face to me,
this comfort that I lose not,
on earth to comfort thee.

In thy most bitter passion
my heart to share doth cry,
with thee for my salvation
upon the cross to die.
Ah, keep my heart thus moved
to stand thy cross beneath,
to mourn thee, well-beloved,
yet thank thee for thy death.

My days are few, O fail not,
with thine immortal power,
to hold me that I quail not
in death's most fearful hour;
that I may fight befriended,
and see in my last strife
to me thine arms extended
upon the cross of life.

Thank you, Oremus Hymnal, for getting it right.

These words are, as I now learn via Wikipedia, a "fresh translation" by the English poet Robert Bridges, in 1899, of a Latin text, often but apparently erroneously attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, meditating on various aspects of Christ's crucified Body. This hymn, obviously, is taken from the part about His Head. This section was translated into German, as "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden," by the 17th-century hymn-writer Paul Gerhardt, and set to the melody of a secular love song, composed by Hans Leo Hassler. J.S. Bach arranged the harmonies for Gerhardt's hymn, which was subsequently translated into English, as "O Head So Full of Bruises," by an Anglican vicar in Oxfordshire, the Revd. John Gambold. From Gambold's 1752 translation resulted a succession of English versions: "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," by the American Presbyterian minister J.W. Alexander, in 1830; "O Sacred Head Surrounded," by Sir Henry Baker in 1861; and Bridges' sublime poem in 1899, which borrows somewhat from Alexander's much longer translation:

O sacred Head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown;
How pale Thou art with anguish, with sore abuse and scorn!
How does that visage languish, which once was bright as morn!

What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered, was all for sinners’ gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression, but Thine the deadly pain.
Lo, here I fall, my Savior! ’Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor, vouchsafe to me Thy grace.

Men mock and taunt and jeer Thee, Thou noble countenance,
Though mighty worlds shall fear Thee and flee before Thy glance.
How art thou pale with anguish, with sore abuse and scorn!
How doth Thy visage languish that once was bright as morn!

Now from Thy cheeks has vanished their color once so fair;
From Thy red lips is banished the splendor that was there.
Grim death, with cruel rigor, hath robbed Thee of Thy life;
Thus Thou hast lost Thy vigor, Thy strength in this sad strife.

My burden in Thy Passion, Lord, Thou hast borne for me,
For it was my transgression which brought this woe on Thee.
I cast me down before Thee, wrath were my rightful lot;
Have mercy, I implore Thee; Redeemer, spurn me not!

What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest friend,
For this Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever, and should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to Thee.

My Shepherd, now receive me; my Guardian, own me Thine.
Great blessings Thou didst give me, O source of gifts divine.
Thy lips have often fed me with words of truth and love;
Thy Spirit oft hath led me to heavenly joys above.

Here I will stand beside Thee, from Thee I will not part;
O Savior, do not chide me! When breaks Thy loving heart,
When soul and body languish in death’s cold, cruel grasp,
Then, in Thy deepest anguish, Thee in mine arms I’ll clasp.

The joy can never be spoken, above all joys beside,
When in Thy body broken I thus with safety hide.
O Lord of Life, desiring Thy glory now to see,
Beside Thy cross expiring, I’d breathe my soul to Thee.

My Savior, be Thou near me when death is at my door;
Then let Thy presence cheer me, forsake me nevermore!
When soul and body languish, oh, leave me not alone,
But take away mine anguish by virtue of Thine own!

Be Thou my consolation, my shield when I must die;
Remind me of Thy passion when my last hour draws nigh.
Mine eyes shall then behold Thee, upon Thy cross shall dwell,
My heart by faith enfolds Thee. Who dieth thus dies well.

So if you haven't sung "O Sacred Head" this Lent, why don't you give it a try today? That hymnal: it's not just there for pew-ballast. Open it up and sing.

This Lenten message brought to you by the American Catholic-Choirs-of-Five-People Association. If We Can Sing It, Anybody Can.

P.S. If anyone should happen to know what word the Revd. Mr. Gambold chose to rhyme with "bruises," do please let us know. Enquiring minds, &c.

PPS: I should add, too, that in the 1982 Episcopal Hymnal, Bridges' fourth stanza is replaced with Alexander's "What language shall I borrow" stanza, which is more beautiful and singable than Bridges'. I only now noticed this . . .

