MOMMENTARY |
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Sunday, January 19, 2003 ( 9:24 PM ) Elinor Dashwood OUR PARISH ISN'T SO BAD: In fact, it's a lot better than most of them in our diocese. We have kneelers; we have a DRE who has the confirmation class study the Universal Catechism; best of all, we have a devoted and determined pastor who is trying to set matters right liturgically. Unfortunately, we also have a clutch of shabby-genteel affectations that grate on me dreadfully. For instance, it appears to be obligatory, when the preschoolers go out of Mass for their Liturgy of the Word, to follow them with limpid eyes and "Aww" smiles. The choir, while not nearly as bad as at our previous parish, labors under the misapprehension that no part of the Mass can be carried forward without lengthy choral support. And worst of all, the parish is so gone on Communitarian goofiness that everything that happens to everybody is announced, all the baptisms take place during Sunday Masses, and the names of all the sick are read out at every single Mass. (Cacciaguida points out that we have time to hear the whole sick list, numbering several dozen names, but we don't have time to say the Gloria?) The announcements are positively awash with working-class euphemisms - nobody dies, they "pass away". The relatives don't have a wake, they have a "viewing". This last didn't get any easier on Cacciaguida family self-control after a column appeared in which, under the guise of Mr. Language Person, Dave Barry indicated the correct usage of the term "shoulda never" by using it in the sentence, "Earl shoulda never brung 'Silly String' to the viewing." And the music! I have an aversion to hymns that use the first person a lot, since it does not seem to me that American Catholics of the Baby Boom need any encouragement to dwell on ourselves, an activity that ought to be discouraged in any case during the Mass; I positively detest hymns in which the congregation assumes the role of the Deity. Today we had a some of each - a gulpy, Hands-Across-America number called "All Are Welcome", and the never to be sufficiently reviled "Here I Am, Lord". The latter reminds me of the scene in Woody Allen's "Love and Death" in which Sonia (Diane Keaton) lures the amorous Napoleon to her room at midnight as part of an assassination conspiracy. He asks if she is alone, and says he heard voices before he entered the room. Thinking fast, Sonia says she was saying her prayers. "But I heard two voices," he protests. Sonia replies, "I do both parts!" "Here I Am" does both parts - the singing congregation is both "I, the Lord," and "Here I am, Lord," the faithful disciple. Ugh. Others on the First-Person Pronoun bad list are "We Are the Light of the World" (Are you; how nice) and "I Am the Way". Email me with your liturgical music pet peeves. # Sunday, January 12, 2003 ( 11:54 AM ) Elinor Dashwood DAWN BREAKS OVER MARBLEHEAD DEPT: In Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Work & Family columnist Sue Shellenbarger takes what is probably the closest thing to an honest look at day care that you're likely to see in a major newspaper. Among the unsurprising observations is that the researchers whose work she summarizes feel strongly that "children need consistent and committed tender loving care." You think? They are also willing to consider, however, that day care itself, and especially early entry and long hours of day care, may have undesirable effects on children's behavior and on the mother-and-child bond, and that's a good sign that day care researchers may finally be taking their heads out of the sand. There's one problem with day care that neither fewer hours nor later entry nor more stimulating surroundings can overcome, and that's the clear inference that every warehoused child is capable of drawing from his situation: there are things my mother would rather do than be with me, and material things my mother would rather have than my society. Slice the day care debate where you like, but you can't keep it from being apparent to the child that he's an encumbrance to his mother's activities and desires. # Thursday, January 09, 2003 ( 8:55 AM ) Elinor Dashwood DON'T FEEL GOOD: Which is what my children used to say when they were sick, but were too young to particularize. I have a bad cold, and mean to spend a day or two on the sofa, fighting it off. Post again soon. # Sunday, January 05, 2003 ( 9:31 AM ) Elinor Dashwood IF YOU WANT TO KNOW what it's like to have a bunch of teenage sons, check out this Sherman's Lagoon. I love Sherman's Lagoon - it's the Dilbert of the Sea. # ( 9:23 AM ) Elinor Dashwood CACC' WATCH: Cacciaguida on why men don't stop the car and ask for directions: "Look what happened when the Magi asked Herod for directions. That's why!" I agree with C. S. Lewis in thinking that the Wise Men were probably more like philosophy professors or mathematicians, and certainly not kings. If they'd been kings themselves, they'd have had Herod's number all right, and would never have blundered into the palace of the current Rex Judaeorum to ask where they might find his newborn supplanter. Not only were they obviously academic types, but I strongly suspect that one of them at least had his glasses mended with string. Happy Epiphany. # Saturday, January 04, 2003 ( 2:23 PM ) Elinor Dashwood MIDDLEMARCH: During a recent revel at a favorite used book store, I picked up a Penguin edition of George Eliot's (Mary Ann Evans's) Middlemarch. I didn't think much of this "Portrait of Provincial Life" when it was a Masterpiece Theatre production a few years back, and didn't trouble to read the book; the main thrust of it seemed to be "Oh, the hollowness of conventional morality!", and, frankly, I'm too busy to bother with wailings about conventional morality on the part of a woman who lived with another woman's husband for twenty-some years. Mistake! I ought to have allowed for the Masterpiece Theatre Effect - everything on M. T. seems to be about hollow conventions and