Essays in Idleness

I have received many replies to my recent Idleposts touching upon “physician-assisted suicide,” the latest “human right” created by Canada’s activist, forward-looking Supreme Court, which now rewrites our laws freely. They are seldom first in the world on any issue, but since the Omnibus Bill of the Trudeau government gutted our Criminal Code in 1969, they have shown much enterprise getting to the front of the avant-garde. They may not have been the pioneers of abortion-on-demand, for instance, but made us the first, and since, the world’s only jurisdiction to allow abortion with no restrictions whatever, from conception to live birth if not later. It seems a point of pride with them, to stay one step ahead of the Joneses to our south, though it should be said the Americans catch up quickly.

According to the standard media account, death-on-demand was a Swiss specialty, before being popularized in the Low Countries. Judge-assisted death-on-demand has followed in two of the United States; and is now quickly spreading through what was once Christendom — even to Germany, where the term “euthanasia” acquired a bad reputation in light of the way it was used through the period 1933–45.

Media enthusiasts for “assisted suicide” are too shy to mention the truly pioneering work of the Nazi Party, arguing when they must that most of the many millions of deaths were not strictly voluntary. But the Nazis used the same arguments as our own euthanasia activists, to start, and were very keen on “progress.” Verily, they were the great Autobahn for physician-assisted everything since hallowed by progressives, from anti-smoking legislation to the slaughter on high-speed highways, which is why I am fond of the expression, “The Autobahn to Hell.” They were heroic Darwinians, and the idea of moving nature along a little faster, with respect to “useless” people, slightly preceded their more far-reaching programmes for Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others on the principle, “every minority a wanted minority.”

Among their first efforts was, for instance, the Kinder-Euthanasie pilot project, in which thousands of mentally and physically handicapped children — “an expense to society and a tribulation to their parents” — were turned over at parental request for “special medical care.” Of course, the parents did not know what would happen to them. No one in Germany ever knew what was happening anywhere in those days, let alone in front of their faces, as we learnt later in the Nuremberg Trials — where quite a few “assisting physicians” were prosecuted. These included those who, like Hitler’s personal physician and Reich Commissar for Health and Sanitation, Karl Brandt, had previously received the highest awards of the state. (Josef Mengele got away, however.)

Canada’s own Doktor Mengele, the late Henry Morgentaler, who personally executed many thousand unborn babies, actually received an Order of Canada “for his commitment to increased health care options for women,” along with the highest award of the Canadian Labour Congress for his “outstanding service to humanity” — favours which, prior to his profitable abortion clinics, had included vasectomies and inserting IUDs. The paradox was in his own background as a Jew from the Lodz ghetto, who saw the inside of Dachau as a child. (He was hardly the only man twisted by the experience.)

“We must remain vigilant in defence of a woman’s right to choose,” he famously said, and said, in self-celebration. And now the “right to choose” death over life, for oneself as for others, is fully roosted in Canadian law.

*

As a visitor to nursing homes (though shamefully much less since my mother died), I retain contacts among many gerontophiles. I have heard from several since last Friday, expressing their desolation at the Supreme Court decision. Let me quote one especially well-placed:

“This decision will blow apart our ability to do what we do. …

“Our work force is largely female, visible minority, and Christian: just try finding someone to pick up replacement shifts on Sundays. Love is truly the fuel for our staff, most of whom see their careers as a calling. …

“Physicians do not provide care alone, they depend on a team. If a physician wants to kill a patient, what of the rest of the staff? Are they to be made unwilling stooges of the decision of the physician to provide this ‘service’? …

“I once worked in acute care, when observant Catholics (and others with religious objections to abortion) were screened out of the Surgery Suite while abortions were performed. This could never be done in Long Term Care. The facilities could not possibly run with staff opposed to this legalization of murder, as the scheduling of staff around the physicians’ decisions when to give the fatal injections would be impossible.”

As I’ve mentioned before, Christians are under siege throughout the medical professions, and even being a “visible minority woman” will not help if you oppose the Culture of Death. But when they have been driven out, or already where they are missing, the pressure increases on the old, the frail, the disabled, the depressed, the mentally afflicted, the terminally ill — to “do the right thing” and die. “Informal” euthanasia is, as I am vividly aware, well-established in many such institutions, precisely where Christian and other religious influence has disappeared.

It is worse than this, however; for I am also aware that many of the old, having lost control over their own daily lives, live in “paranoid” fear that their attendants are trying to kill them. Every injection, every little wax cup of pills, is a source of terror to them. They trust some staff, do not trust others. Indeed, being a voluble pro-lifer may be the best way to earn their confidence.

Among those still fully witted, but often in pain, the “right to choose” provides a terrible ordeal. Another of my correspondents describes this reality:

“The true horror, besides the actual killing of abortion and euthanasia, is the dreadful ‘option’ it presents to people. Where abortion is illegal, a woman facing an unwanted pregnancy can immediately dismiss killing her baby, and therefore enjoy a certain peace of mind. The decision has been made by external factors. Where killing pre-born babies is legal and paid for by the state, the ‘choice’ is hers, so there is no peace of mind: she vacillates back and forth between her natural motherly instinct, and wanting to get rid of a ‘problem’. She is also faced with immensely increased pressures from parents, boyfriends, &c, urging her on to murder so their own lives can go back to ‘normal’.

“With euthanasia being legal and paid for by the state, the sick person’s mind will be bouncing around like a ping pong ball with the highs and lows of illness. On a bad day he or she will want to ask for suicide, and then on a good day, want to reverse the decision. Obviously, too, there will be a decline in palliative care because it will seem absurd to go to any lengths to ease suffering when a permanent solution is as close as the nearest thanatist killer doctor.”

Here we see in operation a great truth once comprehended not only in church but throughout the Western legal tradition: that “he who deviseth evil soweth discord” (Proverbs 6:14). The “right to choose” evil — death on demand — does not stop at murder. Even among those not murdered, it acts as a tremendous destroyer of souls.

It is pleasing to see a man travelling in style. Erkan Gürsoy, age sixty-eight, took the northern route for his latest visit to his native Turkey, which is usual when flying to the Old World from British Columbia. But he gave this a twist by avoiding the airlines. Instead he negotiated the Northwest Passage, then crossed the rough Atlantic (weathering a hurricane), in a 36-foot aluminum yacht of his own construction. The Altan Girl, and her master, arrived safely at Çanakkale (near Troy in the Dardanelles), somewhat dimpled by the ice. Polar bears were also among Mr Gürsoy’s perils, as I gather from reports.

Most solo sailors come from inland locations, I have noticed, and this one from the Turkish interior. My theory is that people raised along the coast would know better. My own frankly escapist sailing fantasies owe much to a childhood spent mostly well inland, so that I was fully four years before I’d even seen an ocean. I remember that first encounter vividly. It turned out to be larger than I had expected.

