A good Advent

On the day before the day before Christmas, I find myself feeling unusually grateful to God. I felt stirrings of a new life inside me this Advent.

Yesterday, I had a Proustian moment. an old Simon and Garfunkel song came up on the store's speakers. I don't think it's a great song but I doubt I could be objective about it in any case. In any case, the second I heard it, a flood of old memories from childhood came back. I was very young when this song came out, I have no memories of it all from the year it was a minor hit. All my memories come from years later from two sorts of situations" 1) when it would come up as an "oldie" on AM radio and 2) when I would be allowed to go off to play by myself while my mother was visiting some friend of hers and I would discover that this friend of my mother's children owned a copy of Bookends.

All of which, it occurs to me now, makes me something of a mirror image of Proust for he would have regarded being sent from his mother's presence as the deepest misery. Also unlike Proust, I am perfectly happy with these memories as memories and have no desire to regain, or should that be "repossess", them.

In any case, I would pull that record out of its sleeve and play it again and again. I never bought my own copy. I don't know quite why. It may be that I did the same with other LPs that had been big hits in my childhood days and almost inevitably found the experience underwhelming. I particularly remember buying a couple of Beatles albums, lsitening to them for a week or so and never listening to them.

The particular song I heard yesterday was Fakin' It. Listening to it now, it strikes me that there are really only two moments in the tune. One is the opening couplet

When she goes, she’s gone
If she stays, she stays here

I was talking to a guy the other day about a local fiddle player and he referred to her as, "The redhead who haunts all our dreams." And that's what is at work here, the gypsy girl we all imagine.

The other part is the spoken word section in the middle of the song where a man walks into a shop and is greeted by the salesgirl. This is meant to make us realize that the relationship with girl at the beginning is only a fantasy.




It really was a more innocent time.

By the way, Paul Simon learned how to write lyrics in English class. I don't know if TS Eliot would appreciate it but his influence shows up all over Simon's lyrics; you get that same sense of someone craving redemption on the one hand but mercilessly excising almost every pathway to it because they seem too easy, too sentimental.

A final thought until after Christmas, another of his songs from that era was called "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her". Simon insisted that the song wasn't about an imaginary girl named Emily but about belief. Looking for the quote this morning, I see in Wikipedia, he also said that the song "Overs" is about loss of belief. That's interesting because Simon apparently conceives of "belief" in two ways:

1. Craving but not finding belief is an imagined relationship with a dream girl; for all Simon's insistence that "Emily" isn't even an imagined girl you just know her last name is Dickinson.
2. Losing belief is the loss of a relationship with a woman.

Look at those two poles, and you can see that it is a way of living that is doomed to failure. (And you can also see that it is an approach to life that haunted a lot of people in that era.) The thing is, there is something backwards in that. If you really want faith in God, you have to imagine yourself as a woman who is open and receptive to the new life he can put in you.

When he wrote "Bridge Over Troubled Water", Simon conceived of it as his message to a particular woman and quite clearly not as a religious song. He failed utterly in that as the vast majority of people who love it, do so because it is a religious song to them. As I've said here before, though, he makes promises to the woman that only God could make. The song works if you imagine the promises are offered to you, to imagine otherwise is blasphemous.

Last word to Christina Rossetti, see you in early January.

The Los Angeles TImes wants you to hate a twenty-four-year-old graphic designer

I know, you've never even heard of her so why would you hate her? Here's why:

Trinkel De La Paz, 24, loves this holiday's deep discounts because they're enabling her to be a more generous Santa.

To herself, that is.

The Silver Lake graphic designer bought herself an iPad mini and some clothes discounted on Cyber Monday, and she's not done. De La Paz said she feels free to splurge on herself because she has extra money from a recently landed job, a new apartment waiting to be spruced up and only one present to buy for her family's Secret Santa exchange.

"These prices are only happening this time of year," she said. "I might as well stock up now."

Actually, if you stop and think about it, her behaviour is quite rational and entirely defensible. You're buying stuff for others and you see a bargain on something you want. There is nothing wrong with that. Trinkle knows that and she talked to a reporter about it in what probably felt to her like a normal conversation. And then that same reporter went and put this quote up like this in a context that she knew would inspire anger to be directed at Trinkle.

