Great ending. "Take the earbuds out. Hear what you hear." I was just thinking over the weeknd how quick I am to fill my sonic landscape with YouTube / podcast / audiobook / music / a good thing and how slow I am to sit with silence. Do we fear silence because we fear the thoughts / voices that arise when we are still?
Good post. Funny to see myself tagged here, because I'm way behind on reading your stuff, but this was the one I decided to use to break the stalemate.
Granted, I'm inclined to believe that inasmuch as these events DO seem absurd on the surface, it means that we are the ones supplying the meaning, through a ceremonial/religious context. We ritualize the beliefs we wish to see as true, and in so doing, elevate them to something more than commonplace.
The question I keep coming back to, and have for years, is whether there's any objective measure that these alleged graces DO anything. Or, to use a catechist's language, do these sacraments "effect what they signify"?
This is a piercing meditation, Kale. Congrats to your son! What you’ve named so well is the sacramental paradox: that what appears anachronistic to the modern eye… these oil-anointed gestures, the tight collars and blistering shoes, the familiar phrases repeated across generations… is, in truth, the architecture of reality. Confirmation isn’t merely a rite of passage. It’s a rupture in time where eternity peers through. In a world trained to value utility and visibility, it is radical to suggest that a “happening” might occur beyond the senses, that a sacrament might not just symbolize grace but be grace in action.
Your phrase, “a presencing and invocation of spirit into flesh,” echoes the core of incarnational mysticism, which is the heart of what I reflect on at Desert and Fire. Christ didn’t leave us a system, He left us a body, a way, a community bound together by events like these that don’t just point to something higher… they convey it. And as you rightly suggest, without the embodied community of faith stretching forward and back through time, the gestures lose coherence. But seen through the sacramental imagination, they are nothing less than God’s signal cutting through the static of a disenchanted age. The noise may grow louder, but the signal remains.
Hi Kale, first off, congratulations on your kid’s confirmation! Reading your post, I couldn’t help but remember this text from Brazilian poet Murilo Mendes, from around 1940.
Yes, he wrote this before the 1960s events and that is very relevant.
Catholic Poetry
by Murilo Mendes
“Religion alone has stayed young religion
Simple as the hangars at Port-Aviation
Alone in Europe you are not antique O Christianity
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X”
— Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone
When Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, at the beginning of this century, the verses that open his most famous poem, Zone, he must have been aware of their deep prophetic meaning. It is no coincidence that the leader of the most important modern art and poetry movement was also the poetic observer and commentator of this profound truth — that the Catholic religion is always modern; it rejects the outdated but preserves the ancient.
One reason is that it does not belong to a single historical era. Studying a man only in time traps him in a fixed moment. A man's present is the result of his own past and the past of his ancestors. Time and ages are not sealed off — they are linked to each other.
The admirable Catholic liturgy celebrates human life from its beginning to the consummation of the ages. Such a powerful synthesis can only be made possible through the Incarnation of a God whose life, words, acts, passion, death, and resurrection are celebrated by the Church today just as they were two thousand years ago — a God who triumphed over space and time, and whose doctrine, unlike any other, is not subject to political and economic trends.
It is curious that this same Pope Pius X, whom Apollinaire called the most modern of Europeans, was the one who condemned modernist movements in philosophy, theology, art, and literature. He condemned modernism long before we modernist enthusiasts did… That same Pius X, according to some music critics, was also a forerunner of the Groupe des Six, through his motu proprio on sacred music (in which he denounced the falseness of opera), inspiring a return to Bach and to pure music.
A truly Catholic man is always of his time, and beyond that, he carries the weight of past ages with him. And he has eternity before him, for life does not die — it transforms, continuing in purification. The Catholic spirit is attentive to all aspects of life, because it reflects the divine Fatherhood. Saint Paul says that Christians live in expectation of the wondrous things that the universe will give birth to. For this reason, the Catholic spirit is eminently vigilant, organizing all elements to record and observe everything that is germinating and being born.
We are responsible for the world, and its creations must be catalogued under the great spotlight Christ left us — a light that Catholicism, the unrivaled stage director of universal life, preserves and will preserve until the end of time.
Our Master says: “the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”.
This is what “restoring poetry in Christ” means. To restore poetry in Christ is not, as some mistakenly think, to despise the material world, puff one’s chest, and hide in the sacristy. It is, in fact, the opposite… it is to leave the sacristy. It is to appreciate, weigh, touch, feel, hear, and smell everything life presents — and to understand that all of it is part of the Kingdom of God. It is to order matter toward God.
