When the Universe Paused and Held Its Breath...

This morning, as I was flipping through The Liturgy of the Hours to find my place in Lauds, my eye fell on the following selection in the Office of Readings. The harrowing of hell, when Christ descended to the abode of the dead to free the imprisoned souls of the just, is a popular theme in Early and Middle English literature, especially in the mystery plays. I've always found them charming -- a sort of early Catholic fan fiction. In the Creed, we affirm that "he descended into hell" -- but no one knows exactly what it was like. It is a gap which human imagination longs to fill.

I suppose this sermon is much older. In a fictionalized form, it depicts the meeting of Adam, the first man, and Christ, the new Adam.

From an ancient homily on Holy Saturday
(PG 43, 439, 451, 462-463)

The Lord descends into hell

Something strange is happening — there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and Hell trembles with fear. He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, He who is both God and the Son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the Cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone, ‘My Lord be with you all.’ Christ answered him: ‘And with your spirit.’ He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.’

I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in Hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I in you; together we form one person and cannot be separated.

For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On my back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.

I slept on the Cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in Paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in Hell. The sword that pierced Me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly Paradise. I will not restore you to that Paradise, but will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The Bridal Chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The Kingdom of Heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.

Saint Nicholas: A Saint for Everyman

Today is the feast of St. Nicholas. All the children are now gone and grown, no little shoes were lined up at the front door last night waiting to be filled with chocolate coins and other traditional treats. However Fillius and I still maintain the family tradition of reading aloud from The Twenty Miracles of Saint Nicolas by Bernarda Bryson. Usually we skip around in the book, hitting all of our favorites during the octave of the feast. But this year I decided to start reading at the very beginning of the book and to work our way through to the end. So last night, the vigil of the feast, I began by reading the opening words of the book:

"Here is the story of Saint Nicolas, Bishop of Myra, patron saint of mariners, moneylenders, thieves and children; protector of travelers, turners, dyers, coopers, boatmen, bootmakers, sawyers, seedmen, mercers, merchants, Greeks, cities, Jews, packers, spinsters, pirates, Russians, pickpockets, haberdashers, children, fishermen, pilgrims, pilgrims, prisoners, parish clerks, sailors and unwedded maids; defender of the Faith and maker of many true miracles." He really is the patron saint of everybody! (I love illustrations in this book. The one on the facing page shows a crowd of little figures -- examples of all the many groups of which St. Nicolas is a patron. But what is a centaur doing among them? I haven't quite figured that one out.)

The first story tells about the birth of Saint Nicolas and how the nurses who sought to bathe the infant saint were completely freaked out when he stood upright in the bath and spoke to them in Greek. Convinced that he was possessed by the devil, they fled the house. Then he grieved his mother by refusing to nurse on Tuesday or Friday.

"Oh my dear child, what is this curse that has fallen upon us? Am I made of poison that you refuse to take my milk?"

To her great surprise the baby replied to her, speaking clearly, 'Oh Mother, ' he said, 'do you not know that today is Friday and is a fasting day, and that Tuesdays are fasting days also, when the good and pious take no food?" Then the mother was full of joy, for she saw that the child would grow up to be a holy man, perhaps even a Saint, and that he was in no way possessed by the devil.

If you were not around to read it last year, you might like to click here to read one of the later stories in the book, "How Saint Nicolas Met and Overcame the Goddess Diana."

Or you could read this Irish story about St. Nicolas from from another book: The Real St. Nicholas: Tales of Generosity and Hope From Around the World, by Louise Carus.

Nicolas certainly did get around!

All Souls Day

A soul, a soul, a soul cake
 Please, good missus, a soul cake
 An apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry
 Any good thing to make us all merry
 One for Peter, two for Paul
 Three for Him who made us all

God Bless the master of this house, the mistress also
And all the little children who 'round your table grow
Likewise your men and maidens, your cattle and your store
And all that dwells within your gates
 we wish you ten times more

A soul, a soul, a soul cake...

The lanes are very dirty and my shoes are very thin
I've got a little pocket to put a penny in
If you haven't got a penny, a ha' penny will do
If you haven't got a ha' penny, then God bless you

A soul, a soul, a soul cake
 Please, good missus, a soul cake
 An apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry
 Any good thing to make us all merry
 One for Peter, two for Paul
 Three for Him who made us all

(A traditional song by that prolific chap, Annon.)
 