Mr Gürsoy makes his living in Nanaimo manufacturing aluminum boats, mostly as tenders for larger vessels. He calls his stock-in-trade the “non-deflatable” — the hulls ringed around with fat aluminum irrigation tubing. He has a patent on that, and while admitting that his craft are rather ugly, notes that they are hard to sink. (From photographs I see that he is not much into concealing welds, either.) They are also rather noisy, for those riding inside, and they do bounce about on the waves. But on few other ships can one drum so impressively, to discourage those pesky bears, when trapped in ice that is crushing you like a pop can.

Clearly, from the accounts I have read, and by the full Aristotelian definition, a magnificent man.

I have designed many yachts myself, most of them for solo voyaging in the High Arctic, or the Southern Ocean. I have not, however, sailed one around the world, as Mr Gürsoy did with another vessel of his own design, twenty years ago. Typical inlander, he waited until he was actually at sea to learn the art of navigation. Not knowing any better is an important component of heroism, I believe. (It could be why men are more heroic than women.)

Nor have any of my designs been built, truth to tell. I just doodle them on the page, while reading the memoirs of sea voyagers; my knowledge of naval architecture having come almost entirely from the same source.

My favourite model is a development of the inshore Dutch fishing botter: absurdly wide of beam in relation to length, and very shallow of draught, but with a deep leeboard to hold a course when it matters. Too, a hinging mast, to avoid the bridges over canals, which I would also tie down for the duration of big blows on the open water — so to still have a mast when the blow were over, and a solid breakwater in the meanwhile. The interior would be adapted for arctic survival, and to accommodate doodling. I dislike aluminum, with a fixed passion, and have selected wood. This hard-fastened coracle (the old Dutch mariners could not abide a straight line) would pop like a cherry pit out of squeezing Arctic ice. Or else it would crush like a box of matches, but there you go. You cannot know what will work until you try it.

I have various other models, including a ketch adaptation for an old American fishing pinky; but with two masts I’m afraid that would require more crew. Yet ah, to exaggerate the rising tail, to a high seat projecting behind the tiller, on which to recline like a sleepy gondolier.

Among my more ambitious designs is to modify an icebreaker-class research vessel, with a few dozen berths. My thought was to found a little shipping company, to restore passenger service along traditional ocean routes, for people refusing to be pressed for time, or through airports. Not bourgeois vacation cruising, mind — God never wants that — but a civilized passage from A to B, with ports of call, and perhaps a little oceanographical dipping along the way, for those who’d appreciate some fresh air, decent food, and intelligent conversation. Crew would include musicians, and a reactionary chaplain; and on the boat deck, instead of a pool, a fine usus antiquior chapel.

Whereas, I should think, solo sailing is for the more contemplative types. Since Joshua Slocum’s first circumnavigation in the Spray, the idea of a floating hermitage has been widely disseminated. (His Sailing Alone Around the World was among the formative books of my childhood.) But Captain Slocum remains almost alone in understanding how such a passage should be conducted: in no particular hurry, and with an ingeniously designed self-steering mechanism that leaves one turning pages in a cabin full of books.

One could have as much in a log cabin, I suppose, with fewer distractions and less risk of drowning, but that might be too easy. For as Prince Hal says, “If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.”

This business of Shakespeare being Catholic — in thought word and deed, though subtle enough to avoid getting drawn and quartered — flourishes in each examination of detail. Here is a specimen for a day on which I have “nothing more to say,” or to do for that matter, beyond watching Lake Ontario freeze over. (Perhaps that will accelerate tomorrow.)

The character Falstaff in the History plays began with the name “Oldcastle.” This created something of a scene, because Sir John Oldcastle was a real historical character, and his proud descendants were prominent at Court — the top one, the seventh Lord Cobham, becoming suddenly Lord Chamberlain, and therefore licenser of plays. (By happenstance he died soon after, or we might never have had Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, nor heard much more from Ben Jonson, neither, nor from the effervescent Thomas Nashe, nor other closet Cath-o-licks who’d sharpened their wits on this dull anvil.)

Now, Oldcastle was a Protestant “martyr” — an unspeakable Lollard from two centuries before, who’d been hunted down to the Welsh Marches and properly euthanized. And here was Shakespeare depicting him as a charismatic low-life drunkard, a duplicitous liar and compulsive thief. The fan started hitting the apples, and Shakespeare’s company must have told him it was time to stop it. The name would just have to be changed.

That is why you will find lines in Henry IV, Part One, whereon the name “Falstaff” appears, which scan one syllable short of the meter. It is because Will Shakespeare did the last-minute white-out on “Oldcastle,” scrawling “Falstaff” over the top. (But leaving in a gorgeous pun on Oldcastle’s name.)

So where did the Bard get “Falstaff” from?

It was the name of another old Puritan hero, who didn’t have any descendants.

Now, if that ain’t cute, I don’t know what is.

Enthusiasts for “physician-assisted dying” should remember the name Clayton Lockett. He was “lethally injected” by a doctor in an Oklahoma prison nine months ago. This didn’t work as expected. The injectee was writhing on the gurney for a long while. I will spare gentle reader a fuller description. The execution was “called off” by the prison director after twenty minutes or so. He’d been phoning around the state, asking for advice. The blinds were pulled down over the spectator windows by panicking staff. Finally, forty-three minutes into his agony, Mr Lockett succumbed to a heart attack. Perhaps gentle reader remembers this item from the colourful history of botched executions. Opponents of capital punishment in the media gathered much sympathy for the late Mr Lockett — a felon whose convictions included murder, rape, forcible sodomy, kidnapping, assault and battery.

A nurse tells me of her experience with morphine. In one case she administered 2 milligrammes to a big hulking rugby player, who promptly stopped breathing. In another it was 70 milligrammes to a tiny wisp of a teenage girl who then screamed that it wasn’t working. On the other hand, she reads that the anaesthesiologists in Holland, where euthanasia is now commonplace, have got killing people down to a fine art. She assumes they will helpfully share their protocols.

So perhaps this is an unreasonable objection. It is only the first time a doctor murders his patient that he may fumble ineffectually about. With experience and the right training, we can expect him to become a cool, efficient killer, who hardly ever has a “bad hair day.”

If in fact he does his own needlework. It frightens my nursing correspondent that, “the only people who really know how to use those drugs are the gas-passers and Emerg and ICU nurses. Wonder when some doc is going to figure out it’s easier for him to write an order for a nurse to give a fatal dose of propofol than for him to get trained in administering it himself.”

