Essays in Idleness

One strives for a Christian view of words that start with V, such as Vampirism; or, Violence; or, Vulgarity. And Visions, too, for sometimes folk have bad ones. To say nothing of, Valls, or rather, Walls, for I think that takes a double V. Or, Misogyny, in which we have two Vs, but both are in-Verted.

To my Catholic mind, each of these things is good for something or someone or in some situation: I don’t want to go all negative, here.

Vampirism, for instance, has worked out well for mosquitoes, fleas, bedbugs and the like; for leeches and many other small haematophagous creatures — such as the tiny blood-sucking finches of the Galapagos, the rasping lamprey eels of the Great Lakes, the torpedo snails of the eastern Pacific. And of course, “in your dreams,” the discreet Desmodontinae, or vampire bats.

Omnivores like us tend to sneer at such over-specialized diners, but note that, unlike us, they hardly kill anything. They mean only to tax, the way the government does, while spreading their physical (or moral) infections here and there. Surely every liberal or progressive must identify, in his heart, with the vampirists in nature.

And it is after all a question of degree. The larger creatures can easily bear the loss of blood, and by taxation, it is only the smaller businesses that are killed, like the smaller fishes by the lampreys in Lake Ontario. The bigger fish have, as it were, skilled accountants. People think the lampreys should take more blood from the bigger fish, so they can die, too. (This is the first principle of socialism.) But again, the lampreys make their own decisions.

Misogyny gives us another example. Among the ways I once found, to get myself out of further media appearances, was to say, of this apparent vice, “I think there are societies in which there is far too much misogyny. A number of Muslim societies come to mind. But we might have societies, such as in the West today, in which there is too little.”

I’d thought it an innocent remark, equivalent to saying, “I’m not against taxes, but I think some are too high.”

I would have said the same about the reverse misandry, of course; and rather grandly and generally for my own democratic misanthropy, of which I think there is too little everywhere. I think all races, classes, ages, “genders,” and what have you, could benefit from ridicule. It depends where one begins, I suppose, whether something will sound politically correct, or just the opposite; though one has said exactly the same thing. I think this is the same for all the V words, single or doubled, and upright or inverted.

For Violence and Visions and, better, Visionary Violence, I could perhaps make an argument, but limited to extreme cases. One is a “force multiplier” on the other. That is to say, if one scores 7 in 10 on an argument for violence, and another 7 in 10 for the quality of the vision, by addition we get 14 out of 20, which is 70 percent. But if we multiply one by the other we get only 49 percent. That tells me 7 out of 10 on both the What and the Why isn’t quite good enough for a “regime change.” Though close.

These “force multipliers” of mine are like that: they tend to sink a cause. Note that a 10 for “let’s have some violence,” but only a 1 for the, “and here’s why,” yields a 10 percent “go for it,” not a 55 as in the usual calculation. At least, in my policy universe.

But let us now consider Vulgarity, in politics and public life. (It is harder to be vulgar in private; one needs an audience.) I wrote about this over the weekend, but decided no one should read it. Hence the empty space, where there might have been an exceptionally long and pointless essay on Saturday, weighed down by too many examples. Moreover, my fine philosophical distinctions between the vulgar, the coarse, the crass, the rude, the crude, the impudent, the indecent, and the merely “common” — all examples taken from Donald J. Trump — struck me as sophistical, in review.

I tend to think Vulgarity — examples of which gentle reader might supply — is something like Misogyny. That is to say, something that should be used sparingly; but none would be too little. It follows, I should think, that when one complains about too much vulgarity, one isn’t necessarily condemning vulgarity tout court. There are moments when it might be “appropriate,” as we say today, when we try to avoid terms such as “good” and “evil.” For one must reply to an argument using the same vocabulary.

That, anyway, was the conclusion of this meandering, invisible essay, which I present today, reassembled as a Pure Thought. It was to defend vulgarity, but only with the superaddition of wit; to prefer a kind of “directness” (not a V word, I admit) in which the realities of flesh and blood are frankly evoked or implied, but daintily treated in flushing conceits — not dumped into the street down the vvalls from a high bedchamber. And without the prim, traditional warning, “Gardez l’eau!”

Thus I will not condemn a man for being sometimes vulgar. Rather, my objection is, when he lacks or loses the capacity to be anything else.

So many years have passed since my last good argument over Hannah Arendt, I’ve forgotten which side I was on. Her pregnant phrase, “the banality of evil,” from her book on the Eichmann trial (published 1962), was usually under attack from the “intellectuals.” So I probably defended it. I even read the book, as I recall, for Arendt’s characterization of the SS-Obersturmbannführer, who had organized logistics for Nazi death camps. The Mossad kidnapped him from Argentina, to put him on public trial at Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion apparently thought Israel would benefit from this propaganda stunt, at a time when people were beginning to forget why the country existed. (Perhaps we forget, that David Ben-Gurion was a politician.)

According to Arendt, Eichmann cut an unimpressive figure on the stand. The audience was looking for a bug-eyed, psychopathic monster. Instead this fellow was middle class. He wasn’t terribly smart, either, and his vain exaggeration of his rank, apart from sabotaging his own defence, made him seem the smaller. His offer of a moral argument (that he had always followed Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which simple as it is he could not understand), was lamer still. His conversation was a clutter of semi-military jargon, damp euphemisms, and clichés. He could not construct a competent sentence in any language.

The truth was he had been following orders, since a young man — when he flunked out even of vocational school. But with family connexions, he still found a job; and was a loyal employee. He had always been a joiner. The YMCA, the Wandervogels, the Freemasons, the Nazi Party — whatever. He wanted to belong, and always tried to fit in.

He had been shown to half a dozen psychologists, in preparation for his “show trial.” None of the shrinks could find the slightest evidence of mental illness.

The Nazis were bores, and in Adolf Eichmann the Israelis had caught themselves a typical Nazi. The publicity would have been more favourable to them, had they somehow found an eccentric one.

Eichmann could tell them about the day his boss, Heydrich, sprang the proposed “Final Solution” on the Wannsee Conference, to senior civil servants. He “stunned” them with the ambitious plan to exterminate all the Jews in German-controlled realms. Except, they were not stunned. They reacted just as bureaucrats, to this initiative. No outrage, but no great enthusiasm, either; rather the professional upbeat of, “When do we start?”

Reinhard Heydrich himself, the “man with the iron heart,” the “darkest figure in the whole Nazi elite” — lacked visible fangs. He was a capable amateur violist, from an operatic family; he showed real organizational skills, from Kristallnacht forward. He dressed sharply. He was popular with the women. But to the men, he seemed only a company man, getting on with his departmental agenda: at the time, annihilating Jews. (There was jargon for this, including the term, euthanasia.)