Lacto-Life

It's been some years since I was part of this game, but lately I've run across two articles about breastfeeding and its peculiar orthodoxy which I found interesting. First, Hannah Rosin at The Atlantic makes A Case Against Breastfeeding: does breastfeeding really, asks Rosin, make you a better, smarter, healthier mother? Oh, well, supposedly that's not the point . . .

(ETA: As Pentimento rightly points out, Rosin's article really tips towards a complaint about parenting as non-egalitarian, which of course it is, or should be, since "egalitarian parenting" seems to turn into egalitarian non-parenting: "egalitarian" means both parents get to leave the baby and go to work. But I am interested in her unpacking of the question of whether breast really is best, or at least whether it's THAT much better than the alternative.)

And at Inside Catholic, Kate Wicker writes about lactivism and choice.

via Pentimento

For the record, I don't have a dog in any fight about breastfeeding any more, and even when I did, I spent time on both sides of the issue. Our first child nursed until she was two and a half, at which point we had a summit meeting on the topic: My Body Is Not Your Body; No, Not Any More. Our second child weaned himself shortly after his first birthday. Confronted with a choice between eating and walking, he chose both, opting for forms of nourishment which he could carry with him as he climbed into drawers and sat in the dishwasher.

Our third child was born in the U.K., was taken back to the U.S. for baptism, and was reinstated as a resident of Great Britain with his biological clock on American time. I tried putting him in bed with me to nurse to sleep, and discovered that while he would happily nurse all night long, sleep was a pursuit which interested him not the slightest. After about six weeks of all-day, all-night, perpetually wakeful baby, not to mention two older children who had to be walked to school at, like, a TIME every morning, in desperation I went out and bought the British anti-attachment-parenting Bible: The Contented Little Baby Book, by Gina Ford.

Following her directions, I instituted a feeding schedule and gave the baby a bottle last thing in the evening, so that if he cried at night, I could be reasonably sure that it wasn't from hunger. I should confess, too, that the bottle came as a relief to me, because this child liked to bite. I don't just mean that he bit me: he LIKED to bite, and to watch me react. The others had tried this on a little, but I'd been able to train them out of it. Not this child -- bless his heart. In the course of getting him to sleep, we also toughed out a couple of crying nights with him, which seemed eternal at the time, but really were not. He slept in our room, so whatever he suffered, we suffered right along with him. The upshot of it all was that he did very quickly learn to lie down and go to sleep, and he's a champion sleeper to this day; the other upshot of it was that he weaned himself from breast to bottle at seven months, and we promptly conceived Baby 4.

Baby 4 spent the first week of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit with Group B Strep and came home taking a bottle and on a feeding schedule. We nursed with mutual halfheartedness for about six months, and that was it. That was an insane time in our lives: in the course of a year and a half we'd had one baby, finished one doctoral dissertation, found no job, made one transatlantic move, started homeschooling two older children, and had one more baby. I was happy that this baby hadn't died from Group B Strep, and that she was very quickly willing to sleep through the night, and I was also happy for her father or her older sister or brother to feed her if they wanted to. I could let go my stranglehold, I found, and it was a relief.

I will say this: the child who nursed the longest had far and away the most ear infections of the four. The child who nursed the least has, after the first week of her life, hardly ever been sick. The children who nursed for shorter times don't seem any less well-adjusted, or intelligent, or confident than those who nursed longer-term -- in fact, once again, it's the two bottle-babies who work a crowd as though they were running for public office. Public office on Neptune, maybe, but still.

At any rate, I loved nursing my babies while it lasted, and I'm grateful to have had that closeness with them when they were tiny. I've always encouraged friends at least to try breastfeeding their babies -- it's the kind of thing you can stop doing if it doesn't work out, but it's a heck of a lot harder to change your mind the other way. In short, I'm all for it, at least in theory, but I am interested to see some intelligent dissent among the maternal ranks. And while I'd concur that breast is good, on the whole I believe with Kate Wickers that life is best.

Friday Poetry: Air and Angels

MM and I have been reading Donne. He is reading Donne in a graduate Renaissance British Lit class, and I am reading Donne because he keeps sending me poems and wanting to talk about them. I haven't held up my end of the conversation very consistently; lately my brain's been too tired and full of other things to be good at unknotting syntax and unpicking tangles of images and the thought processes wound up with them. All the same, it's good to read Donne, and I thought I'd share one of our recent conversation pieces:

Air and Angels

Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body, too;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much; some fitter must be sought;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme and scattering bright, can love inhere;
Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,
Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

Slacker 101

Over at Maclin's blog there's an amusing conversation going on, sparked by Mac's fessing up to his Finest Moment As a Slacker, which has led to confessions all around, or at least partly around. One person who shall here remain nameless has confessed to having sold her psychology textbook for money to buy a pizza, which as Mac points out, is worthy of the Slacker Hall of Fame. I confessed, in my turn, to having once made a C in a class called "Interpersonal Communication." Think about that for a moment, will you? I made a C in talking to people.