My nurse, you see, is a serious Catholic. She got into the trade to help ill people, not kill them off. She could curl your ears with many other tales from the front line, e.g. standing up to careless doctors, prescribing potentially lethal doses of this and that.

Gradually, nurses and doctors who adhere to the Hippocratic Oath will be weeded out of our monopoly healthcare system.

Under the Orwellian title, “Consultations on Policies and Transparency By-laws,” the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is pushing the envelope against conscientious objectors. If, for instance, they won’t perform abortions, they must refer the applicant to a doctor who will, thus presenting them with the “right to choose”: be complicit in the killing, or find a new trade. New “end-of-life” guidelines are coming down the same pipe. Catholic doctors are already being told that, if they want to remain faithful to their life-affirming creed, they should get out of family practice.

Note that this tyranny is gratuitous. The CPSO could publish an easily accessible list of doctors who would be happy to kill your baby, your granny, your rich uncle, your bipolar aunt, your annoying teenager, your unemployable husband, your simple brother, or anyone who could conceivably be talked into signing his own death warrant in one or another state of mind. Or over whom you might eventually contrive to get power of attorney. But this isn’t good enough. Not only do the activists want evil, they want decent people to be complicit in the evil; and the power to destroy them if they refuse.

But back to my nurse, who wonders where all these “assisted suicides” will take place. “Are people going to turn up in Emerg and announce they can’t take it anymore, and must be murdered immediately? It blurs the lines if we’re setting someone up with an I.V. in one bay to kill him, while pumping the stomach of a psych patient in the next one, to interrupt a suicide.”

The self-regarding geniuses on our Supreme Court, all nine of them, did not bother to think that through — that, or innumerable other conflicts of purpose that their judgment creates, and which will keep coming back to them for adjudication. They triggered a Hurley-burley, tossing a bombshell into Parliament that the Members will be likely to duck, thus leaving all fallout to chance, including the chance that, as already with abortion in this country, all law restricting euthanasia will be vacated. With a short sophistical paragraph, and language gratuitously vague, they overturned centuries of legal precedent. Their irresponsibility is astounding.

What I find most monstrously hypocritical in the pitch for euthanasia is the pretty picture, of “death with dignity,” with all the family and friends gathered round. It is such a howling lie.

People so depressed they want to be dead do not come from that country. Their despair has everything to do with the absence of family and friends, and the indifference to their loneliness and pain, suffered wherever they have been warehoused. The country in which there were family and friends, and neighbours, and religion, and doctors who came to your house, is gone. That was an antediluvian country. The “social conservatism” that glued it together has been washed away.

This is the new country, founded upon contraception and divorce; the country of cradle-to-grave bankrupt care, and activist judge-made law and lawlessness, where faire is foule and foule is faire.

And this is the new love, that has replaced our backward Christianity — for the old, the frail, the disabled, the depressed, the mentally afflicted, the terminally ill. It comes in a syringe, supplemented when necessary.

At least despatch them with something that works, every time, and requires minimal intelligence to operate. May I suggest the Spanish garotte?

“Arise!” would be how the Introit began this morning. That is why Sexagesima is also called “Exsurge Sunday” in the Calendar of the Ages: … Exsurge, quare obdormis, Domine? … Or in the colloquial: “Get up, why are you sleeping, God?” This of course from a Psalm; and David, king and minstrel, is not so impious as first sounds. “Help!” might be offered as a paraphrase, for what he is crying.

Those in possession of the old missal — and I would hate to think any of my readers were so poor, or so disorganized, as to be without one — may, even if they must live in Babylonian exile from the Old Mass, keep up with it in spirit. Each Sunday provides a new masterpiece of poetic construction, and as today’s Mass unfolded — through Introit, Collect, Epistle, Gradual, Tract, Gospel, Offertory, Secret, Communion — the whole Christian life was expounded. Read it attentively, then read it again, with as much Latin as you can bring to the English crib, and soon you will discover how much is there. Follow, too, the Chapters, Psalms, Antiphons through the Canonical Hours (Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline, and Matins or night watches towards the following day), and you will see that it is part of a vast music. It continues ceaselessly; while you, for your part, come in and go out.

But for today, beginning from that Introit, that cry to the Lord to come and help us, such a vision unrolls: of things as they have been, recently, and as they have been since Adam, and as they now are. In the Epistle, Paul, “Doctor of the Gentiles,” resorts to autobiography to explain what evangelization is all about, and the inconveniences that may attend it along the way, should we be as he was, “in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils from my own nation, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils from false brethren.” Those are the earthly rewards of striving, and he gives details, such as how many lashes he took each time, or what it is to be wet, cold, naked, and hungry. He then confesses his own terrible weakness — how more than once he pleaded with God to give the job to someone else. And the answer came: that power is made perfect in infirmity; that the grace he’d been given was sufficient and so, get on with it.

Infirmity — pain, and often desolation — can be used to make us perfect. Note, mark, flag this passage. Take it deeply into the heart and never part with it.

The length of this Epistle stands out, contributing to its liturgical force. Saint Paul stands before us as a real man, who is calumniated, and has a few things to say, and does not intend to shut up. It is a passage of extraordinary power, and once attuned to its meaning, phrase by phrase, the singing of it carries across the bridge of time, and we are in all ages.

Against this in the Gospel, the parable of the sower: of the seed, of the Word. It is dispersed by wayside, it falls on stony ground, and into thorns that choke it. Christ, now anticipated by Paul, turns to explain exactly what He means by this — to those who have not heard because they were not listening; to those who like what they hear, but will not root themselves against the winds of temptation; to those choked by the cares, the riches, and the pleasures of this world. But when it lands in the hearts of good men, the seed yields fruit an hundredfold. …

“Haec dicens, clamabat: He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

The Mass plays forward in time, but may also play backward, and synthesize, or then piece out, and the effect is to unburden us of the temporal chains we have been clanking. Throughout there is movement, simultaneous as well as sequential, in voice, echo, and modulation, as music. From the unfolding of a fugue by Bach we may learn something of the shape I am trying so feebly to describe: the unity that emerges from an incredible diversity of sharply unique phrases, and actions. The homily itself is only part of the music, harmonic only if the preacher knows its place. For the Mass is comparable to no revival meeting, no concert or recital, no lecture or class or “presentation.” It is something that is done, and is being done within the hearts of all those present, removed in the moment from their earthly concerns and drawn into the Presence of Our Lord, to be blessed, and amended. Even to say it has a teaching function, is to say too little: the Mass is as Our Lord within it.

The Church does not pray in mono. The picture of souls lost has been carried into the flood, at Matins: the sea and ship of Noah upon the torrent; the terrible image of the drowned in their numbers like specks. The wood of Noah’s ship is the wood of the Cross and of our salvation. The Reconciliation with Christ, and the Restoration of His creation to the beauty of its first Day, is glimpsed in evocations of Noah’s rainbow. The purpose in our penitence is coming into view, in the distant prospect of the Resurrection.

