Tonight I saw the Sondheim's-80th-birthday prom (his actual birthday was a while ago).

I think Stephen Sondheim is the closest living man to genius of whom I am aware. He has the threefold gifts of depth of feeling, depth of thought, and clarity of expression - and all three are required for genius - but not only these three, but something unnameable; and that he has.

I have found an article linking Middle-Earth to the O Antiphons, via Fr Finigan: here.

I meditated in the evening as well as in the morning. I intend to either carry on that (15+15) or to do one meditation of 30 minutes in either the morning (preferably) or the evening. I do not think it would be wise to aim immediately for any sessions beyond 30 minutes. Would it be better to do the one meditation in the morning for half an hour, or to do two fifteen-minute meditations?

I had intended to say Vespers from the Little Office of Our Lady this evening, but that didn't happen.

I need to pray more. My current prayer-life is absolutely not enough. I am called to a very great level of holiness, and my current regimen is not sufficient to keep me even from mortal sin.

Here is my current regimen:

DAILY. Prayers on Rising, incl. morning Angelus. 15 minutes mental prayer (morning or evening). Noon angelus. Evening angelus. 5-decade rosary. Compline from the Little Office of the BVM.

WEEKLY. Mass (Sunday). Divine Mercy Chaplet (Friday). (Also preparation and thanksgiving before and after Mass.)

IRREGULAR. Confession. Communion.

* * *

I shall think how to improve this without finding that I cannot keep to my resolutions.

Today is St Pantaleon's feast-day (O.R.). Look him up.

As I was kneeling on my knee
Thinking on Thy Nativity,
A salty sting came to my eye,
Although I did not then know why.

Bitter to me the taste of things,
Though angels with outstretchèd wings
Were singing of Thine Advent dear.
Their melody I could not hear.

I could not hear the song they sang
That with unbounded gladness rang,
Because I wander evil-starred
And I have learned Thy Will is hard.

Too hard, it sometimes seems, to bear;
You do not take away our care:
But anguish has not broken me,
Because of Thy Nativity.

(26th July, St Anne's Day, 2010.)

I had a lovely day at Ron & Anne's today.

I have finished book IX of the Iliad.

Ora(te) pro me.

I am still sighful.

I do not want to go to Calvary.

I am sighful.

Dad and I went to Framlingham this evening; we saw Ed.

Dad and I went round the church. Norfolk (3rd duke) is buried there.

Beyond the Bourne

There is a land, I have been told, beyond the bourne of things,
Beyond our woe. There is a host of saints that gladly sings
A timeless music, silently, and all who there have come
Have vanquished sin and conquered death, that they might reach their home.

Arrayed with brightness, all are here to slake their deepest thirst.
That thirst is quenched: yes, even these, of Adam's race accursed,
Who lay so long in longing that remainèd unfulfilled,
Have reached the end that they were made for: Death, at last, is killed.

For Death itself is doomed to die: it was not made to live:
While Death may take away, the power is God's alone to give:
Death thought that he had conquered God; but that he thought in vain:
For Death knew not that Life must live for ever, and must reign.

For Death he shall not conquer us, though he shall come for all,
The beggar in his alleyway, the monarch in his hall;
For we through Christ shall conquer him who our whole being tore,
For Death once overcome, Death's dread dominion is no more.

I pant for waters that the time has not yet come to taste:
Waters for those alone who are humble, loving, meek, and chaste;
For sinners cannot drink from them without augmenting thirst,
For only those who love the truth can drink and not be cursed.

Reality is harsh to those with eyes who do not see.
Reality is merciless! To Be meaneth To Be
Both now and in eternity. You shall not be destroyed:
The choice is yours to make, either be damned or overjoyed.

The deepest longing that exists within the hearts of men
Is longing for the Deepest. Seek it: you shall gain it then.
Who would not travel through the desert, thitherward to wend?
I would not thirst eternally: I would desire mine end.

(21st July, 2010.)

I received a very long tirade of a comment on something I had posted on Facebook. It was most unpleasant. The degree of spleen was scarcely tolerable. I think I was accused of having said things I had not said. Anyway, I am going to bed now.

I saw on Facebook that (Fr) Tim Finigan is friends with a man called Alan Kuntzman. It does not say much for my maturity that I find that name very funny (Kuntzman, not Finigan).

I have published two notes on Facebook today, one "On the Ordination of Women to the Catholic Priesthood;" the other "On the Nature of Truth." They have received, so far, 64 and 5 comments respectively. I am finding it is rather wearing me down.

I almost despair of the ignorance Catholics have of their own religion.

Meme stolen from Esther, who stole it from Danni

1. If you’re reading my blog, I want to know 35 things about you. I don’t care if we never talk, or if we already know everything about each other. Short and sweet is fine.