This slacker post follows on the heels of a post about students, non-students, and dreams. Specifically, the question was whether or not that classic anxiety dream, in which the dreamer realizes that he has been enrolled in a class, but the realization dawns only on the day of the final exam, occurs solely in people who actually liked school. For the record, I mostly disliked school. There were isolated things I liked about it -- English, mainly -- but for the most part, and on many levels, school and I were not a good match for each other. And I have never had the final-exam dream. The school dream I have had, repeatedly, involves my showing back up at my old school, about mid-way through my senior year, wearing overalls, or some other item of clothing we weren't allowed to wear to school. The headmistress tries to send me home, and I say to her, "You can't do that to me! I'm 44 years old!" Or, you know, however old I happen to be.

Aelred, who was Student Council President, has had the final-exam dream many times. He also dreams occasionally that he is flying, which is a dream I have never been blessed with. My dreams tend towards the forgetting-about-things genre. When the children were babies, I used to dream that I'd left whoever the current baby was in my closet and forgotten about him or her for a week or so. In the midst of rummaging through shoes in a fit of wild remorse, I'd wake up panting and tearful and have to creep shamefacedly from my bed to make sure that, indeed, the baby was still breathing quietly in the Moses basket, round-cheeked and chubby-fisted and manifestly not neglected in any way.

I still dream, too, about a horse I had as a teenager. I had him from the time I was eleven until I went to college; as my mother put it, I could have a horse or a college education, and I was having a college education. So I sold the horse and honestly never looked back -- except in my dreams. In my dreams I still own him, though I've forgotten that fact for roughly twenty-seven years, and am confronted with the revelation that somewhere, in some pasture, he has been waiting forlornly all this time for me to un-forget, and to come rattling feed in a bucket, calling his name. It's a terrible dream, trust me -- it's as if I were put in charge of the General Resurrection, and the General Resurrection turns out to be what it would be if I were in charge of it. Mercifully, mercifully, mercifully, I am not, and waking from the very suggestion of such a thing is sweetness itself.

Gaude Virgo Salutata

I love the quiet sublimity of these voices.

Wishing everyone a joyous Feast of the Annunciation

Sex, Lies, Church & Media

At First Things today, Orthodox writer Joshua S. Trevino offers a useful and much-needed item-by-item clarification of the media muddle surrounding the Recife case, deconstructing the myths regarding 1)the excommunications of the mother and doctors; 2)the perception that the stepfather who repeatedly raped his nine-year-old stepdaughter somehow received a lighter sanction from the Catholic Church than the mother and doctors; and 3)the perception that the Church values the life of a nine-year-old child less than it values the (now-discarded) lives of her unborn twin children. Trevino concludes:

The media incomprehension of the Brazilian case, and the outrage accompanying it, rests on more than just factual ignorance. There is also a moral ignorance that sees the Church failing to love the afflicted little girl, when in fact it demands an equal love for her unborn—and now dead—children. Alas, for the cause of insightful journalism, the Church (and most Christianity) delves far beyond a surface appreciation of basic affection in its demands on our love. The faithful get little credit for loving those whom they find easy to love. The imitation of Christ comes in loving the enemy, in loving the alien, in loving the unseen, and in loving the unborn.

Read the rest

Meanwhile, at the Touchstone Mere Comments blog, there is this meditation on abortion and theodicy from Patrick Mahaney Clark:

For Christians, God has indeed spoken: for this girl, and for all the countless millions of oppressed and exploited children throughout the ages. Our God does not stand by and watch: He came and lived among the poor and fed the hungry and himself suffered exploitation, betrayal and death by torture. He knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of the reasoning that says, “it is fitting that one person should die for the sake of the greater good.” On a Roman cross he stared into evil’s darkest depths and—though even he asked “why?”—he was not overcome by it. He did not attempt to solve injustice and violence by force. Instead, he put the world’s rage to shame by stretching out his arms and receiving the nails. “As a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.” His response to evil was neither words nor wars (cultural or otherwise) but wounds. “And by his wounds we are healed—” even the most shattered among us. Our best response as Christians to all this public shock and uproar is the same as it always was: the cross, fully embodied in our lives. For if the cross is not our justice, what is? If the cross is not our hope, what is?