But for now we toil, in a very dark labour.

*

To the enormity of what happened in our public life on Friday, there has been no reply. Many bishops responded, but had nothing very forceful to say. They do not seem to realize the horror of what was done in our Canadian Supreme Court: the suffocating stench of it. They treat it as one more item of news, already passing from the news cycle, as if bishops were pundits. From polls we learn that the vast majority of those now living in this country — nine in ten — glibly subscribe to the new public doctrine, that puts humans on a level with dogs and cats. We now know from those numbers that only a tiny proportion of Canadians can be Christian, whatever they may fondly call themselves; that in the main, the inhabitants of this country do not think their own lives worth living, except for pleasure.

Exsurge, Domine! … What a vision of souls, falling like snowflakes into Hell.

O Lord, pray for us, and come to us in our bottomless squalor.

There is no further need of slippery slope arguments, once we have reached the bottom of the calving glacier. Last night I devoted a few hours to reading through Canadian media commentary (there was almost no reporting) on yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that mandates “physician-assisted suicide” (now glibly abbreviated to “PAS”). As an additional Shrovetide penance I read the Judgment itself. It is apparent that the country is now morally and mentally dead, though still locomoting on the zombie principle. The unanimous judgment of the court was echoed in nearly unanimous cheering that another victory had been achieved for “human rights.”

A few of the more thoughtful paused to view the slope, now that we have slipt; nowhere could I find a coherent ethical argument, nor the observation that the Justices had not tried to make one, founded in natural law, or in anything. Neither journalists nor judges bothered to acknowledge overturning the central premiss and entire heritage of Western law — the sanctity of human life. Indeed, the only legal history they review is extremely recent.

The journalists go a little beyond the judges, in using flagrantly emotional arguments which they identify as “rational,” and mocking conscientious arguments as “emotional.” Most then announce that a debate in which they could never have participated — given their cruel intellectual limitations — is now closed because the Oracle has spoken.

My excuse for them is that they were raised in a state of complete confusion, on basic principles of law. “The sanctity of human life” was effectively overturned by the legalization of abortion — the murder of an unborn child. That provided the slippery slope to this one. It was compounded in Canada by the legalization of suicide, which is self-murder. The principle in law had been coherent: “You may murder no human being.” It was made incoherent.

That is why the battle was not fought at the top of the hill. It was surrendered at the start, and all resistance was restricted to feeble rearguard actions, such as petition signing. Those opposing the murder of the old, the frail, the disabled, the depressed, the mentally afflicted, the terminally ill, find that they can now do so only on the ground that it makes them feel a little queasy. But once it has been established that some people can be murdered, no line can be drawn, and we are not only down the slippery slope, but at sea.

In this instance we needed at least one journalist to call attention to the judges’ actual argument. A right to “physician-assisted suicide” was found in Section 7 of our (Trudeau-bestowed) Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and in the words, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice” (whatever that now is).

Ludicrous enough: that such rights could include a right to be murdered by a doctor, on request. But to make some more plausible link, all nine judges signed on to the idea that, unless he is guaranteed this new right, the citizen may feel compelled to kill himself while he is still able to do so — thus becoming deprived of life, liberty, and security, in toto. The state is thus held responsible in advance for a citizen’s free act, and must make amends for forcing him to commit the suicide that he did not commit, by killing him at the expense of the taxpayer.

Someone should have mentioned that this reasoning is insane.

Propter incredulitatem vestram, “because of your unbelief.” This is why, Christ patiently explained to his disciples, they were unable to cure the little boy of epilepsy. “If you will have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, Move: from here, to there. And it will move.” But then, on the little matter of demon removal, He explains nonchalantly: “This kind is cast out by prayer and fasting.”

Mad, totally mad, I can remember once thinking. And if He hadn’t just cured the little boy, no one would have taken him seriously.

A fortnight ago, NASA released the sharpest pictures yet of the Andromeda Galaxy, only a few hundred kiloparsecs away: the nearest spiral to our native Milky Way. Four hundred and some high-resolution snapshots from the Hubble telescope were assembled in a mosaic presenting nearly one-third of Andromeda — from part of its galactic bulge at the left, to the outskirts of the disc at the right. About one hundred million stars are in the frame, a representative sample of the brightest. (What can you expect with less than two billion pixels?) Gentle reader is invited to go look, on the Internet. I especially like the dark passages: the intricate “dust lanes” that reveal structure, within structure, within structure.

Children love to ask how many stars there are, and tend to press until you tell them, “Forget it, kid.” We cannot even count the galaxies: perhaps half a trillion? Not that galaxies are the only things we see. But this is large, and travelling around the speed of light, only to the next galaxy, we would need about two-and-a-half million years. “No need to hurry,” I once told a dear little boy. “We’re going to collide with it in another four billion. You’re young yet, you have to be patient.”

Now, all of this exploded from a single cosmic egg, infinitesimally smaller than any grain of mustard seed. Or rather, that is the most plausible current account, consistent with what we can measure. Again, I refer to that Hubble mosaic for some context. (And wonder what could explode from a cosmic egg the size of the full grain.)

No human brain can possibly wrap around this; the nearest I’ve seen come is that of Saint Thomas Aquinas who, as gentle reader may know, signed off on trying to describe what had been shown him, saying, “All that I have written now appears as so much straw.”

Straw: blowing from the tomb of Lazarus.

The older I grow, the less I know; but the better I understand that Christ was not exaggerating.

*

Domine, salva nos, perimus. The little fishing boat, awash in the tempest, and Christ is sleeping through the whole thing. With these words the fishermen awoke him: “Lord, save us, we are perishing.” To which Jesus yawned, “O ye of little faith,” then rose and calmed the sea: Tunc surgens, imperavit ventis, et mari, et facta est tranquillitas magna. (Everything is better in Latin.)

I haven’t met anyone else who could do this; I would have remembered if I had. There have been saints, however, who have performed miracles. The explanation is obvious: it would be their great faith. In moments I have imagined how it might be possible; in dreams I have even hovered above the ground. In waking life, I have not faith enough to make the pot pour me another cup of tea. This is inept, and I confess it.

We are constrained within the various mechanical “laws,” I would suggest, only because of our bad living. We are right to feel a certain frustration with them; wrong not even to try busting out, from this abject condition of slavery. But what it will take is not an organized rebellion.

Sanctity alone can lift us out of this place; sanctity alone by Grace, in faith receiving — it is the only way out. In this, it seems, we may begin to see, that in a perfect faith would be a perfect freedom.