Dickens and a Digression

I love library book sales. You never know what you'll find. When our kids were young, we all looked forward to the annual book sale at the Santa Monica public library. To a certain extent, I always felt bad when I discovered great finds among the children's books which the library had discarded. I didn't hesitate to snap them up, but I was sorry that future borrowers would miss out on them. Ah, well! The library's loss was our gain. And of course, books donated to the library booksale by the community were guilt-free.

One year we found a complete set of an old edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia. We didn't need it ourselves, since my husband had bought a new set in the 1970s when he was still a bachelor with discretionary income to fling about. (He was also working at a bookstore in those days and was allowed an employee discount even on special orders. Hence, nearly all of our gorgeous art books were bought during that period.) But we bought this older set on the grounds that it needed a good home. And as it turned out, we were scheduled to attend a Catholic homeschooling event shortly afterwards where we found a family that was happy to adopt it. (The fact that it was an older edition was a plus in their eyes.)

At that same sale we found this copy of The Life of Our Lord by Charles Dickens. I'd been a Dickens fan ever since the sixth grade when I first read A Christmas Carol, but I'd never heard of this work before. That was not, perhaps, surprising. Dickens wrote this little book for his own children and refused to allow it to be published while he lived. The introduction to this edition quotes a letter written by Georgina Hogarth, his sister-in-law:

I am sorry to say it is never to be published . . . He wrote it years ago, when his elder children were quite little. It is about sixteen short chapters, chiefly adapted from St. Luke's Gospel, most beautiful, most touching, most simple as such a narrative should be. He never would have it printed, and I used to read it to the little boys in MS. before they were old enough to read writing themselves . . . I asked Charles if he did not think it would be well for him to have it printed, at all events for private circulation . . . . He said he would look over the MS. and take a week or two to consider. At the end of the time he gave it back to me and said he had decided never to publish it, or even to have it privately printed. He said I might make a copy of it for ... any one of his children, but for no one else, and he also begged that we would never even hand the MS., or a copy of it, to any one to take out of the house, so there is no doubt about his strong feeling on the subject, and we must obey it. . . .

The book remained a family secret for 85 years until the last of Dickens' children, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, bequeathed permission for its publication should his family so desire. It was published, first serially and then in book form, in the mid 1930s. My copy has illustrations by Rachel Taft-Dixon.

There are plenty of copies to be found online these days including editions that have been published since I bought my used copy so many years ago. You can also read it online or download it as a PDF.

So how is it as a book? Believe it or not, I hadn't sat down and read all the way through it until quite recently. My kids were not the right age for it when I bought it, so I shelved it with the rest of Dickens, and it sat there until just the other day when I was between novels and needed something to read with my lunch.

Well, it was interesting to read such a private work. It has a familial charm which is endearing. "You never saw a locust," Dickens writes as an aside to his description of John the Baptist, "because they belong to that country near Jerusalem, which is a great way off. So do camels, but I think you have seen a camel. At all events, they are brought over here, sometimes; and if you would like to see one, I will show you one." (I like to imagine Dickens and his children watching camels together.)

Dickens' interest in social issues relating to the poor are apparent here in his reminders to his young readers that heaven was made for the poor as well for the rich, and that "God makes no difference between those who wear good clothes and those who go barefoot and in rags. . . Never be proud or unkind, my dears to any poor man, woman, or child."

The homeschoolers to whom we'd given the encyclopedia rather envied us our possession of The Life of Our Lord. They belonged to that class of homeschoolers who assume that an old book, published before the current moral rot had set in, is automatically a safer choice for their children's instruction. But every age has pockets of rot.

Personally, I would not have read this book to my children as part of their religious formation. It's not the Victorian language. Rather, it's Dickens' de-emphasis of the divinity of Christ.

Although he based his retelling mostly on the Gospel of Luke, Dickens skipped the Annunciation, and therefore the whole Son of God bit, along with the Virgin Birth and Joseph's position as foster father of Christ. Perhaps he simply felt a Victorian reticence towards bringing up birth and paternity with very young children. If so, I'll forgive him the omission. Sorta.

But in his account, when the angels appear to the shepherds, they say, "There is a child born to-day in the city of Bethlehem near here, who will grow up to be so good that God will love Him as His own Son; [Emphasis mine.] and He will teach men to love one another, and not to quarrel and hurt one another; and His name will be Jesus Christ; and people will put that name in their prayers, because they will know God loves it, and will know that they should love it too."