Once again, read the rest

ADDENDUM: Robert T. Miller on Trevino on the Recife Case

The Teacher and the Teacher's Chief Work

From Teacher and Teaching, Richard H. Tierney, S.J., Longmans, Green & Co., 1914:

The primary aim of all true education is the formation of character. The ambition of every true teacher is to accomplish this aim. He longs to work on the souls entrusted to his charge, in a way taht will most surely effect this purpose. The subjects on whom he works are the young -- creatures of the moment -- people notoriously inconsiderate of past and future. Like butterflies they are absorbed in the delights of the present. Their souls are cabined and confined and imprisoned within narrow limits. Worst of all, the prison-house is so comfortable and even consoling that the youths either fail to realize its nature, or realizing it, are disinclined to rescue the prisoner, hence it becomes the teacher's first task to destroy the great gates, or at least throw them open, so that the spirit of his pupils may enter upon a larger and nobler life. There is but one way to do this effectively, to wit, by bringing the boy to realize the high purpose of life, by giving him a view, a great, wide view of the end of existence and a desire to play a noble part in the world.

Aelred read me this paragraph at the breakfast table this morning, and what I thought of was Flannery O'Connor's story, "The Lame Shall Enter First," in which a widowed father, Sheppard, convinced that his own bereaved son, Norton, wallows in hopeless selfishness -- "The boy's future was written on his face. He would be a banker." -- invites a juvenile criminal to live with them. His sentimental pity for the other boy, Johnson, and his loathing for the seeming moral inertia of his grief-paralyzed child, leads him to prefer the interloper and blinds him to the boy's determination to commit evil and his contempt for Sheppard's philanthropy. Ultimately Sheppard's attempts to do good and to teach his own son a lesson in generosity end in disaster. Johnson, after taunting Sheppard with an escalating series of petty crimes, is caught by the police and brought back to confront Sheppard.

Johnson hurled himself forward. "Listen at him!" he screamed. "I lie and steal because I'm good at it! . . . The lame shall enter first! The halt'll be gathered together. When I get ready to be saved, Jesus'll save me, not that lying stinking atheist, not that . . . "

The police take Johnson away, leaving the shaken Sheppard to reflect:

"I have nothing to reproach myself with," he murmured. His every action had been selfless, his one aim had been to save Johnson for some decent kind of service, he had not spared himself, he had sacrificed his reputation, he had done more for Johnson than he had done for his own child. Foulness hung about him like an odor in the air, so close that it seemed to come from his own breath. "I have nothing to reproach myself with," he began again. "I did more for him than I did for my own child." He heard his voice as if it were the voice of his accuser. He repeated the sentence silently.

Slowly his face drained of color. It became almost gray beneath the white halo of his hair. The sentence echoed in his mind, each syllable like a dull blow. . . . Norton's face rose before him, empty, forlorn, his left eye listing almost imperceptibly toward the outer rim as if it could not bear a full view of grief. His heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself. He saw the clear-eyed Devil, the sounder of hearts, leering at him from the eyes of Johnson.

Sheppard's revelation visits him too late, alas, to save Norton who, egged on by Johnson, hangs himself from an attic rafter, above the telescope through which he has been trying to see his dead mother in the heaven which Sheppard has told him doesn't exist.

It's a brutal tale of human folly, but what strikes me, rereading both the story and the words of Fr. Tierney, is the difference between philanthropy, which presumes having something in this world to give to another person, and nobility, which as Fr. Tierney suggests, has its sights trained higher, yet plays a part in this world, perhaps because it truly isn't thinking of itself at all, or of this world as an end in itself. Sheppard, in trying to save both Johnson and Norton, strives inside the prison-house.