Remember that the next time some nice reporter starts asking you questions in a friendly tone. You have no idea how te story is going to be framed and reporters think nothing at all of acting friendly while they position you for a knife in the back.

Okay, but why go to the trouble to set poor Trinkle up? So they can bury the lead!

Consumer's impulse purchases to buy something for themselves while out shopping for gifts is actually a very good indicator of the state of the economy.

"The willingness of the shopper to push her budget beyond what she had originally planned is a key influencer for holiday growth," NPD Group analyst Marshal Cohen said in a blog post. "In fact, the self-gifting indicator has made the difference between growth and decline."

Cohen reasons that each year, the number of gifts Americans expect to give remains roughly the same, making their tendency to buy presents for themselves a more accurate gauge of their economic circumstances. And during the recession, when spending declined, "one of the leading factors that saved retailers was an increase in self-gifting" by consumers taking advantage of big holiday bargains, Cohen said.

And now that you know that, there is a pretty obvious question: How are we doing? If you read 11 paragraphs into this article you get the answer:

But this year, the behavior is on the decline, as shoppers already accustomed to making do with less money shrink from the head winds of continued economic uncertainty.

Far be it from me to suggest that some poor 24 year old got held up to mockery in the press just to protect some politician who is having a rough time right now.

What are they selling?

If you live on a bus route that feeds a university campus you get to see a lot of ads about condoms:

These ads don't change anybody's minds about anything. They never have and this is well-established. Anti-smoking ads did nothing to reduce the number of smokers, pro-fitness ads do not increase the number of people who exercise, anti-racism ads don't reduce hatred and so forth. Perhaps most notoriously, the very same people who promote rape awareness ads insist that there is a ever worsening rape culture on university campuses which, if true, means their own campaigns have been a failure.

Why run the ads then?

Before I answer that, let's talk about Porsche. Or the Toronto Maple Leafs. What those two vendors have in common is that they have no trouble at all selling their product. Porsche and the Leafs always sell out. So why advertize?

The answer is that Porsche advertisements are not aimed at people who want a car but don't know which kind. They are aimed at people who already want or already have a Porsche. The ads exist to validate the desires that people already have. Thousands, possibly millions, of young men who have or want a Porsche use the ads to convince themselves that they are right to keep on wanting a Porsche.

Condoms, however, are more like the Leafs: they suck. Perhaps a bad word choice but crude as this is, the problem is that nobody, but nobody likes condoms. Don't take my word for it, trust Bill Gates:

The one major drawback to more universal use of male condoms is the lack of perceived incentive for consistent use. The primary drawback from the male perspective is that condoms decrease pleasure as compared to no condom, creating a trade-off that many men find unacceptable, particularly given that the decisions about use must be made just prior to intercourse. Is it possible to develop a product without this stigma, or better, one that is felt to enhance pleasure?

By the way, notice who gets left out here? That's right, women!  But women have no problem with condoms, you say. Actually, the best research shows that they dislike the things at least as much as men do. (Notice that the ad is actually aimed at women. The people behind these campaigns may not admit certain facts but they do know about them.)

Anyway, to get back to the central thread, you'll notice from the text I cited above that the marketing problem for condoms is the same as it is for Porsches or the Leafs: it's easy to get people to desire these things; it isn't so easy to get them to act on those desires. Lots of men want Porsches but that is one hell of a lot of money for what is really just a toy. The Leafs, they always, but always, manage to lose in the end; they're so bad they should move to Cleveland. And everybody approves of condoms to reduce the risk of disease but ... well, that's another problem.

Did you notice that they can't quite bring themselves to say it? That entire paragraph is full of evasions: "the lack of perceived incentive ... from the male perspective is that condoms decrease pleasure ... develop a product without this stigma". They won't come out and say what everyone who has ever used one of these things knows to be true: that they do reduce pleasure.

The point is to stiffen your resolve. It's an ad to make you feel good about yourself so you will keep using condoms even though condoms are really inconvenient and reduce pleasure.