To deny the fundamental importance of matter is heresy. The soul, according to Catholic doctrine, penetrates and informs every atom of the body. A Catholic is, above all, a pagan — and only afterward a Christian. Matter transforms and evolves by God’s command. Matter is beautiful. It is the visible form of the spirit. Great forces of matter intertwine, endlessly reproducing countless editions of God’s thoughts.
Heresy lies in saying that matter is a blind force and that God is confused with it. No: matter is governed by spirit (and by technique), and God transcends nature, even while remaining intimately connected to it.
All senses must remain alert to capture the poetic elements in everything. Our only teacher, the Catholic Church, gives us in its daily liturgy a first-rate materialist lesson, calling on our senses so we may learn to sanctify objective things, in the hope of the pacification of matter — which shall be fulfilled in the triumphant Church.
In the Prayer of the Three Holy Children, said after Mass in thanksgiving, all the diverse forms of creation are praised — a theme later resumed by Saint Francis in his Canticle of the Sun. Without any doubt, the power of God, which is transcendent and supernatural, vivifies all things. With a single sign from Him, creation would fall into nothingness. But precisely because He sustains matter through His providence, its importance is immense.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” It is because of Christ’s incarnation that the union of man and woman’s bodies has become such a beautiful, grand act that Saint Paul compares it “to the union of Christ with the Church” (Ephesians 5:32), elevating it to the dignity of a sacrament — for in this carnal union, man cooperates most closely with God in the work of expanding the world.
God performs great things through man. Through the power of the spirit, He expands our vision of matter, making us participants in everything that happens in the world.
We must not, then, begin by being either optimistic or pessimistic — for that would reduce us to a dull neutrality. Life offers us the most contrasting emotions — necessarily so, for otherwise we could have no constructive relationship with the world.
Catholic poetry must not be one-sided. In it must converge joy and sorrow, spirit and matter, time and eternity — for all categories are diverse aspects of the one and multiple Charity that governs cosmic life — that is, Love, without which there are no poets, and no poetry.
Great ending. "Take the earbuds out. Hear what you hear." I was just thinking over the weeknd how quick I am to fill my sonic landscape with YouTube / podcast / audiobook / music / a good thing and how slow I am to sit with silence. Do we fear silence because we fear the thoughts / voices that arise when we are still?
Good post. Funny to see myself tagged here, because I'm way behind on reading your stuff, but this was the one I decided to use to break the stalemate.
Granted, I'm inclined to believe that inasmuch as these events DO seem absurd on the surface, it means that we are the ones supplying the meaning, through a ceremonial/religious context. We ritualize the beliefs we wish to see as true, and in so doing, elevate them to something more than commonplace.
The question I keep coming back to, and have for years, is whether there's any objective measure that these alleged graces DO anything. Or, to use a catechist's language, do these sacraments "effect what they signify"?
This is a piercing meditation, Kale. Congrats to your son! What you’ve named so well is the sacramental paradox: that what appears anachronistic to the modern eye… these oil-anointed gestures, the tight collars and blistering shoes, the familiar phrases repeated across generations… is, in truth, the architecture of reality. Confirmation isn’t merely a rite of passage. It’s a rupture in time where eternity peers through. In a world trained to value utility and visibility, it is radical to suggest that a “happening” might occur beyond the senses, that a sacrament might not just symbolize grace but be grace in action.
Your phrase, “a presencing and invocation of spirit into flesh,” echoes the core of incarnational mysticism, which is the heart of what I reflect on at Desert and Fire. Christ didn’t leave us a system, He left us a body, a way, a community bound together by events like these that don’t just point to something higher… they convey it. And as you rightly suggest, without the embodied community of faith stretching forward and back through time, the gestures lose coherence. But seen through the sacramental imagination, they are nothing less than God’s signal cutting through the static of a disenchanted age. The noise may grow louder, but the signal remains.
"the embodied community of faith stretching back and forth through time"
This really resonates in terms of understanding how we as members of the body of Christ operate through history as one.
Hi Kale, first off, congratulations on your kid’s confirmation! Reading your post, I couldn’t help but remember this text from Brazilian poet Murilo Mendes, from around 1940.
Yes, he wrote this before the 1960s events and that is very relevant.