Today is a special day up here in Canada, worth remembering for a long time: the last day in our public life before our Supreme Court ruled on what the psycho faction likes to call “euthanasia.” The pagan mind thinks suicide is an option, but after tomorrow, every life in the monopoly public healthcare system is worth whatever the death committees decide. With the passage of time, their budgetary constraints will weigh ever more heavily upon them.

There has been no debate, and could be no debate, as I muttered recently about abortion: all decent humans being on one side. The Canadian media, on the other, buried the story as hardly worth their time. In the extremely rare circumstances in which ethical arguments against killing people were allowed to creep onto an op-ed page, the comboxes quickly filled with vile locutions from that psycho faction. I use the word advisedly: one must alas read such comments to appreciate what I mean.

Unless, of course, our Supreme Court should elect to surprise us. But when one looks down the row of men and women who warm that bench, hope is not indicated: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate. Their adherence to the Culture of Death has been consistent; their respect for the ancient usages of law, whimsical at best. Madame Justice has been on record for years, explaining the nature of the decisions they render, as a College of Vestals sweeping before the Sacred Flame.

As any death sentence, their decision should be taken quietly. There is no point in crying out. The ideologues of “progress” are ruthless, and the old, the frail, the disabled, the depressed, the mentally afflicted, the terminally ill, must never look to them for “mercy.” They have their own definition of this term, and among the stipendiaries of Eugenics and Auschwitz, the short way is best.

____________

Next morning update: The Supreme Court has ruled as predicted, and unanimously. There was a cosmetic limitation to hard cases, and special requests; but as we know, and they know, from the legalization of abortion, this will be ignored. Later, when the rhetorical cover has served its purpose, it will be formally rescinded.

One thinks of the illustrious G. Gordon Liddy. Asked once by a judge if he was trying to show contempt for the court, he replied: “No, your honour, I was trying to conceal it.”

In addition to, “Can’t anyone here play this game?” I have many favoured quotes in Stengelese. Indeed, one of my several motives for getting into Heaven is to hear Casey Stengel chatting with Thomas More. Both were talented managers.

“The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”

“Now there’s three things that can happen in a ball game: you can win, you can lose, or it can rain.”

“Been in this game one hundred years, but I see new ways to lose ’em I never knew existed before.”

“You got to get twenty-seven outs to win.”

“I couldn’t have done it without my players.”

“Nobody knows this yet, but one of us has just been traded to Kansas City.”

“That boy couldn’t hit the ground if he fell out of an airplane.”

“Wake up muscles we’re in New York now.”

“Being with a woman last night never hurt no professional baseball player. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.”

“Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice-versa.”

“You have to have a catcher because if you don’t you’re likely to have a lot of passed balls.”

“If you’re so smart, let’s see you get out of the Army.”

“They say some of my stars drink whiskey. But the ones who drink milkshakes don’t win many ball games.”

“I die the king’s faithful servant, but God’s first.”

(Readers are invited to guess which quotes were Stengel’s and which were More’s.)

*

But it is, “Can’t anybody here play this game” that keeps coming to mind when I observe developments in the Middle East. As I hope gentle reader will soon discern, each of the quotes is relevant to the current situation.

The response to it in the West, and particularly from the United States government, is incompetent on a scale so breathtaking that I sometimes miss my slot as a daily news pundit. (And by inviting Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress, Boehner proved himself as dumb as Obama.) What distresses me is not that characters like Obama and Kerry say “terrorism” has nothing to do with Islam. They are politicians: of course they spout drivel. Rather, I am appalled by the evidence that they actually believe what they are saying.

This goes beyond noticing that the terrorists cry Allahu Akbar! after every strike. To understand current events one must notice the war being fought within Islam. And this is not as hard as it might seem. It is a war between not one, but two radical factions: Shia fanatics, and Sunni fanatics.

“Al-Qaeda,” “the Caliphate,” “Hamas,” and some other groupings, though rivals for the leadership, are united in their aspirations for the Sunni side. Revolutionary Iran and its proxy Hezbollah provide the united leadership for the Shia side. Every formerly Western-allied government in the region, including that of the Wahabi sheikhs in Saudi Arabia, fears both sides; but they fear Iran more. And after Iran, they probably fear Turkey, which has the potential of becoming patron to the fanatic Sunnis on the analogy of Iran.

We could get into blaming Islam itself for the mess, but that won’t be necessary for today’s purpose. It is only necessary insofar as we must understand that the words Allahu Akbar are not uttered lightly, and are not insincere.

While both sides look forward to murdering us next, their attention is first focused on murdering each other. Attacks on Western targets must be understood in this context: for neither party is so naive as to think they can out-gun us, or even out-gun Israel. Moreover, many of their stunts (including video beheadings) are designed to manipulate Western public opinion — against themselves, in order to win allies within the region. The “Je suis Charlie” demonstrations in France, for instance, were a godsend to the Sunni fanatics: they triggered massive anti-Western demonstrations among less fanatic Muslims across the Middle East, and thereby magnified their claim to represent Islam.

A good general knows better than to be manipulated by goads. He keeps his eye on the chessboard, and thinks several moves ahead. He acts in apparent indifference to his opponent’s last move, and may even invite more of the same. He is looking for checkmate, not to trade pawns. But in the words of a gorgeous Israeli paratrooper I once chatted with (she was female, incidentally), our leaders are trying to play chess with checkers pieces.

So note the disposition of the board. The Iranians, on the cusp of obtaining nuclear weapons if they do not have them already (I would bet they have), are the party that other regional states most fear (except Syria, the Iranian client we should be trying to lure away). And this for very good reasons. They also fear their domestic Sunni radicals, but they know the Shia party is much better organized and armed, and has the more realizable ambition to destroy them. This view is the opposite of senseless.

Now, fools, or let us say those too clever by half, will next suggest we play one enemy against the other. Let Hitler bleed himself mooshing Stalin, or vice versa. This is crazy, in addition to evil. The winner of that conflict then becomes our much more powerful adversary. Our task is to defeat the Sunni “terrorists” — by military means where necessary — without giving the slightest advantage to the ayatollahs. To negotiate with the latter, semi-secretly seeking their help against their worst enemy, is the stupidest course available; and it is the one the Obama administration is banking on.

Do I have to explain more?

Hard “realpolitik” would recognize both threats, and propose to defeat them respectively by quite different tactics. The allies we require are just the sort the Bush administration was cultivating, but which the Obama administration alienates with batty lectures on “human rights,” and other empty pieces of performance art, intended to undermine them. Our common interests are not permanent, and therefore they can only be allies, not friends: but this is war. In the first place we must communicate to such as the Egyptian and Saudi governments that we understand the game, know how to play it, and are once again (like Bush) as good as our word. Negotiate with your allies, not with your common enemies, or you will find yourself without allies pretty fast.