The phrase, “I was only following orders” — or giving them, as the case might be — became famous from the post-war Nuremberg trials. It seemed so glib, in light of what the Nazis had done: the great mountain of bodies. It was assumed to conceal the most horrible secrets. But it was meant straightforwardly. That’s what they were all doing — following orders. And getting their paperwork in on time. It was glib.

The camp guards, too, had a job to do, and managed to make it routine. They might be feeding human beings down the chutes, into the ovens. But it was nothing personal. Sure, a few of them may have been sadists; but no more proportionally than in, say, the Canadian tax department.

Here we are considering the bureaucratic “mindset,” and while it may benefit from a Prussian pride in efficiency, it is common alike to Italy and Spain, to India and China, to Britain and Australia and all fifty United States. As well, to any large private enterprise: one has a job to do, and a head to keep down, and a nose assigned to whichever grindstone.

I think of these things when I consider the 80 percent of North Americans who favour “euthanasia” in the polls (see yesterday’s Idlepost). And the men and women who will do the killings, when instructed by their superiors in the organizational chain. They aren’t the “monsters” it would be convenient for the opponents of “mercy killing” to depict. They are dull people, of “average” intelligence (which is to say, pretty low), with a work ethic. I’m sure 80 percent of Germans agreed there was “a Jewish problem” when Hitler was at his apogee. (Though later: “We did not know what was happening.”)

And we, of course, have our own demographic “problem,” with the disabled and the aged — more of the people Hitler killed off, “for their own good,” and to free up their beleaguered guardians.

He, too, from what I have heard, was on the personal level, rather boring. No particular interests, talents, skills; a failed Sunday painter. A few obsessions, perhaps. It took considerable stagecraft to make him look big — much bigger than some troublesome Alpine peasant. But a patriot, determined to “make Germany great again”; and “a man of the people,” who could command obedience — according to his rank.

Evil is so banal. Only sanctity is interesting.

At Mass today, across the Archdiocese of Toronto, all homilies were suspended so that a statement could be read by our Cardinal Collins against the Ottawa government’s impending “euthanasia” legislation. This our Parliament was ordered to write and pass by Canada’s Supreme Court: a junto of nine who are a law unto themselves. The Parliamentary Committee discussing the matter, now dominated by the Liberal Party, has made recommendations such as forcing all doctors and other medical staff to participate in the killings; and arranging for children and the mentally ill to be terminated on the advice of one “care giver” or another. It is a monstrous, unambiguously evil measure they are contemplating — which, like abortion, targets the defenceless.

In reading of the Maoist revolution, years ago, my attention was riveted on the massacres. In villages across China, a quota of persons were to be exterminated, by way of establishing the absolute power of the new Communist dictatorship. The Reds did little of this work, however. They instead compelled the neighbours of accused petty landowners and the like, to do the actual murdering. This was not because the Reds were squeamish. It was to make sure every surviving citizen of China was morally and memorably implicated in what the Communists had done. It was a policy expressly designed to erase “conscience.”

This is what most strikes me about the impending measures: the power to compel doctors and nurses to perform the killings. It is to make conscience itself a career-ending choice; to implicate every single member of the medical profession in murder. Any one you visit might have blood on his hands.

Archbishop Collins, a good man so far as I can see, cannot be criticized for raising the temperature of the public “debate.” He has the guts to make statements when they need to be made; then speaks very softly. One may listen to him read the statement we heard in church today (here). It sounded more fiery when our own priest read it, so one might also consult the text (here). Links to the issue are easy enough to find; and Collins tells his audience how to write their Members of Parliament, “respectfully.” The governing Liberal MPs — all of whom were vetted for their pro-abortion views before the last election — will reply with form letters. If that.

Unless, by a miracle, many millions write in, and a few hundred thousand storm Parliament Hill, I cannot expect the government to change its satanic direction. For in my knowledge of this benighted country, it is only a small minority of Catholics, and others, who much care about the issue, at any given moment; and not all of those are opposed to “euthanasia.” (The replacement euphemism is “assisted dying,” truly worthy of Orwell.)

Emotion trumps thought among those who have witnessed the lonely suffering of the afflicted; and the idea of “mercy” has been so cheapened that they are able to confuse it with murder and suicide. (“Here, dear, press this button if you want a nurse, and this one if you feel like dying. I’ll tell all your visitors which is which.”)

Those who demand, instead of killings, attentive palliative care, also expect the Nanny State to provide it. They have been raised to look for a technical solution in any grim situation, and to react to all stimuli as pure consumers. Indeed, much unnecessary physical suffering is caused by very expensive medical technology which helps to prolong life, artificially. This also creates consumer demand for artificial means to shorten it.

One cannot argue with what is now the great majority of “the people,” to any immediate effect, because they no longer accept the sanctity of human life (including their own) — on which not only our retreating Christian religion, but all the laws of this country were premissed. You do not push ailing granny off a cliff, even if she is asking for it. The case does not change, morally, if you choose a more presentable way to kill her. In the grave new world of our “Culture of Death,” our “Dictatorship of Relativism,” appearances matter, and substance does not.

Less than a generation ago, there would have been a public outcry against what our courts and legislatures are attempting. What will they do in another generation?

That is clear enough. Taking care of the old, and enfeebled; the seriously ill, and disabled; the depressed, and hopeless; the demented, the rude, and the improvident; is something that will remain beyond the means of bureaucracy — especially as fellow-suffering Love, of the toughest least bankable kinds, is the principal requirement in each of these cases. You cannot buy Love, even at the price of an unimaginably large, unionized labour force.

Families, in the first instance, and in the second, institutions that inspire voluntary labour and gifts, are the means by which this “social problem” — that has been and always will be with us — can be assuaged. There never was an alternative. Only the mad, in the deepest sense, could propose and then insist upon “policies” that can never work, in which Man, through massive Kafkaesque public agencies, tries to overwrite both natural and divine commandment. The sane already know where that must end.

Canada’s Liberals and their allies, and their power-seeking colleagues in every other Western country, have formed the equivalent to an international coalition of the “progressively” mad, and madder, to advance this unholy cause. We will see where it will go, next. It makes its appeal to the mindless and glib, who now dominate every Western electorate, and make decisions of profound consequence on less than a minute’s thought. We have, in effect, electorates which demand to be lied to, about the most fundamental facts of life. Who don’t want to think about it (to paraphrase Housman), “because thinking is hard, and a minute is a long time.”

Nor can the few remaining Catholics and others, still animated by the “traditional” human decency, hope to disentangle or separate ourselves, in a time when centralized government is increasingly able to track every individual, and control his behaviour and fate by external means.