So how do you make a boring and anti-romantic product seem sexy?

You don't have to take a risk to be risqué.

"Risqué" to be sure means a pretty small risk but having the ability to judge a crowd well enough to tell a risqué joke and get away with it is something we admire.

They really mean, you shouldn't take certain specific risks when you have sex but that's kinda boring and, given that the ad is aimed at people who already agree in principle and already own a box of condoms but don't always actually open the box because ..., and risqué is something they might aspire to. The ad is designed to encourage them to see themselves as rebels who challenge social norms even though the social norms they are supposedly challenging stopped applying sometime in 1963. You're not a boring lover just because you insist on stopping the action to insist on a condom that is going to reduce your pleasure and your partners because, hey, you're risque!

What really bothers me about the ad is the assumption that sex can or should be risk free but that's a whole other kettle of fish ...

Taking Francis seriously (pargraphs 11-13): Whose renewal?

I was talking to two liberal I know Catholics about Envangelii Gaudium and both surprised me. The first, an old-schood "new lefty" from the 1960s did so by saying he thought it a very badly written and poorly thought out piece of work.

Well, he's right. I was taken aback at first because I had found lots to like in it myself. But now that I read it more carefully, I can see his point. As an example of what he and I mean, consider the following quotes from paragraphs #10 and #11.

1. When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization, she is simply pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfillment.
2. Consequently, an evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral!
3. A renewal of preaching can offer believers, as well as the lukewarm and the non-practising, new joy in the faith and fruitfulness in the work of evangelization.

If this was a term paper submitted by an undergraduate, I'd mark it F. In the margin beside these paragraphs, I'd write, "You don't really believe what you have written here." Back in the days before I left the academic world and had to mark undergraduate papers, I'd write that a lot.

To grasp the problem compare these phrases from quotes 1 and 3.

• "... the source of authentic personal fulfillment."
• "A renewal of preaching can offer believers ...new joy in the faith"

If evangelizing is THE source of authentic personal fulfillment then it WILL offer believers new joy in the faith.

Part of the problem, as I indicated in an earlier post, is that Francis is making a psychological rather than a moral or a factual argument. But there is a more fundamental issue and that is that he doesn't really believe it himself.

But maybe that is okay. He's a pastoral pope not a groundbreaker like John Paul or a deep and perceptive thinker like Benedict. His task may be to be a bit of a cheerleader who exhorts us to do better while he does his real job of fixing church governance away from the spotlight, a task suited to a tough man like him. The church is full of parish priests who are mediocre preachers but really good administrators who can pay down the debts and clean out the deadwood and thank God for them; perhaps we need a pope who can do what they do for individual parishes for the whole church.

Which brings me to my second liberal Catholic friend, a gay man who hopes the church will one day stop condemning homosexual acts. We were talking about just this aspect and he said he thinks the liberalizing Francis is getting credit for is really the work of John Paul and Benedict.

For me, that was one of those moments when we suddenly realize we've missed something really important. Because my friend is right. Read John Paul and Benedict correctly and you can see a path for renewing not so much the church as the faith. Liberal Catholics see nothing but roadblocks because they are rigidly committed to only one kind of renewal but there is another, and better path, open to those who are willing to see it.

Is Francis one of these? Well, in a sense it doesn't matter because, quite frankly, he doesn't have the intellectual or the moral stature to do anything else but follow what they have set out. He can do the job really well, really badly or just muddle through doing the best he can but nothing he does is going to fundamentally alter the course his predecessors have set.

As we will see next week, he makes a real muddle of "new evangelization". Such a muddle, in fact, that this particular exhortation is, for all intents and purposes, stillborn. But, so what? We can survive this and, at the very least, accomplishing little means we can be certain of accomplishing little harm; boldly launching the church in a new direction doesn't necessarily guarantee that direction will be a good way to go.

Cardinal Burke had to go

Regular readers will know that I am no cheerleader for Pope Francis but I have to say he was absolutely right about this one. Cardinal Burke's remarks to the effect that we cannot talk enough about abortion was simple defiance or, even worse, he was trying to deter others by giving them an excuse to ignore the Pope's message. Given what he said, he had to be demoted and he was.