Before I Disappear Back into Work Again

Really, I have these books piling up beside my bed, and I've got to read them. But after posting the other day a list of the books we're all reading, insofar as I even know what people here are reading, it occurred to me that maybe somewhere out there sits somebody who'd like to know what school materials are being used in our house right now as well -- beyond that list of books, that is. The books are the heart of it. Still, Maureen Wittmann notwithstanding, I haven't quite managed to do math via living books yet. So here's a random list of non-literary resources employed in the attainment of educational objectives for spring 2009:

MCP Math Book E
Miquon Math: Orange Book
Key To Algebra
Teaching Company Foundations of Western Civilization lecture series with Prof. Thomas F.X. Noble of Notre Dame
Voyages in English 5 (we dip in and out of this)
Introducing the Periodic Kingdom to Its Heirs, Mary Daly
The Biology Coloring Book, Robert D. Griffin (not for your Hello Kitty colorers, I might add)
Latina Christiana II, Cheryl Lowe, Memoria Press
Lingua Angelica, also by Cheryl Lowe and from Memoria
Minimus, a children's Latin program from Cambridge University Press
Around the Corner, my own first-grade reader from Harper & Row
Little Angel Reader A
I Can Draw Animals, from Usborne
Usborne Children's Book of Art
the massive Italian Renaissance art text I used for a college class
Usborne Pocket Guide to Ancient Rome

Saint Augustine's Prayer Book (actually an Anglo-Catholic prayer book from the 1940s)
various little books on aspects of the faith by Fr. Lovasik
college Latin class
local science museum
garden
seeds
compost pile
Madagascar hissing cockroaches (the subject of Amicus's composition exercises this week, among other things)
large magnifying glass
thank-you note dictated to me, then traced over, signed, and delivered by Helier to the kind neighbor who gave him and Amicus the cockroaches and the magnifying glass
letter written -- letter by laborious letter -- by Crispina to her Grammy (only yesterday; I need to put it in an actual mail-able envelope)
cookbooks
crayons, markers, scrap paper, scissors, glue, sidewalk chalk
dinner conversation
music CDs
magazines and internet news
blogs
fan-fiction websites
online math and phonics games
grocery stores
pocket money
beans (we're trying to keep a "sacrifice jar" for Lent, putting in beans when we do acts of charity and so forth, but they also get used as math manipulatives)
violin songbooks
friends who do Irish dance
friends who do historical re-enactment
friends who have lived or visited places we haven't, like Brazil and New Jersey
access to college campus and friendly professors who give tours of whatever collections they've got up there in the fastness of the fourth floor
siblings

That's all I can think of right now, without getting up and scouring the kitchen, where we tend to do our sitdown schooling these days. Anyway, for those of you who've been dying to know this kind of thing, there you go.

Some Entertainments for Laetare Sunday

Because, you know, you ought to be rejoicing. Here, at least, the sun is shining. We've all been to church, had bacon and eggs wrapped up in tortillas for a late breakfast, and taken long walks in shirtsleeves. The little children have been up in the big camellia tree outside the back door, watching over the porch roof as a tiny little fraction of the world passes before the house, at a distinctly leisurely small-town pace.

This was our anthem at church this morning. Not very "laetare," but we love it anyway, and in any event, you can't ever go wrong with Edward Caswall. The choir, here in our smalltown parish, consists of five people, including me, and we never have an accompanist for rehearsals, which hamstrings us somewhat, but simple as this is, it went off well. We sang it a capella. Women sang the first verse in unison, then the second in parts. Men joined, in parts, for the third verse. Fourth verse was men and women in unison; fifth was everyone in parts. All this is a little . . . well, you can go read Fallen Sparrow and my friend Pentimento for serious music, but trust me, for us this was something indeed.

More pets have joined our household: Madagascar hissing cockroaches. I'm not sure how many, but I've been assured by their new masters that their numbers will increase. I think the idea was that I would greet this prospect with joy, and I am prepared to, to a moderate extent, as long as those things stay in the plastic file box where they belong, with the pine shavings and the rotting half-banana.

Meanwhile, from Caleb Stegall, on dealing with animals on a larger scale:

I started raising pigs several years back. I let our very first hog grow to mammoth size–clocking in at somewhere just south of five-hundred pounds–before finally deciding that his date with the reaper had arrived. The boundless arrogance of a corporate lawyer used to getting his way in everything with a snap of the fingers in conjunction with the boundless enthusiasm and ignorance of a novice left me positive that to move this animal to the local butcher would be a cinch. Just get in there and nudge the thing along. No problem. It’s just a dumb pig after all. And I’m a lawyer. (I know, it makes no sense, but take it from me, when they teach you “how to think like a lawyer,” that’s what they mean.) At that time, the poor beast was still more ham and bacon to me than a free agent with his own ideas about his future.

Read the rest here.