Eventually the burden of overwhelming cost will inspire our keepers to cut their expenses by eliminating all their more expensive “clients,” whether they request it or not. The latest proposed legislation will surely be found insufficiently “inclusive” in a few more years. As we see, the great rush of Liberalism is accelerating. It is that of the Gadarene swine.

We cannot stop this “trend” except by growing more faithful and courageous; by raising children with the knowledge and backbone to resist the Devil’s works. We can, at best, struggle to recreate families that will take care of their own, without poisoned government assistance, and persist in doing so — until the jackboots burst in, and the matter is out of our hands, and into God’s.

One wonders if watching the Republican nomination debates on TV is confessable. Well, not on television, but in jerking, flickery videos in one’s laptop. This may or may not compound the sin, by making it semi-interactive. (At least I don’t post tweets any more.)

Certainly one feels dirty after the experience. I may have mentioned this was less so during the Iowa debate, when Mr Trump for some reason did not turn up. The standard of civility rose several storeys. Now it has descended again, to somewhere in the parking vaults, as Trump’s rivals, such as “Little Marco,” desperately excavate to Trump’s level. And this in the old Foxtown movie theatre, restored to its full original glitz, in the Grand Circus district of “beautiful downtown Detroit.” (It was built on the eve of the great stockmarket crash in the late ’twenties.) What a stage for trumpery!

And I watched this, after earlier in the day watching the Mormon, Romney, telling us that in addition to his being a fraud and a con-man (true, true), should Trump be elected, “America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.” … Pulease, Mr Romney.

Perhaps I have previously imparted what I think, in my Biblical way, of politicians who use “American dream” rhetoric, or the equivalent jingo in every other popular-franchise country, without exceptionalism. Quite frankly, I find the standard of all post-modern epideixis absurdly low. As Aristotle would add, it’s because of the audience.

So why did I make myself part of it?

Well, gentle reader may be thinking: if that is the best you have to confess, go and do it. The priest in his box is getting lonely.

*

A Canadian friend (of USA origin) forwarded to me the speaking notes of a certain Morton Blackwell, invited up here to explain to a (“conservative”) conference how to win elections, from the grassroots up. It is full of useful suggestions. The American “conservative movement,” only now cracking up after winning then losing its hold on the “mind” of the Republican Party, had a good half-century run. Blackwell explains, to anyone who doubts it, the amount and nature of organized work it takes, or took, with unwilting pharaonic stamina through the decades, to get someone like Reagan elected. From my own cruelly limited knowledge of politics, it is all true, too true. Effete people (like me) think ourselves “above” all this mindbending, backbreaking work — going “door to door” through hyperspace as well as along the street — all to erect one limp windbreak against the Nanny State, and win one lousy Cold War.

But Blackwell is right: that’s what it takes. The millions of sweet young things who utter the cliché, “ideas have consequences,” and therefore think in their soft little heads that the ideas themselves should win — that they need only articulate them — are, shall we say, naïve.

Glancing through his notes (I think I’d seen them before), and admiring their contrast to the electoral methods proposed by the demon, Saul Alinsky, I nevertheless noticed a mistake. This was Blackwell’s assertion that the “technology” used in mass politics is “neutral.” For while he makes good points against yawning arrogance and strumming hubris — sins to which most are tempted — we have a fatal problem. The technology is not neutral. It actually favours the other side, because the other side is glibber — whether one is up against a Clinton, an Obama, or a Trump. (Or a junior Trudeau, as up here in the snows.)

As my countryman Marshall McLuhan once said, “ye medium is ye message,” and it is no coincidence the mass media are overwhelmingly airhead Left.

Our “ideas with consequences” — such as civic freedom and autonomy, voluntarism, subsidiarity, personal responsibility, “traditional values,” and ultimately the Love of God — cannot be readily communicated to a mass audience through mass media, because a mass is not a man.

Swiss democracy flourished because there were Swiss peasants living in high mountain valleys cut off from each other. American democracy worked in small, pioneering, frontier towns, &c. In which the townsfolk could remove a cad from office, with or without an election.

In both of these obvious cases, and in the guided aristocratic British form, “democracy” sort-of worked for a while after various good habits had been formed. In none of these places is it working now. And the cause of this is, mostly, “mass” communications. (Note the limiting adjective; I am hardly against “communication” per se. And anyone who doubts my wholesomeness should observe that I designed this Idleblog expressly to subvert any possibility of a mass audience.)

“All politics are local,” according to another cliché, but we are dealing now with a locality that is, if not global, extremely large; and in which the human atoms become, quite inevitably, statistics. You cannot preach moral nobility, or personal independence, to a statistic.

The people themselves must be previously infused with this spirit of liberty, and disposition to received wisdom, to hear the political call. So aligned, the preaching would be easy. A man in focused relation to a family, to his neighbours, and to God, has no trouble understanding that he doesn’t need “guvmint” to control his life. He does not require a libertarian ideology; he is simply a man with a chest. Or a woman, as may be: free of chimeras, and the delusions of crowds.

Trump is winning because millions of Evangelicals, novus Catholics, mainlining Protestants, and countless others learnt their “conservatism” from mass media. They think and act not as voters, but as masses. One cannot “lead” them for long, and those who think they can be led with fine principles should take a good look at Trump. (Then go to Confession and wash it off.)

Newman had this exactly right: the faith and “values” we treasure are communicated parent to child, person to person, heart to heart; and thus, slowly. Tree-roots, not grassroots, as it were. The very Enemy exerts hisself through the peer pressure of passing fashions. Cor ad cor loquitur — “heart speaks unto heart.” Or else, does not speak, but shrivels.

This is why I think we cannot win in the foreseeable future: there is no there there, in the “heart” of mass society. Against impossible odds, we must re-establish Christ. But He will help if that is our focus, and we are weak but He is strong.

Or let me put this in a profane way. In order to “sell” what is called a “conservative” agenda, we need a “market” predisposed to buy. And the only imaginable way to forge this, is by a route into the heart of each and every social unit or cell. We must appeal, thus, to the Man and not to men, in their scattering. Man to man, or one cell to another.

So far as we take this exercise onto the political stage, the best we can hope is to lose with more dignity, and to a more convincing exemplary effect: by appealing to that small minority of independent mind, who notice when the mocked soul has better manners, and some good arguments.

Oremus.