the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality, if it isn't about racism or the subjection of women. So far Middlemarch is shaping up as a picture of an overly serious-minded girl who comes through a lot of troubles and is much softened and humanized thereby. At the novel's beginning, the really very fine and earnest main character, Dorothea Brooke, is rather stern in her charitable works and impatient of her more conventional sister, something, in fact, like a less bloodless Olive Chancellor in Henry James's The Bostonians. More about Middlemarch as I get along in it. # ( 2:03 PM ) Elinor Dashwood THE DARLING SYNDROME: This is late, because we've been out of town visiting, but see if you can get this article that was on the front page of the Outlook section of the Washington Post on Sunday, 29 December. The author is Patricia Dalton, a clinical psychologist in D.C. and the mother of three grown children. It's always nice to see the opinion elite (as represented by the Washpost) catching on to something that their grandparents could have told them, but which they wouldn't have believed until they read it in the paper - preferably with statistics. The article, titled "Let Go, Already", deals with the problem of adult children who remain dependent, can't make decisions, and generally remain perpetual adolescents. In many of the author's cases, they get this way, not because of insufficient funding for Head Start programs, but because their well-meaning "uber-parents" over-program them and don't make them learn self-reliance: "They decorate their children's rooms in stimulating colors, buy educational toys, forgo playpens and give baby massages. They space their children according to the best advice of child-development experts. They sign their kids up for Marva Tots gymnastics classes and apply to the most progressive preschools and enroll them in soccer at age 4 . . . They let their kids interrupt them and drop everything to take advantage of every teaching moment. And perhaps most important, they take every opportunity to build up their children's self-esteem by complimenting them on how smart, athletic, artistic, talented and good-looking they are." My name for the same thing is the Darling syndrome, in which parents think it's so important to fill their children to the brim with music lessons and AP classes that there's positively no time to bother with courtesy, humility, respect for others, or a even a dimly-distant inkling that Darling him- or her - self is not the most important thing that ever was or could be. One of the many, many advantages of growing up in a large family is that the parents thereof are driven by necessity to insist on obedience, help in the house, and a certain measure of independence in matters of paper routes, sports practices, and science fair projects. # ( 12:38 PM ) Elinor Dashwood SAVE SOME MONEY NEXT YEAR: We're glad to be back on schedule, because we never know what day of the week it is or what we're supposed to be doing between Christmas Day and the New Year. Neither, it seems, do journalists, to judge from the articles in the newspapers during that week. File this, and you won't need to buy the paper from 26-31 December 2003. Area Families Celebrate Kwanzaa; Weather Snarls Holiday Travel; Are We Giving Kids Too Much?; Museums Full as Homebound Families Get Out; Retailers Grim Over 4th Quarter Sales; Shop Now For Best Values Of The Year!; and, finally, the Year-End In & Out List. In some years a mid-level presidential appointee will die shortly after Christmas, and (could he but know) would finally feel that he was appreciated at his true worth: reporters, desperate for some real news to write about, will carry on as if the departed had been Moses, Talleyrand, and Abraham Lincoln all rolled into one, earnestly pondering his career and his influence on public life in articles titled "Farnesworth, A Life in Politics" and "Interior After Farnesworth: Will Wetlands Survive?" If 4 July is the best date for a future president to be born, 26 December is definitely the best date for a policy wonk to die. # ( 12:17 PM ) Elinor Dashwood PERSUASION: We've been out of town visiting Cacciaguida's family, and in the car we listened to Jane Austen's Persuasion, read by Anna Massey and available from Cover To Cover Cassettes Ltd. Persuasion, Austen's last completed novel and posthumously published, was also the last of her novels that I encountered - I was in college when I read it for the first time - and was never in the first rank of my favorites. All that is revised now. Besides being a beautifully-constructed story, it hammers home with particular vigor some of Austen's persistent ideas, which can get lost in the mix of her more "light and bright and sparkling" books, especially P&P and Emma. Character is better than charm, and it's also more uncommon; Since some suffering is inevitable, patient endurance makes you happier in the end than griping; People who make bad situations worse by becoming hysterical should be smacked; Being square with your conscience is far more conducive to contentment and pleasure than any amount of faulty self-indulgence and weak self-justification. What's the common theme here? It's one that Austen considered in Sense and Sensibility and returned to in Persuasion, and might be summed up in the statement that self-command is better than being at the mercy of your nerves, and that what you do is far more important than what you feel. If Persuasion were being written today as a modern self-help manual, it would be called Get Over Yourself Already. Read it and disagree. # Friday, December 27, 2002 ( 3:04 PM ) Elinor Dashwood D.C. CRACKS DOWN ON VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS Those of you who live in Our Nation's Capital will be relieved to learn from Thursday's Washington Post that officials there are taking a firm line on physical violence in the public schools. What may take the bloom off your satisfaction is that they have fired thirteen teachers for violating the District's "zero-tolerance