Our common interest with the Israelis — who are friend, not ally — is to move attention away from them. Our obsession with solving the insoluble “Israel/Palestine” conflict plays directly into our enemies’ hands, by enhancing an issue that galvanizes their existing supporters, and can only win them more. (Nor do you win allies by selling out your friends.) Quietly help Israel get ignored, which is exactly what our regional allies are doing, and exactly what Boehner wasn’t doing.

Beyond this: never try to solve an insoluble problem; you have better things to do than make it worse.

I dread attending Mass on the Feast of Saint Blaise. This is because I am superstitious. It is the day when, by tradition, we get our throats blessed with the crossed candles. Experience tells me I will get a sore throat, just after. (A blaising sore throat, no?) Perhaps this has not always happened, and I omit from memory the times it has not, but it has happened more than once. Thus my delight in reading Father Zed this morning, who reports the same experience. As a priest he also mentions that every time he blesses a car, it gets in an accident. On the other hand, one of his customers re-assured him: “Imagine, Father, what would have happened had you not blessed it.”

Do blessings work? My fear is that they do, invariably. This is why I hesitate to pray for the virtue of courage. No sooner have I done this than it seems the Holy Spirit has put me in a spot, where courage will actually be necessary. That was not precisely what I asked for, I might think; but of course, according to Thy Will, not mine. And one forgets the part about practising the virtues.

Now, it is good that I disabled Comments many months ago, for otherwise the global village explainer would show up to say the reason people get sore throats around the beginning of February is that it falls in the dead of winter. He would then add that I should get a flu shot; after making some patronizing remark about his toleration of Catholics. … Plausible, plausible. … I get so sick of plausible.

Of course, it was worse for Saint Blaise himself, when he prayed. He had his head sawed off with steel combs, if I have the story straight, from the early fourth century. (Hence his patronage of the wool industry.) I believe Marco Polo passed his tomb at Sebaste in Armenia, on his way to Cathay. But it is hard to see Saint Blaise, through the accretion of legend that became associated with his name, as his reputation spread, in death as in life for “medical interventions.” Peasants everywhere swore by him, to judge from the huge number of Saint Blaise parishes, raised throughout Christendom East and West within the first thousand years of his leave-taking.

In life, he was said to have saved a child choking on a fishbone. He effected many other miraculous cures, of animals as well as people. Indeed, he seems to have been a kind of precursor to Saint Francis of Assisi. Whole flocks, afflicted by some pestilence, were led to him for his restorative blessings, and individual sick animals were drawn to him for help. They would mysteriously obey him. In my favourite of the stories, a poor woman came to Blaise, because a wolf had made off with her piglet. The holy man had words with the wolf, who returned the piglet to the woman, unharmed.

Thinking, “What could I say about Saint Blaise?” last night, I then woke this morning from a dream I imperfectly remember. But one phrase stood at the top of my mind: “The fish commands it!”

I have used this for my heading, in the belief it must have some secret meaning. Gentle reader may not easily see the point, but really, I can’t do everything for him.

The Armenians still celebrate “The Coming of the Son of God into the Temple” (i.e. Candlemas) on the 14th of February. Terndez, as they call it, is older than our Western celebration of Christmas. The “forty days” were once counted from the Epiphany, according to the Lady Egeria (more below), which might explain that date. Later, upon the establishment of a fixed date for Christmas at Rome, by counting nine months forward from the Annunciation, the new date for Candlemas (today, February 2nd) was established by countiing forward forty days from that. We glimpse the reasoning in an old arithmetic, working from traditions in approximate agreement.

Knowledge of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, as of the ancient Hebrew ritual that lay behind it (the purification of Mary, forty days after childbirth), came to the Armenians by a different route than that to Rome through the Greeks. Information travelled also to Persia, India, Ethiopia — by other routes, now lost in the sands. It travelled at different speeds: to us in the West rather slowly, in this case. The more one looks into ancient liturgical practices, the clearer it becomes that the apostolic tradition — or “Tradition” as we write in the Catholic Church — is as real as Scripture. The same accounts travelled many routes; the same letters were carefully transcribed, and themselves sent on many journeys. Everywhere men already Christian sought the best possible information. The truth was winnowed out.

That God’s hand was in it, we cannot doubt. Yet we can also understand this from a human point of view: that the process of establishing authority cannot be controlled by any one man, or committee. As in courts of law, or even disputes on the Internet, the true can defeat the false because it makes sense: is internally and externally coherent. The false account fails because it doesn’t make sense: is contradicted by facts already known, or falls apart in self-contradiction. By prayer, but also by diligent inquiry a consensus emerges, which can withstand any blast. From this great distance in time, we cannot reconstruct the whole process, but we can still see it at work, the more clearly when we are not encumbered by our modernist baggage.

It would not have been possible for “redactors” to operate in the way that modern biblical scholars like to assume, on the basis of no physical evidence. They imagine editorial habits that belong not to antiquity, but to their own time. No one was in a position to play God with widely disseminated manuscripts. The Canon was discerned, as received. Likewise, the traditions were discerned, as received. In both cases, the process was rather to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Four Gospels are a proof of that: they contain minor contradictions, that were not smoothed over; had that been tried, variant readings would even then have given the game away. They were selected for their pedigree, and for the ring of truth, in light of many other factors unknown or only darkly known today. We have every reason to trust the sincerity, as well as the high intelligence, of those who chose each “this” over “that.”

The belief that everyone in the past was stupid, and that we alone are smart, is one of the conceits passed down from the Enlightenment. It is expressed with great smugness among progressive elites, and gives a fair indication of their own intellectual limitations.

Candlemas (though not yet with candles) is described in the travel memoirs of the Lady Egeria, making her pilgrimage in the Holy Land in the fourth century. She writes “hic celebrantur,” indicating that the feast was then unknown where she came from (Galicia, in north-west Spain). I mention this because I have so often been irritated by the dismissive tone in reference works, when a Christian feast is dated to some pope who formally proclaimed it in such-and-such a century, as if he had invented it on the spot. Our Candlemas, for instance, originates in the Church of Jerusalem, and must go back many generations before Egeria witnessed it. It has nothing to do with the much later Pope Gelasius, or the pagan Lupercalia or … other common rot.

The focus in Egeria’s time is not on the purification of Mary, but instead on Christ through the eyes of Simeon and Anna. The “forty days” are not mentioned in Saint Luke, but are nevertheless taken for granted. This is because the Hebrew rite of purification after childbirth, specified in Leviticus, was understood. We can still retrieve that, but if we couldn’t the biblical scholars would have had a field day. This is a point about old sources that we neglect at our peril: writers tend not to bother repeating what everyone already knows. It does not follow that we must reject everything not attested in a literary source that happened to come down to us. (In addition to making best efforts to explain away what is directly attested.)