Attendees of the Holy Mass, in its “extraordinary” form, will have been reminded that today is the twentieth of Lent, which is to say, half way through. Anciently, it was half-celebrated, and the liturgy is full of miraculous healings, including the expulsion of devils. Salvation means “healing,” among its other associations; and in recovery, a whole new life. “Laetere Sunday,” the mid-Lent rejoicing, is almost here, and soon the sprinting to the empty tomb. Verily, if I am not mistaken (and how could I be, after checking with the Catholic Encyclopaedia?) signage from today’s Thursday Mass was transferred to the Sunday, centuries ago — including rose vestments, flowers on the altar, dalmatics on the deacons, and some organ music.

The life of Penance continues, but the joyful are reminded that the season is not a test of Will. The fast which we keep, or fail to keep, is not the equivalent of a New Year’s Resolution. That is because it is not all about moi. It is a common activity, and as for the individuals participating, it is continuous and “determinating” (a word from a kid), being all about Him.

A typical human resolution, such as one of mine to do something silly like stop smoking, lasts perhaps five hours. There are year-end monsters of Olympian fortitude who have been known to keep a vow until January 3rd. Hints of the Prussianization of Lent are to be seen on humourlessly Jansenist faces. One tries to be especially frivolous and jocular in Lent, if only to lighten them up. No one is actually encouraged to fail, but surely it is understood that the average faithful Christian falls off one rail or another in a repetitively comic way. And each little bounce reminds, that our beloved Saint Peter went zero-for-three with a rooster.

Which is the thing about Lenten observance. You don’t do it from Ash Wednesday to the next morning, and then give up. You fall, and you get up again. And then you fall again, and rise. Seven times down, and eight times up, according to a fine, thirteenth-century rabbi I was reading. (He’s a beaut; more on him later.)

It is rather like skating, as I recall from earlier in my continuing childhood. And somewhere along the way, you learn to laugh at yourself — the way Christ laughs at you, or Our Lady laughs — or your own mom and dad used to laugh, unless perhaps you had hurt yourself badly. But even then, they had to suppress a giggle, given what they’d just seen.

Now, I am thinking of some girl, a prize-winning figure skater I once saw in action. And of her father, who brought her up alone, after her mother died. And of the tears in his eyes when she won the honour — of joy, honest pride, and remembrance.

“I remember her at three, falling on her ass,” is what he said to me.

So, I should think, the angels in Heaven, when another Christian has, finally, got his act together.

For reasons I gave yesterday, it is often better to write before something happens, than after. For then we have the advantage that it hasn’t happened yet. We are free of a weight not yet imposed.

We are told by most, if not all of the pundits, that Mister Trump will sweep the Super Tuesday primaries today, to become the inevitable Republican nominee for “Potus” — the improved, abbreviated designation for the more dragging, “President Of The United States.” Well, maybe he won’t quite take Texas, where I gather my preferred Cruz still has a chance, though rather short of the winner-take-all trigger. So that Trump appears “poised” (strange term) to carry off jumbo cartloads of delegates and momentum to the Republican National Convention in July; with “coat-tails” long and swirly enough to trip many of the most useful congressional incumbents in Texas and the South. Kevin Brady, for instance, if de-nominated, will lose Texas the House Ways and Means chairmanship, for just one passing example. And this on the Feast of Saint David, which, notwithstanding Lent, I feel bound to take with a little whisky.

Young “first-time voters” — a category which overlaps almost entirely with “low information voters” — are expected to clinch the result. They, and other hormonally challenged (I won’t say which sex) brought Boy Trudeau to power up here, in our Dominion election last October. But of course, the USA was ahead of us with Obama.

Though with Obama, it was still possible to predict which foolish and mindlessly tyrannical, leftwing policies he was likely to try on. The same might be said for his (criminally indictable) replacement, Misses Clinton: that the degree of American self-destruction and recess can be approximately calculated. (So much for the first term, then doubled for a second.)

With Trump, no one knows. Once in power, he could do anything. His mind is made from moment to moment, depending on what he thinks the market will buy; and on his own crass, kindergarten rages.

Compare our own prime ministerial child, at sea except when discussing marijuana, but carefully controlled from the Liberal back rooms. One might hope they will be satisfied to load their pockets, while euthanizing only their competitors at the public trough.

Little Trudeau disturbs me for the incredible lightness of his being; Big Trump because he appears to be smart, as well as extremely wilful, and ruthlessly indifferent to consistency and fact. You can get rich in real estate that way; I notice everything else he touched in business concluded in smoke and ashes. And one may make a reasonable inference from this — while observing that USA is not some minor country.

I may be writing of the fate of one planet only — albeit the one on which I live, with no other currently accessible to me. And true, I will be dead soon enough; but I will leave children and friends. Rather more than to pundits, one turns to God, for advice in such situations.

According to the inhabitants of Seta (or Cette, in the old, disintegrating book I am reading) — a city on a hill about three leagues west of Montpellier — it is possible with the simpler wines of Catalonia and Roussillon, the excellent inexpensive local brandy, and plentiful springwater, to make “Port, Sherry, Clarets, Burgundy, Champaigne, Hock” and almost any other wine, to a very low standard. The town was bursting with enterprise. Barely two centuries ago, they were supplying all Europe (except England which had high customs duties) with inferior imitations of these beverages. Yes, except for England (and the cruel efficiency of her Revenue Cutters), free trade and capitalism were flourishing, and “the people” everywhere liked “cheap.”

Some things do not change, except in crude volume.

The town of Besièrs (or Béziers, or Bezières, but I prefer the Occitan spelling), mid way between Montpellier and beloved Carcassonne, is among the towns I wish I had visited during my longish Continental walks, earlier in life. It was the principal source of this good, cheap brandy, and too, from what I’ve read, a beautiful town just inland of the cliffs above the Mediterranean Sea.

Granted, there was much destruction, in July of 1209, so that monuments before that date are damaged if not extinct. The inhabitants refused to hand over their Cathar heretics, when the assembled Crusaders asked politely at their gates. Instead they dug in. Yet there were known to be faithful Catholics in the town, including priests, in addition to the many excitables.

It was indeed the place where the Albigensian Crusade began. Gentle reader may recall an historical sound-bite associated with this event. Arnaud Amalric, the Abbot of Cîteaux (or Cistaux if we want to be old-fashioned) — the papal legate advising the Crusaders — was asked by a conscientious soldier how to tell the heretics apart from the faithful when they stormed the town.

“Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius,” the good abbot replied. Or in English, “Kill them all; God will know his own.”

Whether or not he agrees with this approach or stratagem, I’m sure gentle reader will join me in admiring how succinctly it was expressed; and in reflecting that this decisive action had a very positive result, postponing the Reformation for another three hundred years.

Besièrs, almost as old as Marseilles (founded six centuries before Christ), and known to sportsmen as a centre of French bullfighting, is not my topic today. Instead we visit a smaller town, approaching from the east. The author, Derwent Conway (nom de plume of Henry David Inglis) does not name it in the book I am reading.