I mention this also to call attention to an earlier post of mine "What is Pope Francis up to?" I think what I said there has now been thoroughly vindicated. Francis is a tough man, not the humble man he plays on TV, and he means to rein in those Catholics, whom I call Humanae Vitae Catholics, who want to define being Catholic in terms of our adherence to a series of moral rules regarding sexuality. I know, abortion is not an issue of sexuality but talk to any hard-core Humanae vitae Catholic and they'll tell you that, in their view, the real basis of the abortion debate is contraception.

Pope Francis has sent what ought to be a clear message and that message is lay off of this stuff; that the primary message of the church is God's mercy and forgiveness not refighting the sexual revolution. He has now reinforced that message by demoting Cardinal Burke. Local stations please copy.

And I'd add this: today, on his 77th birthday, we should thank God for Pope Francis and his doing this.

(The writing is also on the wall for fans of the Traditional Latin Mass: Don't tie your love of the old ritual to hard-line sexual morality.)

Taking Francis seriously, paragraph 10: Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.

As Christmas approaches, pageviews drop. It happened last year. It's happening again. That said, I suspect the subject matter I've taken up with this series is probably driving people away. Oh well.

When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization, she is simply pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfillment.

I'll respond to that with quotes from two friends of mine, neither of whom are famous.

1. The first quote is from a therapist who now works with the military. Back when we were in university, he once said, "Self-help books can do people good but only if they read them very quickly." What Tom meant by that was that these books consist of exhortations that are good at motivating some people provided they don't look into the philosophical foundations they are built on. Analogy: telling a stage-four cancer patient to cheer up just might work provided they don't ask you to provide reasons why they should be cheerful.

For example, we could paraphrase the above quote from Francis by saying:

Get out there and evangelize and you'll find personal fulfillment!

Well, maybe. It depends what you mean by "evangelize". You could, for example, learn to speak Arabic, fly to Saudi Arabia, set up on a street corner and start to proclaim the gospel. Most likely scenario is that an angry mob would form and assault you on the spot. If your lucky, you'll survive and an appeal to Saudi authorities would cause them to waive the death penalty in your case and your badly damaged body will be flown back home.  You probably wouldn't survive.

You may think I'm being facetious, but Saint Dominic wanted to do the equivalent of that. Fortunately, for everyone, he was denied permission by his superiors and went on to found the Order of Preachers.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. What I do know is that the one of two huge questions as we read through this is how Francis defines "evangelization". Any pope could get away with saying, "Evangelize it's your duty", but a pope who writes a long letter asking us to do so also, by this very action, puts the onus on himself to come up with a very good definition of evangelization and very good reasons why we should do it.

For now, he quotes the Fifth General Conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops:

“Life grows by being given away, and it weakens in isolation and comfort. Indeed, those who enjoy life most are those who leave security on the shore and become excited by the mission of communicating life to others”

That strikes me as the sort of thing you find in a typical self-help book or even on an inspirational poster. You could accept it as true in a fuzzy sort of way but it would not stand a lot of scrutiny.

2. Which brings me to the second quote. My friend John, an economist, once said to me, "One of the things you learn when you study behavioural economics is that people who go after something in a  single-minded way succeed more often than people who are merely gifted; the ugly, five-foot nothing bald guy who makes seducing a whole lot of women the centre of his life will usually do better than the tall, good-looking guy." His point was that when the rest of us sometimes sit around and bemoan the fact that we didn't have as much sex, money, fame or adventure in our lives we are forgetting that we didn't really want these things in the first place.

To stick with the guy who wishes he could have more sex partners, we could think about this in two ways. One possibility is that something, usually the fear of rejection, held us back from actually pursuing these things. Another possibility is that we didn't pursue sex because, whether we admitted it to ourselves or not, we actually value other things more.

Thomas Cardinal Collins, as quoted by my Bishop, likes to say,

Don’t show me your mission statement. Show me your budget, and I will know what your mission is.