My grandfather raised hogs and cured his own country hams; as my mother likes to say, "Papa loved pigs." He had a healthy and matter-of-fact approach to dealing with them: I can remember sitting on the pigpen fence, early in the morning, watching him wade into the midst of all those bristling backs, brandishing the slop bucket in one hand and a two-by-four in the other. At any rate, Stegall's account of his initiation into thinking not like a lawyer but like a farmer is a lively read, and amusing to those of us sitting comfortably at our desks and not, at the moment, facing down a pig.

Actually, what are we doing here? It's a feast day, for crying out loud. Go outside.

Another of Those Lenten Sonnets

Exercise

In certain lights, our garden looks almost --
not habitable, exactly, but like a garden:
sudden daffodils, an unexpected host
of primrose like grounded moths. Think Eden
in the aftermath: boxwoods outgrowing
their bequeathed rounded, cornered, or conical
shapes. Dropped limbs. The grass needing mowing.
Windfalls liquefied, an alcoholic smell,
last November's hindsight. Fruit flies
ascending like visible, audible breath.
Imagine, against the wall, a rusted cooker
showered with damp white blooms, an onlooker
at an open window saying, ah, here's death
undone, again. And glad of the exercise.

After several days spent outside, digging and raking and planting and moving stuff around -- how much landscaping can you do with overgrown vinca and little volunteer nandinas? A lot, say I -- this poem from that Lent in Cambridge seems fitting. That garden was a little brick-walled enclosure, with a patch of lawn and beds full of lemon balm and daisies, which had choked out whatever else might have grown there once. That particular spring, the flat below us was being divided into two flats and renovated, and the lawn had largely vanished under a mound of construction debris and discarded appliances.

Given all that, the primulas which managed to bloom in what was left of the grass seemed all the more miraculous. And despite the mess, it was a quiet little oasis tucked behind our building, sheltered from the busy road on one side and the noisy secondary school on the other. There was a concrete slab in one corner where a shed had once stood, and when they finally hauled all the rubbish away, we bought a cheap patio table and chairs and put them out there so that we, and all the other residents of the building by turns, could eat outside in the brief summer weather.

Meanwhile, our current, more rambling yard is starred at present with some little blue-white bulby-type flower which looks beautiful, growing in generous drifts along the backyard fences and up through the gravel in the driveway, but which has a smell like -- and I am trying here to be merely accurate, you understand -- a smell like dog farts. The children had brought in armloads of this flower and loaded up every vase and jar in the house with specimens of it, and it was only after I'd put the dog out and opened all the doors that I realized where the stench was coming from. Still, it looks pretty, at a distance.

Current Reading in Our House

Helier and Crispina (read-alouds):
Children of the Northlights, by Ingri & Edgar Parin D'Aulaire, 1935
Legends of Saints and Beasts, selected and illustrated by Anne Marie Jauss, 1954
(I won't look up the copyright dates for all our reading -- these are two lovely old books, clearly CPSIA contraband, which I bought at a conference last weekend)
The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff

Amicus:
Guadalcanal Diary
33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Epiphany:
David of Jerusalem, The Restless Flame, The Glorious Folly, all by Louis de Wohl

Me:
The Collected Stories, by Flannery O'Connor
The City of the Saints, by Sir Richard F. Burton (reading this very episodically, I confess, but it's no end of entertaining)
An Exaltation of Larks, by James Lipton, also an episodic read
The Secret Life of Insects: an Entomological Alphabet, by Peter Milward, a review copy of which just arrived in today's mail. The accompanying flyer indicates that this book will be available in bookstores in April.

Aelred: Books seem to be arriving daily in padded envelopes with his name on. I have no idea which of them he's actually reading right now.

From New Liturgical Movement

Simple Music for Lent

News Flash: Pope Gets It Right

On condoms and the spread of HIV, that is. So says the director of Harvard's AIDS Prevention Research Project, anyway. Read about it here.

via the Touchstone Mere Comments blog.

UPDATE:

This from an interview with Green, the director of the Harvard project, in Christianity Today:

Is Pope Benedict being criticized unfairly for his comments about HIV and condoms?

This is hard for a liberal like me to admit, but yes, it’s unfair because in fact, the best evidence we have supports his comments—at least his major comments, the ones I have seen.

What does the evidence show about the effectiveness of condom-use strategies in reducing HIV infection rates among large-scale populations?