policy" regarding corporal punishment. One of the dismissed fell foul of the policy when she pushed a student who had just hit her. Now, nobody likes to have teachers hitting her child. I wouldn't like it myself, if I hired out my educational duties. In fact, before we moved to our present home our eldest several children attended a very good, small, independent Catholic school, where there was one day a flap over a teacher's having spanked a first-grader (if I remember rightly). I told my children that I'd go to the mat for them if a teacher ever struck one of them, as follows: Mrs. Cacciaguida: "Why did you slap my son? Why didn't you explain to him that what he'd done was wrong?" Teacher: "I did explain to him that what he'd done was wrong. Then he gave me the (rude gesture)." Mrs. C: "Would you like to slap him again? Only I bag first go." We never had any problems in that respect. But I thought you'd be glad to see that the District, so long unable to cope with the increasing violence of its schools, has taken a stand at last. # Tuesday, December 24, 2002 ( 11:16 PM ) Elinor Dashwood SMOKING BISHOP Now there's a phrase that suggests all sorts of pleasing images, especially if you live in our diocese. (Retirement countdown, T - 7 months and counting) As a matter of fact, it's the hot drink in which Scrooge proposes to indulge with Bob Cratchit as they talk over Bob's changed circumstances. Several years ago Cacciaguida and I found a recipe for it in Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, and we've been making it for Christmas ever since. It's basically hot sangria: red wine, sugar, and sliced lemons and oranges - the proportions are infinitely adjustable - simmered together and served hot. Most people like it. Last year a friend tried to talk me into adding cinnamon sticks and cloves to the simmering procedure, but I held firm: everything that's been simmered with cloves and cinnamon sticks winds up tasting exactly the same, it seems to me, and it doesn't taste like bishop. Start with about a half-gallon of red wine, and not a good vintage, either - however strong and sour it is, it'll come out right. Add about a cup of granulated sugar, three or four oranges and one lemon, sliced, peel and all. Simmer for twenty minutes or so and remove the fruit and peel. It can be warmed up repeatedly for serving, but don't let it boil or it will start to get syrupy. # Sunday, December 22, 2002 ( 11:52 PM ) Elinor Dashwood The Santa question. If you've read Cacciaguida recently, you've seen that we never did the Santa business with our children. That is, we read them "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and told them about the saintly bishop's character for doing charity by stealth, but we made it clear that the "miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer" were a charming fairy story and not to be believed as fact. Here's what I want to know about parents who tell their children about Santa as if it were true, to add wonder and specialness to Christmas: have they thought this through? At Christmas we celebrate the beginning of our Redemption, when God's own Son came into a cold and exhausted world to work our salvation. If you want wonder and specialness, try this: go somewhere alone - in church, perhaps, or anywhere quiet - and try to understand what was done for you, and at what cost; how the history of all Heaven and the fate of all Earth were changed, so that God might not lose you to the fire. I'm inclined to think that if that isn't enough wonder for you, a guy in a red suit jumping down the chimney won't be a satisfactory substitute. A merry Christmas, a blessed Nativity to you. # ( 5:20 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Why Elinor Dashwood? Elinor Dashwood is the elder of two sisters whose troubles and actions drive the plot of Jane Austen's novel, "Sense and Sensibility". "S&S" isn't Austen's best-constructed book; its two opposing ideas are perhaps too simplistically portrayed in the sisters, of whom Elinor is Sense and Marianne is Sensibility. Marianne is a Rousseauian, a passionately vivid spirit who lives for romance, emotion, perfect candor, freedom from societal constraints, and the World Well Lost For Love. That's why I'm Elinor: not only do people like Marianne do a lot of harm to themselves, to the family, and to society, but they also make me feel extremely unwell. # ( 5:14 PM ) Elinor Dashwood A little history. I'm the youngest of seven children of an Irish-American family, not untypical of sturdy working-class cradle Catholics in the Fifties and Sixties. My parents, a police lieutenant and a homemaker, scraped and saved to send all of us to parochial school, five to diocesan high schools, and three to Catholic colleges. The reward of their trust and sacrifice was that their children were indoctrinated with dissent and situation ethics, and taught to mock the beliefs and deride the duties that shaped their own lives. Only when the academic rigor of these institutions followed the spiritual formation into the ashcan did the folks awake to the fraud that had been practiced on them, and I was sent to a good local public high school. From there I went to Yale, where I ran into anti-Catholicism for the first time, a circumstance which gave a much-needed shot in the arm to a faith attenuated by guitars, lefty sermons, and squishy catechesis. The unavoidable necessity of crushing the pretensions of a bunch of pagans and huggy-bears drew me from the brink and back into the Church. In due course Cacciaguida and I got married, and we now have a troop of young warriors, prepared at any moment to defend the Faith against all comers. # ( 4:26 PM ) Elinor Dashwood My husband, Cacciaguida, set me up in this blog. HE says it's because I'll have a great time blogging. I think it's because we were beginning to experience a dangerous buildup of opinions at our house. And what do you do when production outstrips local ability to consume? You export, of course. # |
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