His own tour, of 1830, begins with a circuit of Switzerland; descends the Rhône, to wander across southern France; ascends the Pyrenees; then comes down through Bordeaux; ending with an itinerary along the Loire. It was published at Edinburgh the next year, in the two pocket volumes I now have from a Greater Parkdale flea market. There was an old letter tucked inside, to the book’s former owner, recommending it for remarks on French wines, which the writer found astute after more than a century. The correspondents were apparently serious imbibers, and the work was given in return for a fine Chambertin ’28, two cases of which had been “liberated” in 1944.

But that is to take us off the road to Besièrs in 1830. This Conway, or Inglis — a Scottish advocate who became bored, and exchanged his trade for journalism and travel — must have been a quick walker. I do not think I could have covered his route in a single season, even in my prime; though it must be said he resorted to coaches and horses, river boats and ferries, through some sections of his journey. Most of it would have been “pedestrianism,” however; which is still possible if one’s legs will permit the exercise. I took the occasional motor autobus myself; but will insist the only way to notice the country one tours, is to walk across it. …

To Lourdes, for example, twenty-eight years before the Marian apparitions. Through many other towns, before other things happened — if one can read, and thus return to a time when the open road was a genuine adventure. It remains so in some places today, I suppose, but only if one is following the footpath rights of way, parish to parish, off the thunder’d pavement. Anything over four miles per hour (between halts) will blur all the gorgeous details. Except the thrill from heights, air travel is insupportable.

The English-speaking peoples were once renowned, or condemned, as persistent travellers. An explanation for this is provided by a French gentleman in whose company the author found himself at the table d’hôte in this unnamed little town. The Frenchman called it, la maladie noir — a restless desire to move from one place to another, as if in search of some cure. Conway admits that this is exactly what afflicted him before he left home. “Itchy feet,” we call it, with pretended innocence. (My own feet still itch terribly, as my mind succumbs to elderly nostalgia.)

Better to read these older ambulators than the newer, for after all, the parts we want to see are invariably those which were built before modernity and suburbanism drowned them in “diversity” (i.e. total sameness), and the invasion of monied mass tourism rendered even the surviving good bits so tourist-crowded and glib. Visitez les plus belles régions de France before Alphonse de Lamartine has laid down his confounded railways, and all the noise and ugliness is edited away. The wonders of this world are all now museums, and until the Islamists blow them up, will only “make your feet hot.” (Whistler’s comment after a frenetic afternoon in the Uffizi.)

I should also like to read Conway’s tour of Scandinavia; his Solitary Walks through many Lands; his Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote; his journeys through the Tyrol “with a glance at Bavaria”; his observations on Ireland. He is a masterfully attentive journalist, interactive with all passing life; and the composer of innumerable wonderful asides, including analyses worthy of a Tocqueville. (For instance his explanation of why the best brandy comes from places like Besièrs, which are the worst wine districts.)

He commanded such illustrators as George Cruikshank (for the book on Spain), in the days before photography ruined everything. He was quoted in Parliament as an authority on foreign and even Irish affairs. He is an admirable prose writer, comparable to the novelists of his generation. Unlike our better “magazine” writers of today, he is not merely bigoted, ignorant, illiterate, vain, pandering, quarrelsome, and thick.

Perhaps I am a little giddy from recent illness, and should avoid making magisterial statements until I am elected pope, but I have found that an effective way to avoid the Sin of Wrath is to read the blog, Eccles is Saved (here), before turning to the other ecclesiastical news. This is especially useful in Lent, when the sin in question might easily be provoked as an ancillary to one’s lust for e.g. a thick juicy hamburger with swiss cheese and bacon rashers. Gentle reader will of course form his own judgement. He often does.

For as our crusading ancestors learnt: never attack a Saracen encampment during Ramadan, while the sun shines. Wait until two hours after it has set.

It was by means of this device (prophylactic reading of the blog in question) that I was able to prevent myself all week from commenting on a certain attempt to encourage deviation from the perpetually established Church teaching on contraception by citing a precedent, irrelevant in itself, based on an urban legend about Blessed Pope Paul VI (something to do with nuns in the Congo). Which was not then corrected upon landing in Rome. I could easily have slipped into mentioning the case, or any of several others that arose during a recent trans-Atlantic “presser” at an altitude of more than 30,000 feet. I was also able to avoid using the medical term, hypoxia, in a satirical way.

For as the saying goes, “Who am I to judge?”

No, no, I leave that sort of thing to gentle reader.

Some forty years ago, and for a couple of years before and after — which is to say, once upon a time — I lived in a small workman’s cottage at Vauxhall — which is to say, towards the middle of the Great Wen of London. I often think back on this “squat,” which I occupied semi-legally until the socialist Borough of Lambeth got the money together to demolish and replace it — together with the rest of what had once been a flourishing neighbourhood of home-owning working class people — with subsidized “public housing.” Happily, it took them a long time.

Pure luck, for me; the house fell into my hands through the usual series of coincidences. I would never have found it on my own.

By my standards for the world, I was a very lucky person — until towards the age of thirty, when I began to seriously “engage” with it. Whatever I wanted seemed to fall into my hands. And at this time I was still in my early twenties. Fortunately, I had little desire for money, for then I would have had to “get a job.” My interest was instead in the acquisition of knowledge. My vanity was such that I imagined myself a budding poet and philosopher.

I am thinking of that place today, because of a pleasant event yesterday. A Czech couple, among my oldest friends, were visiting Greater Parkdale, and brought me copies of three photographs they had taken when they visited me in London about 1976. I had no other photographic evidence that “65, Wilcox Road” had ever existed. All the detailed memories that flood back, from small corners of a few old pictures!

The house was, by American standards, quite tiny indeed, with low ceilings, no cellar, but two modest bedrooms’ worth of upper floor. There was a small kitchen extension into a miniature brick-walled garden at back, with an outdoor toilet. There were working hearths or fire-boxes in each room, and gas for a kitchen cooker still supplied through a meter in which one deposited old shilling coins. Wood for heating could be obtained from the tips of local demolition contractors. Any bill for water or electricity would have been charged by the Borough as a proportion of rent, but there was no rent. (I did not use the electricity anyway, and was chintsy on the water.) The total cost of operation for the house was thus five “new pence” in the gas meter, every month or so. Plus food, but as the photographs attest, I was pale and skinny.