2. Comment here with your answers and repost the questionnaire on your own blog, if you so desire.

01) Are you currently in a serious relationship:
No.

02) What was your dream growing up:
...

03) What talent do you wish you had:
The ability not to be shy around new people.

04) If I bought you a drink what would it be:
Ginger beer.

05) Favourite vegetable:
Parsnips.

06) What was the last book you read:
I am reading the Iliad and I am also reading The Cruise of the Nona to sanabituranima.

07) What zodiac sign are you:
Sagittarius.

08) Any Tattoos and/or Piercings? Explain where:
No.

10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride:
Perhaps.

11) What is your favourite sport:
Tennis, probably.

12) Do you have a Pessimistic or Optimistic attitude:
I don’t know.

13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me:
Keep calm and carry on (or try to).

14) Worst thing to ever happen to you:] OPTIONAL — substitute “best” or “weirdest,” if you prefer
The most unpleasant, perhaps not the worst, has been the persecution that I have had to endure on account of my Catholicism.

15) Tell me one weird fact about you:
I have attempted to invent languages.

16) Do you have any pets:
No.

17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly:
I would let you in.

18) What was your first impression of me:
This person is nice.

19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary:
Scary.

20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be:
I don't know. I think I am quite handsome.

21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience:
Crime partner, I fear.

22) What colour eyes do you have:
Brown.

23) Ever been arrested:
No.

24) Bottle or can soda:
Whichever.

25) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it:
I'm not sure.

26) What’s your favourite place to hang out at:
I fear it is the Ersatz Substitute for Real Life.

27) Do you believe in ghosts:
Yes.

28) Favourite thing to do in your spare time:
Read.

29) Do you swear a lot:
No.

30) Biggest pet peeve:
Injustice.

31) In one word, how would you describe yourself:
Melancholy.

32) Do you believe/appreciate romance:
Yes.

33) Favourite and least favourite food:
Favourite: Spaghetti bolognese.
Least favourite: aubergines.

34) Do you believe in God/a higher power/whatever you want to call it:
I think the answer is very obvious from this blog, but just in case anyone is being really obtuse:

I believe in God.

35) Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you:

Done.

Instead of a friend become not an enemy to thy neighbor. A sweet word multiplieth friends, and appeaseth enemies, and a gracious tongue in a good man aboundeth. Be in peace with many, but let one of a thousand be thy consellor. If thou wouldst get a friend, try him before thou takest him, and do not credit him easily. For there is a friend for his own occasion, and he will not abide in the day of thy trouble. And there is a friend that turneth to enmity: and there is a friend that will disclose hatred and strife and reproaches; and there is a friend a companion at the table, and he will not abide in the day of distress. A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found him, hath found a treasure. Nothing can be compared to a faithful friend, and no weight of gold and silver is able to countervail the goodness of his fidelity. A faithful friend is the medicine of life and immortality: and they that fear the Lord, shall find Him. He that feareth God, shall likewise have good friendship: because according to him shall his friend be (Ecclesiasticus 6:1–17).

Frustration is a terrible thing, but it is one of the crosses we have to carry through this wicked world.

Some Thoughts on the Middle Ages

My appointment this morning was remarkably short; I doubt whether it lasted even five minutes. It was scheduled for 9.30, but it did not begin on time, though that did not matter as I was lost in thought while waiting. I then went to St James the Less & St Helena Church in Priory Street, where I meditated upon the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple for a quarter of an hour. I am now in the library; it took me some time to get this computer to load, and I am only allowed an hour on it. While I was waiting for it to work, I got the Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse off the shelf; I read "Of one that is so fair and bright," which is surely one of the most beautiful hymns ever written. It is one of those bilingual hymns like "In dulci jubilo," which prove that the imaginary medieval ignoramus was not as ignorant of Latin as our Protestant and secular historians are so fond of believing.

OF one that is so fair and bright,
Velud maris stella,
Brighter than the dayës light,
Parens et puella,
Ich crie to thee; thou see to me!
Levedy, pray thy Sone for me,
Tam pia,
That ich motë come to thee,
Maria.

Levedy, flowr of allë thing,
Rosa sine spina,
Thou berë Jesui, Hevenë-King,
Gratia divina.
Of allë thou berst the pris,
Levedy, quene of Parays
Electa.
Maidë mildë moder is
Effecta.

Of carë conseil thou art best,
Felix fecundata;
Of allë wery thou art rest,
Mater honorata.
Bisek Him with mildë mood
That for us allë shad His blood
In cruce
That we moten comen til Him
In luce.