And that's a good way to think about it. We often say we value certain things but our real mission is better revealed by how we spend our money. If "money" seems to dirty for you, it also works with the way you spend you time and energy*: you say you love your mother but how often do you visit her? (Values", by the way, is an absolutely useless concept in morality; that's why we like it so much.)

And here is the rub: You probably don't love your mother; or, if this makes it easier to swallow this bitter pill, you don't love her as much as you think you should. I know, what a scandalous thing to say. But, be honest, you know what she did for you and you know how much you mean to her but the truth is that you've been through a lot with your mother and there are lots of things you'd rather be doing than visiting her. Evangelization is something of a similar problem. No mother, no you; no evangelization, no church. And the point is not that there are other things we'd rather do but that month after month, year after year, we keep choosing to do other things.

In part one, I suggested that Francis has set himself a logical hurdle to get over. In this second part, I suggest that he has also set himself an inspirational hurdle that makes that logical hurdle look tiny by comparison. I don't mean to be uncharitable when I say that logical hurdles are not this pope's strong point. He follows two exceptionally intelligent popes. That said, I don't think he is up to the logical challenge and that means that everything, the entire success of his papacy, depends on his ability to inspire.

And, sorry to be a downer, I think he is going to fail. Actually, it's worse than that, I think he has already failed. I think he has succeeded in becoming a celebrity but we didn't need a celebrity. We needed someone who was going to inspire people in the church and not someone the media would love. We should all pray I'm wrong pope but, even if I am right, it won't be so bad. One of the consequences of having a really great pope is that we tend to focus too much attention and hope on the pope when our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.


* OTOH, the way you spend your money will almost certainly match the way you spend the way you spend your time and energy, which is the Cardinal's point.

Taking Francis seriously, paragraph #9: The dangers of sentimentality

I'm going to quote this one in full. Pope Francis makes a claim and then quotes Saint Paul to back up that claim. The question I want to ask is, "Does Paul actually backs up Francis here?"

Goodness always tends to spread. Every authentic experience of truth and goodness seeks by its very nature to grow within us, and any person who has experienced a profound liberation becomes more sensitive to the needs of others. As it expands, goodness takes root and develops. If we wish to lead a dignified and fulfilling life, we have to reach out to others and seek their good. In this regard, several sayings of Saint Paul will not surprise us: “The love of Christ urges us on” (2 Cor 5:14); “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16). 

If we want to help Francis—and why not?—we should say that "every authentic experience of truth and goodness"and that any experience of "profound liberation" is really an experience of Christ's love for us. And that, no doubt, is what he does mean.

On the other hand, it is easy to see, when we read stuff like this, why Francis is so consistently "misunderstood" by the press. I put "misunderstood" in scare quotes here not because I think that the press actually does understand him. My concern is that if you are Francis and the press keeps misunderstanding you, there is point where you should ask yourself whether it might not be a good idea to start expressing yourself more carefully.

And that should worry us because the press is in the business of selling us cheap sentiment and Popes should not be. So, I ask myself why any sane person with even a modicum of life experience should accept the claim that "Goodness always tend to spread"? Really?

Here is a quote from Paul that really shook me the first time I read it:

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church, of which I became a minister according to the divine office which was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now made manifest to his saints. (Colossians 1: 24)

It never shocked me to read that in Paul. I must have always let it slide by. But it really shook me when someone took it and turned it into a prayer. This is the Psalm prayer that follows  Psalm 116 (verses 10-19) in Evening prayer 1 from last Saturday night (Week III of the Psalter).

Father, precious in your sight is the death of the saints, but precious above all is the love with which Christ suffered to redeem us. In this life we fill up in our own flesh what is still lacking in the sufferings of Christ; accept this as our sacrifice of praise, and we shall even now taste the joy of the new Jerusalem.

To fill up or complete what is still lacking in the sufferings of Christ???? However we explain that to ourselves, we shouldn't try to explain it away.

Here is how the excepted section from Psalm 116 that precedes that prayer begins:

I trusted, even when I said:
"I am sorely afflicted,"
and when I said in my alarm:
"No man can be trusted."

There is a lot of ocean between that and "Goodness always tends to spread."

I don't where to go from here—other than to keep reading.