It will be easiest if we confine our discussion to Africa, because that’s where the pope is, and that is what he was talking about. There’s no evidence at all that condoms have worked as a public health intervention intended to reduce HIV infections at the “level of population.” This is a bit difficult to understand. It may well make sense for an individual to use condoms every time, or as often as possible, and he may well decrease his chances of catching HIV. But we are talking about programs, large efforts that either work or fail at the level of countries, or, as we say in public health, the level of population. Major articles published in Science, The Lancet, British Medical Journal, and even Studies in Family Planning have reported this finding since 2004. I first wrote about putting emphasis on fidelity instead of condoms in Africa in 1988.

Read the rest

In the Midst of Lent

We've been away lately. Last week we were literally away visiting family and friends in Memphis, but more than that, I've been working on some print articles and other projects which have left me with less time and energy for the kind of off-the-cuff stuff I tend to write here. As I've mentioned before, I'll be moving a good bit of my blogging to another venue, a new blog which will be related to First Things, about which more later. I've been writing for the magazine on a sporadic basis for the last two years, and I'm very grateful to the editors for making this all an expanded and more regular thing.

The April issue of the magazine arrived the other day, an issue devoted to tributes and memorials to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who died in early January. An additional tribute by Princeton's Robert P. George, which appears on today's On the Square blog, reminds me why, exactly, I should be grateful for Fr. Neuhaus's influence, both cultural and personal, and why I am honored more than I can say to be associated with the magazine he founded. George writes:

In the early 1970s, Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus was poised to become the nation’s next great liberal public intellectual—the Reinhold Niebuhr of his generation. He had going for him everything he needed to be not merely accepted but lionized by the liberal establishment. First, of course, there were his natural gifts as a thinker, writer, and speaker. Then there was a set of left-liberal credentials that were second to none. He had been an outspoken and prominent civil rights campaigner, indeed, someone who had marched literally arm-in-arm with his friend Martin Luther King. He had founded one of the most visible anti-Vietnam war organizations. He moved easily in elite circles and was regarded by everyone as a “right-thinking” (i.e., left-thinking) intellectual-activist operating within the world of mainline Protestant religion.

Then something happened: Abortion. It became something it had never been before, namely, a contentious issue in American culture and politics. Neuhaus opposed abortion for the same reasons he had fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. At the root of his thinking was the conviction that human beings, as creatures fashioned in the image and likeness of God, possess a profound, inherent, and equal dignity. This dignity must be respected by all and protected by law. That, so far as Neuhaus was concerned, was not only a Biblical mandate but also the bedrock principle of the American constitutional order. Respect for the dignity of human beings meant, among other things, not subjecting them to a system of racial oppression; not wasting their lives in futile wars; not slaughtering them in the womb.

. . .

The liberal argument against abortion was straightforward and powerful. “We liberals believe in the inherent and equal dignity of every member of the human family. We believe that the role of government is to protect all members of the community against brutality and oppression, especially the weakest and most vulnerable. We do not believe in solving personal or social problems by means of violence. We seek a fairer, nobler, more humane way. The personal and social problems created by unwanted pregnancy should not be solved by offering women the ‘choice’ of destroying their children in utero; rather, as a society we should reach out in love and compassion to mother and child alike.”

So it was that Pastor Neuhaus and many like him saw no contradiction between their commitment to liberalism and their devotion to the pro-life cause. On the contrary, they understood their pro-life convictions to be part and parcel of what it meant to be a liberal. They were “for the little guy”—and the unborn child was “the littlest guy of all.”

Read the rest here.

Meanwhile, life goes on here as usual. Aside from our normal schoolwork, the handful of non-rainy days we've had lately have been expended in tilling up a bed for vegetables along the south side of the house, and amending the soil. Today we've got several varieties of lettuces, plus sweet onions, carrots, and peas to plant, plus seeds to start indoors for the hot-weather crops. Additionally, I think I'm going to have to make the children fill in the bunker they dug in the backyard several weeks ago, while I was hard at work on an essay on euthanasia. Give a child a shovel, and he will keep himself busy; but on the other hand, then you have a great gaping red-clay maw in the ground which fills up with rainwater, and then people fall into accidentally on purpose and ruin the one pair of decent trousers they had left, and really, enough is enough. Besides, if they fill it in, they can always dig it again, and I have a feeling I'm going to need them to do that.

On their high-school transcripts, where you have to indicate that they've done a credit of P.E. I think we'll just put "Ditch Digging 101."