Al this woreld war forlore
Eva peccatrice,
Til our Loverd was y-bore
De te genitrice.
With 'ave' it went away
Thuster night, and comth the day
Salutis;
The wellë springeth out of thee
Virtutis.

Wel He wot He is thy Sone
Ventre quem portasti;
He wil nought wernë thee thy bone,
Parvum quem lactasti.
So hende and so good He is,
He haveth brought us to blis
Superni,
That haves y-dit the foulë pit
Inferni.

Lux in Tenebris

We live in a world that does not understand,
That does not understand many things:
Such as Truth and Adventures and Friendship,
And there are no songs that it sings.

It says that it understands Money
And that Fools alone squander their gold,
As it clings to its moneybags tightly
Till it groweth with Avarice old.

It hates them that do not love it
And the evil and slime that it bears,
And who will not bow down before it
Or dress in the dross that it wears.

And they that fight against it
Must needs know sorrow sore;
For we know and the world knows
We are at war.

And we shall die in this battle,
And our corpses be soaked with blood,
And our bones and our hearts shall be broken,
And our women's eyes shall flood,

And we shall be tormented
By sorrow and anger and dread:
But we shall fight and conquer
Be we alive or dead.

For though the world should reave us
Of the last thread of life,
It is not for our selves' sake
That we endure this strife.

We desire not that men should remember
What happens to be our name;
For more than Truth and Justice' sake
We burn the eternal flame.

We hold that Torch in darkness
That does not understand
But hates the only beacon
That can bring it safe to land.

And so we cannot wonder
At the deepness of the Night
Of a world that loves the Darkness
And is blinded by the Light.

(12th July, 2010.)

Her Music (Belloc)

Oh! do not play me music any more,
Lest in us mortal, some not mortal spell
Should stir strange hopes, and leave a tale to tell
Of two belovéd whom holy music bore,
Through whispering night and doubt's uncertain seas,
To drift at length along a dawnless shore,
The last sad goal of human harmonies.
Look! do not play me music any more.

You are my music and my mistress both,
Why, then, let music play the master here?
Make silent melody, Melodie. I am loath
To find that music, large in my soul's ear,
Should stop my fancy, hold my heart in prize,
And make me dreamer more than dreams are wise.

Today my degree certificate arrived with the post. I intend to have it framed. After the not infrequently hard time I have had over the last several years, I am pleased. I hope it will be a reminder to me of what can be achieved through hard work and the endurance of hardship.

It is something of a consolation that this life is so short. But heaven is eternal.

I am reading Dr Johnson's poem, "The Vanity of Human Wishes."

A solitary man was walking along the beach as the waves on his right crashed against the shore. He was lost in thought. To his left, on a level above him, some ramblers were walking along footpaths between a links golf-course and the beach. He was a couple of miles, by his own estimation, from the last village on the coast and he was not sure how far it was to the next one. He did not have a map, nor even a bottle of water.
He sat down on a conveniently situated rock, and gazed soulfully toward the horizon. His mind turned to thoughts of the past. Lines of Tennyson's came into his head:

"Break! break! break!
On thy cold gray stones, O sea,
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."

He spoke the words to himself, quietly. "Break! break! break!..."
I cannot break, he thought. I wish I could.
The man was quite young, though he did not feel young: on the contrary, he felt incredibly old. Whether by the time he actually grew to be an old man, he would feel young, or seem to grow even older within himself, or whether yet he would remain then even as he was now, it was impossible to say. Those who really know him, and there were few who did, knew that he was older, much older, in his soul, than a mere reckoning of years would give away. And those few were for the most part of a mind in some aspect like to his own: for only to such as these did he feel able to impart the very essence of himself, which was himself. He knew that he was not alone in the world, though he knew well what solitude was. He knew the wilderness: he knew the desert. He knew the darkest places of the human mind. He knew the silence of the soul; he knew stillness; he knew the deep sorrow. His own soul was of a depth unknown to those who had only a superficial knowledge of him; and these were the many. Not only wise beyond his years, there was something that lay hid within him, something for which he himself did not yet have a name.

James Hannam's book is extremely informative in some respects, but when he calls St Robert Bellarmine (neglecting to call him Saint) a "religious fundamentalist," I do tend to find I am driving somewhat up the wall.