“On that day,” Egeria writes, “there is a procession into the Anastasis [the original Church of the Holy Sepulchre], and all assemble there for the liturgy; everything is performed in the prescribed manner with the greatest solemnity, just as on Easter Sunday. All the priests give sermons, and the bishop, too; all preach on the Gospel text describing how on the fortieth day Joseph and Mary took the Lord to the Temple, and how Simeon and Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, saw Him, and what words they spoke on seeing the Lord, and of the offerings which his parents brought. After all these ceremonies, the Eucharist is then celebrated, and the dismissal given.”

The Itinerarium Egeriae is an invaluable account of liturgy and ritual that descended within that Church of Jerusalem directly from the life of Christ. The Christians in those parts knew exactly where Golgotha was, exactly where the Nativity occurred — exactly where to dig on sites the pagan Romans had covered with landfill during their persecutions. There had been humbler shrines on those sites long before the Byzantines built great churches over them. The archaeologists have gradually discovered, sometimes to academic chagrin, that these were not “urban legends.”

Our authoress had lived in Jerusalem continuously for at least three years, with wide contacts among guides, priests, and the Christian laity. As well, she had travelled everywhere in that land, and from Sinai through the Levant. She was a learned and inquisitive lady, who checked every assertion she could against physical evidence, readily at hand. When sixteen years ago I filled a Christmas newspaper section in the Ottawa Citizen with a very long article entitled, “Looking for Christ under stones in Israel,” I found a modern edition of Egeria (edited Gingras, 1970) extremely helpful. It was an aid in slicing through much twaddle and confusion in secondary and sub-secondary guidebooks. I had in my hand the work of a predecessor who had done what I was trying to do, but had years at her disposal, not the couple of months I had for my assignment; who was more than sixteen centuries closer to events, with that long-perished world still everywhere around her.

In an age of “irony” and malicious scepticism, it is best to go to the sources. Lady Egeria is of course just one. Far more existed in her time. Some wash up by happenstance, still; many others would have been found in monastic libraries had they not been so extensively rifled, torched and trashed during the Reformation, the French Revolution, and subsequent explosions of “secular humanism.” But we do probably have today enough copies printed of the Migne series to reconstruct what we need to know after the next grand conflagration; and innumerable copies of the Bible. It will thus be practically impossible to erase:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace / according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen / thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared / before the face of all people;
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles / and the glory of thy people Israel.

Unless gentle reader had the misfortune to be only in range of the Novus Ordo, it was Septuagesima today. I am spoilt in Parkdale; my heart goes out to those who have suffered “the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time,” the liturgical significance of which seems intended to escape us, unless it is to affirm the “hermeneutic of rupture” that is crackling once again.

With each passing year it becomes harder to understand how men who were outwardly sane could have done what was done to our Mass, nearly half a century ago. This hardly followed from anything decided at Vatican II. There, the integrity of the Mass was affirmed, and what was done less than five years later would have been unthinkable to “progressives” and “conservatives” alike.

Pope Saint John XXIII had himself re-affirmed the importance of Latin, in the Mass of the Ages, and throughout the Church, echoing many popes before him on the importance of a well-educated clergy (not merely taught Latin, but taught in this universal language). He reminded that none must graduate from the seminaries whose Latin is so weak that they cannot celebrate the Mass in its fullness, its beauty. Too, he reminded that our clergy must be able to read the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, her canon law and all her other documents, from all centuries, without difficulty. All of this is necessary to priestly formation: for the priesthood is not a low calling.

Here is a paradox that every intelligent, perceptive, and observant Catholic, of a certain age, should already know: that wherever the Novus Ordo has advanced (the quicker in its most happyclap iterations) vocations have disappeared; that wherever the Vetus Ordo has survived or returned, vocations are plentiful. Restore that Mass and the Church herself begins to be restored; young men hear the call and come forward. They will never be attracted to a life of sacrifice by a daily ritual that is trite. Undermine that immortal reverence, discard what at first glance looks “out of date” — because the “liturgist” does not understand it — and the Church dies, in ignominious surrender to passing fashion and fads.

Yet even while Pope John’s apostolic constitution, Veterum sapientia (1962), was still wet in the ink, the ecclesiastical bureaucrats and “reformers” were at work in the opposite, “modernizing” direction. I have spoken with more than one seminarian from the early 1960s who recalled how, from the end of one semester to the beginning of the next, as Latin was replaced with the vernacular, the floor fell in. The atmosphere was dramatically changed, in a way that had not happened in two thousand years. How, now, John XXIII must weep over what was done, and is still being done in his name.

The loss of Latin in the seminaries signalled the collapse of all other academic standards. To my mind the nauseating sex scandals in the Church followed, too, from that “liberalization” — for vocations plummeted, and the bishops began to take anybody. Whole orders within the Church evaporated. In so many convents discipline was forsaken, and we had the spectacle of “radical,” politicized monks and nuns abandoning their habits and their vows, shrieking about in demonic helter-skelter.

What was done in “the spirit of Vatican II” was done against the express direction of the Council itself; its documents cited, when cited at all, in a selective, sophistical, deceitful way. To descend into the details is to be drawn down into the mystery of evil: for again, the question becomes, How could men in their right minds be doing things like this? How could they not see the terrible consequences to the Church they purported to love, and to the souls of their fellow Catholics? Why was it allowed?

All of the post-conciliar popes till the present one have struggled to restore what was taught at the Council, consistent with the teaching of the many centuries before; all worked, often heroically, against the Zeitgeist, and to contain a Fifth Column metastasizing within the Church herself. It is the solemn and particular duty of each pope to defend the deposit of faith against every effort to corrupt it, and to keep the practice of the Church consistent with her doctrines. What a priest must know, a pope must know, to his fingertips, restored every day in the Mass. He must never have his own “agenda,” his own cheering section. His job by its nature must be very lonely, as Paul VI once said in a moment of desolation; it is to serve — servus servorum Dei, to be servant of the servants of God. We should pray the more earnestly for Pope Francis who, though he might have the best will in the world, is himself our first papal product of the seminary environment, post-Vatican II.

*

Today we have entered into Shrovetide, with much of the living Church unaware that this has happened. It is from this point, in the tradition, that the Alleluia is no longer sung, until Easter. In an old Gallican liturgy I once saw, metrically sung, the ancient explanation of it: that we fallen men who live on Earth are not worthy to sing the Alleluia unceasingly.