My largest expense was in fact an annual subscription to the London Library in St James’s Square. That was eighteen pounds, then thirty. (It is now about five hundred.) I still have the treasured card, with which I could borrow ten books at a time. There was a choice of hundred thousands, most rather erudite, and I could also spend the length of days tucked away in an obscure quiet nook, which had a window and a school desk. My own little library at home, chiefly of poets, filled never more than four shelves.

There I am, in the pictures. Shy, very serious, and in my uniform: beige canvas trousers and grey wool cardigan; clean shirt, done up to the top button; but no tie. (I didn’t own one.) Hair flaming red and self-cut. Everything washed in cold water.

I had stripped all paper from all walls down to (nearly) indestructible Victorian horse-hair plaster; and all linoleum from the floors to the original wide floorboards; and placed all branded goods in timeless baskets and canisters; so that from any angle the interior would look like it might come from any century, except perhaps the twentieth. Mail might fall through the front door, but there was no telephone. It was paradise in there.

Too, I was operating on a vow of sexual and emotional continence, made prior to Christian conversion — meant to last until I had finished reading Aristotle and “everything that went into and came out of him” (which turned out to include Thomas Aquinas). I realized that would take a long time. I was a wilful lad, and kept this vow through a few close calls, along with a certain tranquility of mind. My hippiesque neighbours (but not so hippie as an American reader might imagine) called me “The Vicar,” and showed their disapproval by ignoring me. It was an urban hermitage, near the centre of what I considered (with its libraries and galleries and theatres and museums) to be my Athens.

All pictures are of a certain date. Wander too far from these ones, and my pictures are not so edifying. These photographs were taken, I now realize, soon after my conversion to the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. The adventure had transformed me and, I think, this shows in my face; an adventure in peace, towards peace. I look so still and untroubled.

Now, when with the encroachment of age I think back on a life that is running out, I detect God’s grace: to have arranged for me the time and setting in which I could be parsed. It is what I would wish for any student today: a “safe space” of just that nature.

It is a little-remembered fact — perhaps because those who could remember are increasingly dead — that it is possible to make a thorough hash of the Tridentine rite. Those old enough to recall church attendance in the late ’fifties and early ’sixties of the last century have several times told me that standards were slipping before Vatican II, if they had not slipped long before. In America, at least, preachiness was spreading, and the “sermon” was coming to dominate an abridged Low Mass, performed in the spirit of, “let’s get this over.”

As beloved Pope Benedict (and three predecessors) counselled and showed, an unrushed solemnity is also possible with the New Mass, if the priests are determined. It can also be made compatible with ancient and profound Christian music. In his motu proprio, fully restoring our right to the Old Mass, Benedict was at pains to avoid insult to the practitioners of the New. Both “ordinary” and “extraordinary” forms are valid; indeed, those who are Catholic should know that it will take far more than the common sort of abuse in either form to make a Mass invalid. It is actually very hard to do.

For Christ is present in the Mass, and I doubt the ability of an errant priest, with even the worst intentions in the world, to prevent Him from reaching those who come to Him. It is indeed a modern error to refocus attention from Christ, to his priest or servant. Where the latter stands in His way, the risen Christ passes through him.

But ignoring the most irritating cases — of clown costumes, guitars in the sanctuary, processions on skateboards or whatever — the Mass is the Mass is the Mass. One’s obligation to attend every Sunday is not lifted by any personal judgement of how well it is likely to be performed. Save such decisions for concerts or movies.

It may be that for many, the celebration of Mass is turned to a sad penance. Aheu, I say: the times are the times are the times, also.

A priest, whom I much admire, and who apparently admires me (I shall add “industrial-strength Catholic” to my resumé), wrote earlier this week with this chastisement:

“You referred to ‘the Novus Ordo and related desecrations,’ which I found deplorable language coming from a faithful Catholic. I find it truly disgraceful that any Catholic can refer to any approved sacramental rite of the Catholic Church as a desecration. This right was approved by Pope Paul and was confirmed by Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict the XVI, who greatly improved the text against great opposition. If you are suggesting that Pope Benedict was really in the process of ridding the church of the Novus Ordo, then I think you are greatly mistaken.”

He was referring to a passage in my Sunday Idlepost, “Don’t leave.” A word-search tells me that I have used the term “desecration” on several like occasions in the past. Habitually I make clear that I am not implying the invalidity of the New Mass, but rather, many things horrific in themselves, done in the soi-disant “spirit of Vatican II.” But now I must revisit each use of the word and check my context carefully, for in such circumstances the defence, “you know what I mean,” will not do.

The word “desecrate” is very strong. It was introduced into English in the later seventeenth century as the antithesis of “consecrate,” then used by quick extension for any act by which the nature of something is being destroyed.

I have an English-speaking mind, replete with English-speaking history. This includes the historical memory of the dissolution and physical destruction of monasteries and abbeys; the torching of ancient libraries; the theft and gift or sale of Church lands to a wealthy and self-serving new class; the terrors wreaked on monks and nuns and faithful; the hunting down and murder of honest priests; the stripping of the altars in parish churches right across England; the further destruction of heritage by Calvinist mobs; the systematic obliteration of surviving holy works by Cromwell’s Roundheads; and so forth. Too, the cynical history of Power as, for instance, the Anglican Articles of Faith were written and rewritten over the years, with a constant eye to the diplomatic and political needs of England’s Protestant rulers. And far more: suddenly echoed in the “desecrations” of a later age.

Yet no such act could or ever can touch the reality of transubstantiation; only “make a mess,” and spread a vicious ugliness, while immortally endangering countless Christian souls.

Of course the perpetrators of a former age did not think that is what they were doing. The puritan or iconoclastic mind is by its nature impervious to criticism. Nor can the perpetrators’ distant descendants be held accountable for what forgotten ancestors did; nor we, accountable for ours who took reprisals when they could. Too, all parties are unlikely to know that the longstanding “official” Whig history of England rests upon a tissue of anti-Catholic lies. My use of the term “desecration” is, in my English, full of historical allusion and recollection.

I meant to apply the analogy with the greatest possible force.

But one must take especial care when handling heavy weapons, and in this case I fear the good priest is right. There was far too much “collateral damage” from that particular shot, and perhaps others like it. I rather invited misunderstanding, and in a few days, when my current fevers and chills have subsided, I will go back over my e-paper trail and see what can be fixed.

I have received more despairing letters from Catholics (and aspiring Catholics) this last week or so — since the Holy Father went to Mexico, and to Cuba again — than ever before. Many of these are livid with anger, and let me say I understand it. The sense of betrayal is one I share, not only with the Ukrainian Catholics. A couple of the letters were particularly distressing, because they were from persons who said I had “lured” them across the Tiber, and now they would “move on.” I find this kind of thing heart-rending.