The more you read of those expeditions - as of William's two years later - the more difficult you will find it to estimate what measure of support the invaders had. What may be called the legend - the sort of rodomontade you get in the clear, if obvious, rhetoric of Macaulay - may be left aside with contempt. It is not historical, and it is not intended to be historical; it is pamphleteering for a prepared audience; a flattery of ignorant complacency: written not to examine or to inform, but to sell. The picture of a whole England, ardently opposed to James, desiring nothing more than his dethronement, is as false as would be to-day a picture of an England ardently desiring prohibition. But there were elements present which made it worth while to risk the throw; and (as we know), with the aid of a group of very wealthy men, and of plenty of hypocrisy and foreign subvention, the second invasion, the Dutch invasion, succeeded.
I think the real reason we find it difficult to-day to estimate the forces of that society, is that we have a false way of thinking in terms of exact measurement; a habit we have borrowed from the more advanced physical science of our time, but not one applicable to political factors. We think in terms of majorities, and ask ourselves how many men were on one side and how many men on the other.
Now things did not stand like that at all in 1686, or in 1688, and they hardly ever so stand in any national crisis. The bulk of men will accept an event, unless it be quite outrageously opposed to their daily habits. Furhter, the bulk of men are moved by tradition and custom and nearly always incline, very vaguely, to a continuance of what they have known. And at the same time, paradoxically, all men have an appetite for something now and are more or less adventurous for a change. In the main issue of the Revolution of 1688, we can be pretty clear on two large majorities, not dividing men into groups, but dividing the mind of each man within himself.
There was a very large majority in general sympathetic with the Protestant culture which had gradually triumphed, since the pivot-date of the Gunpowder Plot. What proportion of this was ardent, and in what degree, no one can establish; but you may safely say that throughout England as a whole, there was, by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, not more than about one-seventh definitely Catholic in confession and open adherence, and hardly as manay again indifferent, or slightly sympathetic with that one-seventh. But, on the other hand, the number of people who believed that James II. was attempting the impossible task of upsetting what had become the national religion, cannot have been large. It is true that popular illusion is capable of anything - witness "the Russians in England" during the War. But I see no sign of that absurd accusation against James having taken place in the masses. The number who objected to his policy of toleration and to his proposal that Catholic should have the same rights as their fellow-subjects was large; but it certainly was not, and could not have been, an enthusiastic majority. On the other hand, the number who objected to the idea of their national king belonging to what was to them an alien religion, was certainly very large indeed: nearly three-quarters of England.
But then you get another cross category: the number who desired to see the Stuart dynasty extinguished was insignificant. Charles II. had been immensely popular and deservedly so, and James, the reigning king, represented legitimacy. Had not the two princesses remained to carry on the idea of the royal house - the symbol of it at least - I think one can safely say that the nation would have tolerated a change; as for those who desired the reign of William, who were attached to his character and who respected, let alone loved him as a leader, there were none. Monmouth, if he had the money, if the moment of his attack had come after the birth of the Prince of Wales, if he had intrigued at length and with skill to get the full support of the small wealthy group which was conspiring against the King, would have had a better chance of success than William.

Belloc, Hilaire, The Cruise of the "Nona", Constable & Co., Ltd., 1955, pp. 189-90 (first pub. 1925)

University in 1269

Studying at a university during the Middle Ages was not for the faint-hearted. The congregation of so many young men in a single town without parental authority was a recipe for trouble. Drunkenness, violence and prostitution were facts of life, with the students acting as both the victims and the instigators. The records show frequent complaints about riotous students from the put-upon townsfolk. In 1269, we hear that

a frequent and continual complaint has gone the rounds that there are in Paris some students and scholars...who under the pretence of leading the scholarly life, more often perpetrate unlawful and criminal acts relying on their weapons, by day and night, to atrociously wound or kill many persons, rape women, oppress virgins, break into inns, also repeatedly commit robberies and other enormities hateful to God.[2]

[2]Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 78

Hannam, James, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, Icon Books Ltd, 2009, p. 154.

I apologize for not regaling you with verbiage yesterday; the connection was Turned Off before I had expected.

For those of you following the old calendar, today is the Feast of the Visitation. Three years ago on this day I wrote a poem entitled "To the Mother of God," which I reproduce here:

TO THE MOTHER OF GOD

O Mary, deign to look on me with pity,
A weak and troubled sinner gone astray,
Help me to reach your Son's celestial city
Where His Light shines in endless tireless day.

Pray for me, Tower of Ivory,
Pray for me, House of Gold,
Pray for me, Cause of All Our Joy,
And lead me to joys untold.

I see you, Mary, with your Infant Son,
The God whom all my sins have crucified;
I shudder at the evil I have done,
And know that there is nowhere I can hide.

Pray to your Son for me, Morning Star,
Pray for me, Mystic Rose,
Pray for me, though I have wandered far
From the grace your Son bestows.

Mary, the child you carried in your womb
Is God, and came to expiate our crime;
Your Baby Boy, who overcame the tomb
Will come to judge me at the end of time.

Pray for me, Holy Mother of God,
O Virgin most renowned;
Help us to reach your Son's abode
And as His Saints be crowned.

(Monday,2nd July,2007.)