The succession of Sundays, from Septuagesima to Sexagesima, Quinquagesima, and Quadragesima, is the ancient countdown to Lent. (Tomorrow’s Candlemas, on the fortieth day of Christmas, will be the last echo of the season of Christmas and the Epiphany, mirroring the forty days of Lent.) The vestments change to violet, and the great readings from the Book of Genesis begin, expounding our banishment and exile from Eden, as we renew the task of repentance. The Gospel in the Old Mass today was the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, “unto this last” — a detailed affront to every modernist sensibility, for in it Christ showed that human ideas of “fairness” are rubbish; that justice and mercy are compact in opposition to them.

We are turned at this moment towards Easter, and our preparation for a Lent which was once taken by the whole Church — and is still taken in the hearts of the faithful — with spiritual gravity. In the Greek Triodion, we find parallels to every action in our old Latin Mass, and the same gravity in preparation for the Great Fast.

This entire season of Septuagesima, in which so many strands of Christian teaching are woven together, is omitted in what is now called the “Ordinary Form” of the Mass, with its succession of inconsequential “ordinary Sundays.” Yet it remains the birthright of every Catholic, restored to us unambiguously in Pope Benedict’s motu proprio of 2007, and not to be denied to us any longer.

It is for we the laity to demand the return everywhere — in every church, on every day — of our Mass in its “Extraordinary Form.” For even when poorly-educated clergy have forgotten, we may be inspired to remember: that our Church must be like unto her Founder, and that Our Lord was not an “ordinary man,” but invincibly Extraordinary.

Thanks to a typo (“inox” for “inbox”) I found myself blathering this morning to a correspondent in email about steel. My mistake was Freudian, I’m sure: “inox,” from inoxydable, is what they call stainless steel in France. Everything is Freudian, once one has become a Freud. Or as we discover in perusing such as Partridge’s learned glossary on Shakespeare’s Bawdy, there is not a word or topic in the world that will fail to carry some sexual or scatological innuendo, if it is worked carefully enough. This, I suspect, is because we are animals, and subject to decay.

I know little about this subject (steel; I’m fairly well-informed on bawdy), but perhaps enough to make a couple of points.

As my father the industrial designer used to say, “Stainless steel is so called because it stains less than some other steels.” But give me, by preference, wrought iron from a puddling furnace, for I don’t like shiny. Unfortunately it is not made any more except on a small craft scale: but I have, in the kitchen of the High Doganate, a pair of Chinese scissors that I’ve owned nearly forever, which have never rusted and whose blades stay frightfully sharp (they were only once sharpened). They cost me some fraction of a dollar, back when forever began (some time in the 1970s).

Too, I have an ancient French chef’s knife, nearly ditto, made I think from exactly the steel that went into the Eiffel Tower. It holds an edge like nothing else in my cutlery drawer, and has a weight and balance that triggers the desire to chop vegetables and slice meat.

And there are nails in the wooden hulls of ships from past centuries which have not rusted, after generations of exposure to salt sea and storm. Craft, not technology, went into their composition: there were many stages of piling and rolling, each requiring practised human skill. (The monks in Yorkshire were making fine steels in the Middle Ages; and had also anticipated, by the fourteenth century, all the particulars of a modern blast furnace. But they gave up on that process because it did not yield the quality they demanded.)

What is sold today as “wrought iron” in garden fixtures, fences and gates, is fake: cheap steel with a “weatherproof” finish (a term like “stainless”) painted on. These vicious things are made by people who would never survive in a craft guild. (Though to be fair, they are wage slaves, and therefore each was “only following orders.”)

However, in the Greater Parkdale Area, on my walks, I can still visit with magnificent examples of the old craft, around certain public buildings — for it was lost to us only a couple of generations ago. These lift one’s heart. I can stand before the trolley stop at Osgoode Hall (the real one, not the Marxist-feminist law school named after it). Its fence and the old cow-gates warm the spirit, and raise the mind: if the makers sinned, I have prayed for them.

Almost everywhere else one looks in one’s modern urban environment, one sees fake. This, conversely, leaves the spirit cold, and lowers every moral, aesthetic, and intellectual expectation. To my mind it is sinful to call something what it is not — as is done in every “lifestyle” advertisement — and to my essentially mediaeval mind, the perpetrators ought to be punished in this world, as an act of charity. This could spare them retribution in the next.

Craft itself has a penitential aspect. I have a friend, since childhood, whose name he would never permit me to mention. In the last moments when Latin was mandatory in Ontario high schools he won an international prize for a translation from Horace. The lyrics were also very clever, in the songs he wrote. He was and remains a fine string musician, with a voice that can animate a sleepy choir. As elder, now, in an old Anglican parish, so backward it still has a congregation, he has the opportunity. He was raised in poverty by an old widow-woman, who taught him his prayers. He is a doer, not a talker like me; though like me, he grew into a religious nutjob. He aspired to become a farmer. We cannot always accomplish our dreams, and his fell by the wayside. Instead he found employment in what can only be described as a blacksmith’s shop: a specialist manufactory of antiquated steels, on a very small scale. It has thrived, because what it makes has high-tech applications.

His work necessarily involves continuous exposure to what is, for humans, an extremely high-temperature environment. He is the last man still willing to go in there, for hands-on operations that can be done in no other way. He could retire, and collect a good pension; or get another job with his skills. But he will not think of it. The livelihoods of eight or nine other people depend on what he does; most of those have families. Too, he loves his work. The penitential aspect is quite real — he would not choose to spend his days sweating, except to some purpose. He has that purpose, and will sacrifice for it.

As for his family, and the high-school sweetheart he married, and whom he loves rather to distraction, and who bore him more children than I could count. And she is a wonderful craftswoman, especially in the culinary line; and I have the happiest memory of drinking a little too much with her husband, then following him home to a resplendent table, where the Angelus was said before Grace; and so much good-hearted laughter followed.

This is how we should live, in penitence, and likewise in joy. The farmer, too, sows and reaps in all weathers, and every other craftsman knows of pains different in kind from the boredom of the modern office. And even without craft, there are weights to be lifted, by the fragile human frame.

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Or as Guiderjus sings in Cymbeline: “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” For Shakespeare was not a romantic.

All of our technical “progress” is geared to taking the pain out of our everyday lives: the unnecessary pain, but also the necessary and painstaking. We have a societal obsession with finding the easy way out, reflected even in the usurious financial instruments I touched upon the other day, now leading us to ruin. We have come to be boxed by fakery on every side, so that we no longer feel it: until we discover that the scheme cannot work. We think of our ancestors today as hunchbacks; not of what compromise has done to the shape of our own immortal souls.

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand
And almost thence my nature is subdu’d
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. …

But the work of the dyer is also exalted.