One tries to write to people individually. Yet there are many more, not in correspondence. So let me reply to them, too, “from the heart,” if I may mean that hackneyed saying.

Context is required. The catastrophe of “the Spirit of Vatican II” precedes in time the current catastrophe, in which the faith of serious Catholics is being seriously tested. And there is, I would insist, a history before that in which the evil of Modernism was infiltrating the Church. Too much is blamed on our current Holy Father, whose election was, according to me, much more a symptom than a cause. To comprehend the crisis in the Church, we must be patient enough to look over centuries.

Righteous indignation will have its place. Then pause. The Fathers and the Doctors of the Church have expounded the suitable use for anger, short of Wrath. It must goad us beyond indulgent emotion.

Christ Himself put the limits upon it. Read e.g. First Peter, especially chapter two, and Ephesians, especially chapter four, and every word of four Gospels, before you allow your anger to blind you.

Before giving in to this anger, we must ask ourselves at least the practical question, What is it we hope to achieve? If there is nothing we can do, beyond our own vicinity, it follows that we must channel our anger to some lesser, but possible, good purpose.

Those who remain in communion with the Church founded by Christ, must do their best to acquaint themselves with her true teaching, from the Deposit of Faith, and defend that, in defiance of any contradiction. (Do not settle for a flip understanding; keep digging.) They should encourage each other, in Love, to hold the ground that Satan is assailing. Note that I named Satan, not some passing bishop.

Long before I was received into this Church, myself, I was well acquainted with the destructive “progress” of “liberalism” within her. I do not think I was naïve when I joined. I was tremendously encouraged by the papacies of Saint John Paul II, and beloved Benedict XVI, two extraordinary popes. It seemed that the crisis was being carefully addressed; now it seems that it was worse than even they imagined. Not only do we have a bad pope — playing for applause, to a world in which hard Catholic Truth isn’t going to win it — but the possibility that the next will be worse. For we have bad cardinals, too (though also some very impressive). We need not play the (typically modern) Pollyanna.

But there is no place for despair, either; and truly, no room to feel sorry for ourselves. Despair is a sin, for a start. True despair — the wilful abandonment of all hope in salvation — is a mortal sin. Yet many lesser forms of “desolation” lead unto that hell-gate, and here we are discussing one of the principal highways. We must remember that we have had worse popes, and even worse times in Church history. And that the Church can be righted, even through weak men and women who refuse to abandon her in her need.

Nor forget that the fire is being rekindled in places and ways that we overlook: in Africa, in China, and in obscure corners even of America and Europe. Even for this world it may be foolish to despair, and in the view over history it may be, that this was actually an age of recovery.

It could be the age of recovery in gentle reader’s heart.

Nor forget that the Holy Spirit is not only immanent, but also infinitely beyond us. It may be that catastrophes must happen; that these human evils will be used for a Good that we could never foresee; just as the mistakes in our own lives have opened gates for us. On this view, we cannot know even what is happening now, when we think we are on top of the news. For the news is, usually, totally misleading.

“Don’t let the bastards drive you out of the Church.”

The Enemy wants you to despair. He wants you to wander; to get you alone. He wants to exploit your anger. He wants you to leave: “Go! Go!” You have no idea how much he hates you.

Don’t! — if only for the sake of your own immortal soul. Do not participate in schism. Through the centuries it has done no good. Do not think that because things are bad here, they will be better at some more exotic location, where different mistakes are being made. Do not, at any level, simply assume. Faith is not grounded on assumptions.

Should the world be reduced to only one Catholic, be ready to answer: “Lord, I am here!”

And is it yet so bad?

Those who hesitate to be received, must remember it is the Catholic Church they are refusing — not the “church of Francis” or whatever. In a few years he will be gone, in a few more his successor gone, and I think we may reasonably expect that in a few more still, the liberal innovations will be gone, too: because they are unsustainable. Men and women, called to Christ, with their very lives on the line, will not be sustained by such pabulum.

The Founder and Head of Our Church is not some person in Rome; it was not even the (rather fallible) Saint Peter. It was and remains Jesus of Nazareth. Those in Rome are merely custodians — human, for better and for worse.

Our allegiance is to Christ, and it must not be altered because clowns attempt to speak for Him.

Do not sacrifice what is immortal, for what is merely passing. Do not cut and run from the fight. It will not bring you peace; it can never bring the peace which passeth all understanding.

Whatever may happen: Keep the Faith.

Bad David: I truly failed to keep up and foster the fairly good training in classical (and modern) languages with which I was blessed in childhood; and with the passage of the lazy years, have become ever more dependent on my halting English as a medium of thought. This helps account for my shallowness and provincialism, mentioned by several discerning readers.

And yet I travelled the world, or at least accessible Eurasia. Compare me to an old schoolmate who only once overstepped the boundary of his native Ontario township. He kept the training up, writing as well as reading in Latin, for instance; for one must write in a language to read it with understanding. Thus he turned out rather more cosmopolitan.

Were we delivered to ancient Rome by some time machine, I’d be depending on him to give taxi directions.

Or should we go back only to old Weimar (I’d hope a little ahead of Napoleon’s “spoon guards”), not I but he would have to forge our letter of introduction to Goethe. I’d only be ogling his mistress, and trying to look smart.

But of course my old friend would hardly agree to step into the time machine in the first place. When last checked up with in a small-town tavern, I found his view of technology even darker than mine.

The like I have seen many times in my travels: that the learned are seldom in their nature tourist, though some have been travellers. The life of the mind, the life of books and poetry, of art and music, is a much broader thing than a life on the run. Perhaps I should be more thankful to God that my circumstances combined to ground me, more than a decade ago; leaving me in this mountain hut, or rather, high-rise apartment with a view of the sunsets over Greater Parkdale. And trying to catch up with everything I’ve missed.

Since, I have learnt that travel is unnecessary.

*

A decade has also passed since my poor parents were bundled (at their own wish) into “old folk” accommodations, and the contents of their house were dispersed. I became the quick inheritor of what could be grabbed of papa’s “stuff.” At intervals since, I have been whittling down to what seems most worth keeping, in light of the remorseless movement of time. In the end, one cannot carry so much as a satchel, into the Land where all are going.

Much of the bulk is already given to schools, libraries, relatives and others. Papa became, at about my age when his own father died, the inheritor of the previous generation of stuff — mostly books and papers — and an adept of genealogy on both his and my mama’s side. I cannot bring myself, for instance — and notwithstanding my disapproval of photography — to “dispose of” old glass negatives and silver chloride prints going well back into the Victorian era. I’ve been trying to re-organize what papa once had organized well; it all went to hell during his last move.