Eeek! Isn't this Adoptionism, the heresy teaching that Jesus was born a mere human being and only became divine later in life after being adopted as God's son as a sort of reward for his goodness and niceness? Beep! Beep! Danger, Will Robinson!

I was also a bit concerned that when the wise men show up, they are not seeking "a newborn king of the Jews," as in Matthew's gospel, but "a child . . . who will live to be a man whom all people will love." Eeeuuuw! This is a Jesus who sounds too much like a Hallmark greeting card to me. And I think a sure way to kill any young child's interest in the story of Christ is to wimpify it -- pulling out all of the mythic elements or the hard, weird, and edgy bits. (Oddly enough, Dickens does retain the slaughter of the Innocents, though it is unclear why Herod would have perceived this sort of Jesus as a threat.)

However, the book becomes less iffy as it gos on, and I will give Dickens points for including the Crucifixion -- unlike the DRE* at one of our former parishes who chose "The Metamorphosis of Caterpillars into Butterflies" as the Palm Sunday lesson for the children who were attending her religious ed class while their parents were at the 9:00 Mass.

Why, butterflies, you might ask? Her theory was that someday, somewhere, these children would hear the story of Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection.** And then, a light bulb would go off in their heads, and they'd remember the story of the butterfly! And it would be such a meaningful experience. (This was also the woman who, in a staff meeting, spoke glowingly about the profound religious experience to be had while peeling the paper off crayons. Where do parishes find these people?)

All I could say was, "Not with my kid, lady! They're attending the Palm Sunday liturgy with me, and assimilating the story of Christ's Passion up close and personal."
==============
*Director of Religious Education

**On the History Channel perhaps?

Seraphic in the Ghetto

Seraphic Singles has an interesting series of posts about writing, reading, and the Catholic ghetto. It was sparked by a publisher's response to her book submission:

When I got home on Tuesday . . . I discovered a rejection letter on my computer. To put it in a nutshell, the work wasn't Catholic enough for that particular press. And as I mentioned, I lost my ability to discern between criticism of my work and criticism of myself. I lay under a chair, eating chocolate.

One of the sticking points, and apparently there were many, was that I wrote in a positive fashion about the TV show Sex and the City. I went back to my MS to find out where, and it was in my daydream that my friends would copy Carrie Bradshaw's friends in sending Mr. Big to bring me home. That seemed innocuous to me, but then I reflected that perhaps the problem was that I mentioned the TV show at all. . . .

To what extent does one engage or reject popular culture both as a writer and as a media consumer? Her answer might surprise some, especially those unacquainted with Catholic thought. Whether you end up agreeing with her or not, her posts are thoughtful and interesting.

Read "Back to the Catholic Ghetto" Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Something Completely Different

If Dante and Josephus weren't quite what you had in mind for Lenten reading, check out The Twisted Lenten Drama of Green Eggs and Ham, Uncloaked at Ironic Catholic.

Lenten Reading

Sci Fi Catholic is going to abstain from reading fiction during Lent. Instead, he'll be plowing his way through The New Complete Works of Josephus translated by William Whiston with new editing and additional commentary by Paul L. Maier (who apparently also writes novels).

If you'd like to join The 4o-Day Josephus Read-a-Thon "put the comics and sf novels down, pick up a weighty nonfiction tome, and prove to the world that Sci Fi Catholics don't just read ephemeral garbage; sometimes we read boring stuff, too." I'm tempted to join in, but surprisingly my library has no copy of Josephus in any edition. (I'm watching the budget pretty closely right now, so get thee behind me, Amazon!) Anyway, I've enjoyed reading about his comments about Josephus here and here.

Darwin Catholic is going for a second year of Lenten Meditations on the Divine Comedy. He'll be picking up at book 12 of the Purgatorio. As Darwin points out, modern readers tend to give most of their attention to the Inferno:

For far too many in the modern world, Dante is that medieval guy who wrote the poem about hell. The Inferno is by far the most read, and when it crops up in high school or college reading lists, it's often read quickly with an emphasis on some of the more horrific images involved and Dante's notorious propensity to put real characters (ranging from political enemies to recent popes) in hell. This is a shame, because in focusing on some of the more spectacular surface elements of the first third of the Commedia, one loses the real sense of what Dante was trying to achieve.