Catholic Poetry
by Murilo Mendes
“Religion alone has stayed young religion
Simple as the hangars at Port-Aviation
Alone in Europe you are not antique O Christianity
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X”
— Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone
When Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, at the beginning of this century, the verses that open his most famous poem, Zone, he must have been aware of their deep prophetic meaning. It is no coincidence that the leader of the most important modern art and poetry movement was also the poetic observer and commentator of this profound truth — that the Catholic religion is always modern; it rejects the outdated but preserves the ancient.
One reason is that it does not belong to a single historical era. Studying a man only in time traps him in a fixed moment. A man's present is the result of his own past and the past of his ancestors. Time and ages are not sealed off — they are linked to each other.
The admirable Catholic liturgy celebrates human life from its beginning to the consummation of the ages. Such a powerful synthesis can only be made possible through the Incarnation of a God whose life, words, acts, passion, death, and resurrection are celebrated by the Church today just as they were two thousand years ago — a God who triumphed over space and time, and whose doctrine, unlike any other, is not subject to political and economic trends.
It is curious that this same Pope Pius X, whom Apollinaire called the most modern of Europeans, was the one who condemned modernist movements in philosophy, theology, art, and literature. He condemned modernism long before we modernist enthusiasts did… That same Pius X, according to some music critics, was also a forerunner of the Groupe des Six, through his motu proprio on sacred music (in which he denounced the falseness of opera), inspiring a return to Bach and to pure music.
A truly Catholic man is always of his time, and beyond that, he carries the weight of past ages with him. And he has eternity before him, for life does not die — it transforms, continuing in purification. The Catholic spirit is attentive to all aspects of life, because it reflects the divine Fatherhood. Saint Paul says that Christians live in expectation of the wondrous things that the universe will give birth to. For this reason, the Catholic spirit is eminently vigilant, organizing all elements to record and observe everything that is germinating and being born.
We are responsible for the world, and its creations must be catalogued under the great spotlight Christ left us — a light that Catholicism, the unrivaled stage director of universal life, preserves and will preserve until the end of time.
Our Master says: “the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”.
This is what “restoring poetry in Christ” means. To restore poetry in Christ is not, as some mistakenly think, to despise the material world, puff one’s chest, and hide in the sacristy. It is, in fact, the opposite… it is to leave the sacristy. It is to appreciate, weigh, touch, feel, hear, and smell everything life presents — and to understand that all of it is part of the Kingdom of God. It is to order matter toward God.
To deny the fundamental importance of matter is heresy. The soul, according to Catholic doctrine, penetrates and informs every atom of the body. A Catholic is, above all, a pagan — and only afterward a Christian. Matter transforms and evolves by God’s command. Matter is beautiful. It is the visible form of the spirit. Great forces of matter intertwine, endlessly reproducing countless editions of God’s thoughts.
Heresy lies in saying that matter is a blind force and that God is confused with it. No: matter is governed by spirit (and by technique), and God transcends nature, even while remaining intimately connected to it.
All senses must remain alert to capture the poetic elements in everything. Our only teacher, the Catholic Church, gives us in its daily liturgy a first-rate materialist lesson, calling on our senses so we may learn to sanctify objective things, in the hope of the pacification of matter — which shall be fulfilled in the triumphant Church.
In the Prayer of the Three Holy Children, said after Mass in thanksgiving, all the diverse forms of creation are praised — a theme later resumed by Saint Francis in his Canticle of the Sun. Without any doubt, the power of God, which is transcendent and supernatural, vivifies all things. With a single sign from Him, creation would fall into nothingness. But precisely because He sustains matter through His providence, its importance is immense.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” It is because of Christ’s incarnation that the union of man and woman’s bodies has become such a beautiful, grand act that Saint Paul compares it “to the union of Christ with the Church” (Ephesians 5:32), elevating it to the dignity of a sacrament — for in this carnal union, man cooperates most closely with God in the work of expanding the world.
God performs great things through man. Through the power of the spirit, He expands our vision of matter, making us participants in everything that happens in the world.
We must not, then, begin by being either optimistic or pessimistic — for that would reduce us to a dull neutrality. Life offers us the most contrasting emotions — necessarily so, for otherwise we could have no constructive relationship with the world.
Catholic poetry must not be one-sided. In it must converge joy and sorrow, spirit and matter, time and eternity — for all categories are diverse aspects of the one and multiple Charity that governs cosmic life — that is, Love, without which there are no poets, and no poetry.