Double dactyl

Grommity Grammity

How anonymity

Gives me the license to

Spout like a fool

Maybe quite typic’lly

Brooking no cavil, I

Rest on the dictum of

My blog, my rule.

My people don't work

The notion that the word liturgy means 'work of the people' seems to be popular among a certain type of liturgical progressive not so intent on returning the Mass to the people as on putting his own personal stamp on it. The larger problem with the formulation is that it is not strictly true. While the word leitos for people or public and ergo for “to do” form its Greek roots, the word liturgy was not cobbled together from its roots by early Christians, but taken whole in the word leitourgia from Greek culture. In that context, the word meant “public work” actually of an elevated or rich person, for (not by) the public. What the progressive seem to have in mind is more a new coinage, demourgia—ringing uncomfortably close to the Gnostic concept of the demiurge. Considered seriously, we must humbly admit that the liturgy is not the work of the people, but the work of Christ given through his Spouse the Holy Catholic Church for the benefit of the people. This consideration should be enough to quell any temptation we have to engage in any such tinkering with the Mass as for example (as I have heard recently) altering the words of the Agnus Dei.

a quarter century

She took me, damaged goods as they say, without reservation some twenty-four years ago--I'm almost certain she never, even at the end, knew just how damaged--and slowly and painstakingly went a long long way toward fixing me. I never even realized what she was doing (she was no scold); sometimes she even allowed me to think it was she who was in need of repair.

The project, however, is still far from complete. I pray she may still give it some of her attention.

Our last conversation

I asked her, "Are you afraid?"

She said, "No."

Conflicting requests

The Church prays:

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord.
And let perpetual light shine upon her.
May she rest in peace.
Amen.

But I ask that she experience (among many other things) an everlasting falling into joy, an eternal coronation like unto and only a little less than that of the Blessed Virgin Mother of God, an exquisite cardinal moment of perfection on which all creation--time, space and matter--hinges.

Am I wrong? I cannot quite reconcile these prayers. The Church's plea seems to be for a sublime sort of sleep. But sleep, to me

(as, it would seem, to the Psalmist, For there is no one in death, that is mindful of thee, {6:6 Vulg} as well as to the Preacher, For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know nothing more, {Eccl. 9:6}),

means forgetfulness; and eternity, to me, subsumes the notion of an expected future universal resurrection. What's more I'm praying through the intercession of men and women who also have gone down to eternal forgetfulness, praying that she knows even as she has been known.

If I am not wrong and our prayers are not incompatible, then the answer lies surely in the gaps in my understandings of words like eternity or perpetuity, experience, repose, peace and... and the list doesn't end, really. This is what I hope.

I'm wearing it now.

I just found out this morning that I have a shirt that has buttons on the cuffs that I'd never before buttoned myself.

40th Day

Well, she did it. What's more, she made it look easy.

Do I need a new prescription? Is that all?

The horizon that seemed so near I pleased to obscure with a clutter of vanity heaped upon vanity now seems immensely distant and the space between barren.

Ero ism o sono ism.

"She is in a better place now," are words meant to console. But, to say nothing of their being taken together, each of the seven words taken separately easily might underlie ten thousand words of contentious and disturbing debate. Well, perhaps not "a", but, then again, maybe so.