At root, the Divine Comedy is about the spiritual progress of the soul, from attachment to sin, through repentance and purgation, to virtue and salvation. . . In the Inferno, Dante learns the nature of sin, while in the Purgatory he learns to strive to replace each sin with its opposing virtue. The Paradiso is, in turn, an allegory of prayer and the spiritual life culminating in the beatific vision of God surrounded by a "celestial rose" made of the angels and the ever-rejoicing saints.

In this sense, a prayerful reading of the Divine Comedy is most appropriate for Lent, when we seek to assure that we are on the long road that winds Eastward, and making progress towards our Maker.

I've already got the book for this one, so I'm planning to read along. I'll probably use the Dorothy Sayers translation which has excellent notes. Many people do not care for her translation because she attempted to reproduce in English Dante's terza rima. Personally, I find her translation charming, but my tastes in poetry are very hobbitish.

Happy (Belated) St. Nicholas Day

I was planning to post something about St. Nicholas yesterday, but all of my free time got funneled into finishing a project which is due at my next class meeting. I staggered to bed at 2:00 a.m. But this morning I see that Rhinemouse at Zero Summer has posted my favorite legend of St. Nicholas ever: "How Saint Nicolas Met and Overcame the Goddess Diana." It's from the book, The Twenty Miracles of Saint Nicolas written and illustrated by Bernarda Bryson. It's out of print, but well worth picking up if you can find a used copy.

As Rhinemouse points out, he's an all-purpose saint: "[the] patron of mariners, moneylenders, thieves, children, travelers, turners, dyers, coopers, boatmen, bootmakers, sawyers, seedmen, mercers, merchants, Greeks, cities, Jews, packers, spinsters, pirates, Russians, pickpockets, haberdashers, children, fishermen, pilgrims, prisoners, parish clerks, sailors, unwedded maids, and little boys chopped up and packed into pickle barrels. (Which I suppose would also make him the patron of characters in slasher films.) According to legend, he attended the Council of Nicaea and smacked Arius, which I guess would also make him the patron of cranky Catholics . . . . "

Our family always celebrated his feast day by reading aloud stories from this book on the days leading up to December 6th. On the evening of December 5th we had the children put their shoes near the front door and they were miraculously filled with cookies, gold wrapped chocolate coins, and sometimes small gifts, thanks to the agency of the saint.

Many families make a point of celebrating the liturgical year with their children as a means of teaching the faith and passing on their religious and cultural traditions. Certainly that was one of our reasons for doing so. But I think that it also served to instill in our children the firm conviction that Catholics just have more fun.

Besides the well known stories of "The Three Schoolboys and the Salting Tub" and "The Miracle of the Three Dowerless Maidens," the book includes "Saint Nicolas and the Prophet Mohammed," "Of a Woman Who Left Her Baby to Boil," "The Legend of a Boy Possessed by the Devil," "The Pawnbroker and the Greek," and many more.

All Souls Day (Belated)

"November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year," said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frost-bitten garden.

"That's the reason I was born in it," observed Jo pensively . . . ."
--Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

If I lived in New England, I'd probably loathe November too. But when you live in California there's a lot to like about this month. For one thing, the infernal heat of summer is pretty much over. The roses are still blooming, and I'm harvesting lemons from my dwarf lemon tree. And if you're also Catholic you get a jump start on the end of the year holidays with All Hallow's Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day.

On All Souls Day, and indeed during the whole month of November, we remember and pray for the dead. Naturally, departed family and friends are at the top of everyone's list, but since praying for the dead is one of the spiritual works of mercy, many people also make it a point to pray for those poor souls who have no one to pray for them. Or for those souls most in need of prayers.

It is perhaps no surprise that in our family we included in our November prayers a special subset of the departed: dead authors. I always liked to include J.R.R. Tolkien among our November intentions. Since he was a devout Catholic, I knew he would appreciate it. And my husband always included James Boswell. For not only was The Life of Samual Johnson one of his favorite works, but Boswell probably needed the all the prayers he could get. (In a fit of youthful rebellion, Boswell converted to Catholicism but could not be said to have lived a good Catholic life. Libertine is the word that springs to mind.)

I hasten to assure my readers that the Bibliophagist family does not restrict its special intentions solely to Catholic authors. We are equal opportunity intercessors. And it seems not only charitable but just to pray for authors who have given us pleasure in this life regardless of their denomination. Perhaps someday they'll be praying for us.