Photos are good, in one way. Even through sometimes rather stiff poses, one can see what one’s predecessors looked like; so that upon reading old letters and documents they begin to move. There were many vague old family stories I heard, and now they come into focus. These people were my own flesh and blood; sometimes I almost hear their voices. I find a portrait of a man who died a century ago. It is captionless. But immediately, I know who he is.

Or another dead for, lo, rather more than a hundred. Who is buried in some place called Bruce Mines, which eventually ran out of copper. But even before that, there was flooding and a cave-in (1876), and my relatives moved on. Here is a letter of one who went back, at the beginning of the last century, and found Bruce Mines the ghost of a ghost town. Today, says Internet, there is a village again, with a liquor store, motel, and short-order restaurant, for motorists along Highway 17; but for an interim there was nothing. My people are thus only to be found one layer down; a generation later, no grave could be found.

That was one branch; there were these various other branches, and fate pushed them all over the continent. Well into that last (twentieth) century, most lived in log cabins.

My great grandpa and great grandma died in one, in the wilds north of Edmonton, Alberta, before the last World War; two of my great uncles with their wives in the same “Rochester,” well after. I have a Waltham pocket watch that came down to me from one of them. And a note, to me, never previously delivered, from one whom I never met. Yet he writes as if he knows me. Great Uncle Ross apologizes for foolishly having had the innards replaced in the 1920s; since when the thing has never worked properly. Mechanical standards, he notes, have been in continuous decline, since the watch was made in Massachusetts in the 1850s. It had worked fine when he carried it across Normandy, with the Canadian Field Artillery during the Great War.

Another branch went off to Nebraska; we never heard from them again. Many crossed the border, or crossed back: you didn’t need a passport in those days, and there were no tax returns to file. The rails did not run to some of the places these people were going. They were migrants who had heard that there was “freedom” out West, and that a man could earn a living from honest work, pulling up the trees on, say, twenty acres. Yet they were not entirely “hicks”: they went out into the wilderness with their Bibles and their Shakespeares (to say nothing of their guns), as little beacons of civilization; and did what they had to do to survive.

*

And the stargate opens on the stories I could tell you: of Martha (“Mattie”) Warren, for example, farmed out in childhood to another house after her dad John (1811–61) had died in wretched poverty. He’d been building a stone bridge over a creek near Zanesville, Ohio; died coughing his guts out from some stone-dust lung disease. (His clients had neglected to pay him; a bank had foreclosed on everything he owned.) The family this Mattie was lodged with then up and flit town, leaving no word of where they had taken “that very cheerful little body,” then three years old. Her mother and siblings searched for her, not giving up through a score of years, following any lead with letters and newspaper advertisements. (Kindly publishers would run these for free.) “Lost girl” was the title, wherever they appeared.

Twenty-three years pass. The advertisements still ran, sometimes, and by a happy coincidence the grown woman, now “Mattie Stewart,” saw one of them in Springfield, Illinois. She’d been told she was an orphan, but putting everything together, realized that she was not. Understandably, she had to see her mother, and was well-placed to set out right away.

Her husband, the estimable J.K. Stewart, was a railwayman, with stocks. Mattie was very beautiful; he was uxorious. On their journey to Canada — to Derby Township, Ontario, where now lived her aging mother, no longer Mrs Warren but Eliza Christie by remarriage — he had the train stopped. This was because Mattie was admiring the wildflowers in a passing field. So while the train waited, he went out in the meadow to assemble a bouquet.

They’d tracked down Eliza to this Anthony Farm, where she now lived with this Captain Christie (more stories there), in the usual small log house. They arrived at Owen Sound, hiring coach and horses for the muddy sideroad drive. And suddenly there they were, in their city clothing and extravagant hats, standing by Eliza’s door.

The mother did not recognize her little girl. It took some explaining. Then Eliza shrieked a shriek that her son would always remember.

Mattie would be my great-great-great aunt. Beautiful and wealthy: I had already heard that from my grandpa, long ago. Alas, no picture of her may be found in my gallery. By reputation, I had somehow gathered, she was badly spoilt by her rich fool of a husband. According to my papa’s chart: “Died childless in 1884.” It all fits together.

Better not to travel, except by necessity; and to die poor.

My priest — well, I think of him as mine, though actually I share him with some other people — has that wonderful gift for catching a person by surprise. This shows to best effect when that person — in this case, moi — has just said something stupid.

I was reflecting upon my unworthiness for Lent, and noted that I actually like beans (of various kinds and in various preparations) on rice. Also, little fishes from little tins, mooshed in rice. Also, — it was my latest example — aloo methi, with rice. (That is, potatoes chopped into fenugreek leaves, with some onion and tomato pulp and crushed cashews and curry spices, fried in bran or vegetable oil.) Or with naan, instead of rice. And a modest tumbler of, say, coconut water, to wash it down. Or some grapefruit juice, which I also adore.

Of course, in Lent there could easily be too much of a good thing. The meal must fit in one’s lenten bowl, and not spill over. The “seconds” go back in the fridge. Though in my case, I need the help of the angels to walk me back there. (And sometimes, they are busy.)

I love the monastic simplicity: just the bowl, the spoon, and the tumbler. The sight of these three things fills me with peace. And nothing improves the appetite like hunger, which can be a cleanser in itself. One can be made happy by such things.

So here I was saying to the priest that I enjoy Lent; that surely there is sin in it somewhere. What should I do, cut the fenugreek? the cumin? (The cashews I’d already resolved to omit.)

My train of self-regarding thought was brought to a stop at this point:

“That is not a sin, David. That is good luck.”

He was being gentle. He wasn’t shouting “Jansenist!” at me, the way he does sometimes. He went on to explain that Lent is not a celebration of masochism. It is fast, abstinence — obedience, to a glorious end.

Should I happen to like it, bully for me.

I used to dread Lent, because I would expect it to be painful. I still rather dread having to be extra charitable; or even just polite. I am not, after all, a very nice person. True charity makes one accept things, that one may be loath to accept. It makes one part with things, that one would rather keep; and to restrain in some measure one’s eyes, one’s lips, and the inflection of one’s nose. The abstinence from doing what is hateful — even on some days a complete fast — is what I find oppressive. It goes against my nature, my inner Adam, my “preferential option” for being a shit.

“Lord, if you don’t mind, I would rather cut even the potatoes.”

Now, there are good people who, it seems to me, are charitable by nature; glad in their charity, and delighted to give more. My papa was a bit like that; I could never understand it. Had he only been Catholic, he might have welcomed Lent. And I’ve met others even more, by a mysterious grace, given to confoundingly saintly behaviour.

Should they cut back on charity because they enjoy it?