The League of Bearded Catholics

Leaf it To Me

 
Oak Leaf - Oil on Panel - 24" x 24" - ©copyright 2010, Timothy Jones

 

A Tale of Applied Distributism

 

A few weeks ago, our kind neighbor across the street saw me out raking leaves and offered the use of his riding mower and trailer. I thanked him and said that I was nearly finished for the day, anyway, but I'd sure think about it, and that was true. I never have gone to ask him for it, though. We in the nation of Squirrelandia are an independent breed.

I have thought about his offer. The entire sovereign nation of Squirrelandia (all 2 acres) is covered with or surrounded by tall oaks. One may be tempted to think of an oak leaf as insubstantial, but when one begins moving them by the thousands, one sees this is not true. They have weight and take up space, and this, well... matters. They are also tough, as tough as the trees from which they fall. An oak leaf, undisturbed on the ground will be there the next spring. In my experience, they take a couple of years to break down.

I like our oak leaves. If it were only a matter of aesthetics, I would leave them as they are. There is something soothing and appealing about leaf-covered ground. But in practice, letting them lie means letting them kill what little grass still grows amongst our moss, rocks and weeds. This would lead to erosion (we live on a hill) and would also somewhat justifiably irritate the neighbors. So, every year leaf disposal becomes a duty that can't be altogether ignored. I let a few remain. I like the look. It says "country". I want to clear them away, but not with the cold efficiency of a hireling at Versailles.

But back to my neighbor. I have been reluctant to take him up on his offer because, for one thing, my leaves are my duty and not his, and if he let me borrow his mower, he would also insist on helping (he's a terrific neighbor) and he's of retirement age, with his own house and grounds to worry about. I'd feel a little like a freeloader allowing him to work up a sweat over my leaves. Incidentally, the reason we don't have a riding mower with a big grass catching trailer is that the investment seems a bit extravagant for our needs. Because we're heavily shaded, we need hardly mow much at all. I'm of (partly) Scotch descent and I'll be blowed if I'm going to drop a grand on a machine to suck up leaves one day a year. It would be unjust to let the fact that I won't buy a riding mower become my neighbor's problem.

But, truthfully, there is another reason for refusing his invitation to bring my leaf removal system up to post WWII standards. I have learned to enjoy it. Yes, I do somewhat relish grumbling about it every year to my family, and go through the motions of a debate with myself about finally geting a riding  mower, but I won't until I have to. The ritual has become a Zen thing to me. I begin, actually, to look forward to it in a weird way. I don't want a machine to do it. These are my leaves. In the words of General George S. Patton, "I love it. God help me, I do love it so.".

This brings me to a kind of Philosophy of Work that I have been ruminating upon as I rake, but that will be for another post. This one is already, well, long in the leaf.

Taming Aslan

I like the Lord of the Rings movies. Sure, there is plenty at which devoted Tolkien fans may legitimately chafe and grumble, but overall, a very respectable piece of work, and - for a major motion pictute based on a book - very faithful to the source material. Thumbs up, and all that.

The Narnia movies, though, I have found personally underwhelming. I was just not whelmed, at all. The first movie started strongly enough, but I lost interest by the middle. The White Witch is defeated and Narnia is set free in the end, but somehow... Meh. What bothered me seemed to be more than just the watery Disney-fication of the story, but involved something off key.

I could not at the time put my finger on any one reason for my ambivalence, but have just found a dandy article by Steven D. Boyer at Touchstone that I think sums it up, or begins to. In short, the modern world (and so the movie) rejects the very idea of hierarchy;

 

We can see Lewis’s strategy at work if we just think for a moment about what his original stories are like. Narnia is a great repository of hierarchical images and relations—of good kings and noble knights, of laborers who are not disgruntled and servants who are not demeaned, of Aslan the great Lion who rules over all, who is never safe, but always good.

One can hardly turn a page of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or of Prince Caspian without encountering compelling images of royal authority and knightly virtue—and we see now that both of these themes are intimately connected with Lewis’s positive construal of hierarchy, which in turn is foundational to his distinctively Christian vision of reality.

A Strange Sign of Maturity

...the movie as a whole consists in Peter learning to think and act independently... By (the end of the movie), he has grown enough to realize that receiving orders and following them is a sign of immaturity and weakness, whereas independent action, especially when it involves not doing as you’re told, is the sign of strength, maturity, and success.

Note well: disobedience is the sign of real maturity. This quiet, unobtrusive devaluation of humble submission to rightful authority is a significant omen of things to come in the later film.

...One could look at Caspian himself, who is transformed from a noble and honorable young king in Lewis’s telling, into a tortured warrior whose unchecked desire for personal revenge against his father’s murderer leads to the deaths of scores of his Narnian subjects. Or again, one could look at the virtuous Red Dwarf Trumpkin, whose cheerful, good-humored embrace of obedience in Lewis’s story is quietly dropped from the film, replaced by the more modern virtues of sarcasm, irony, and cynicism.

(emphasis and italics mine)

In addition to the problem with hierarchy, there is a general chipping away, or erosion, of the story at a myriad of points. For one, the Narnia in which the children find themselves is just... smaller than the one in the books. Not geographically, but less grand, less noble. Lewis' Narnia was suffused with spiritual and moral energy and significance. Something in the Narnian air made the importance of every action (or inaction) somehow closer to the surface. Courage grew more courageous, friendship more dear, sacrifice more costly, there. The Narnia of the films is... an admirably worked-up fantasy world, but where the most important thing is the children - that they have a Big Adventure and come out safe by the end of the movie. Whew! Now, wasn't that fun?

In the books, rather than being the Center of Everything, the Pevensie children play an important part in what they know is a story much bigger and more magnificent than themselves.

In the movies, Aslan's voice is not, as one might expect, the rumbling basso of a Giant Lion, but the velvety, soporific baritone of a kindly uncle. He seems not so much to have supernatural significance, but simply to have Super Powers. And he is very importantly, not known or referred to as the Son of the Great Emperor over the Sea - who as far as the films are concerned, apparently doesn't exist. The importance of that ommission is really difficult to overstate. Without God, there is no Son of God. Jesus becomes not the Maker of All Things and Savior of Mankind, but a great teacher... a kindly uncle. Without the Great Emperor Over Sea, Aslan becomes a kindly talking lion with super powers. He is shrunk.

In other words, the makers of the first two Narnia films, at least, just do not GET Lewis' story. They have never fallen in love with Narnia, though they may have read it fifty times. Like the wicked Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew, they have only a surface understanding of Narnian events, and so they feel the need to juice the story up with invented rivalries, contrived teen romance, tone deaf melodrama and sturm und drang that not only gets in the way, but at times positively cuts against the grain of Lewis's story.

As Boyer observes;

 

In Lewis’s telling of all of the Narnia tales, the children’s experiences as kings and queens in Narnia consistently transform them into nobler, more virtuous people in their own world. They are not spoiled children wanting to be kings again; they are noble kings who carry that very nobility back into their non-royal roles as schoolchildren.

In the Narnia films, the children do not carry the spirit of Narnia with them into our world, but instead carry their childish pettiness into Narnia.

But, I mean, after all... you can't expect modern audiences to believe all that Pollyanna rubbish that Lewis put in there. So, we can dream of a place where the very land, the animals, the sky and the sea are better-than-real, but we must not do the same for people. People must always be portrayed with dull and cynical realism.

Bearded Holiday Fun

I know, I know... I should have been alert and taken some photos, but I was too taken up with the job at hand last week, as my neighbor and all-around building-and-loan-pal Steve and a gathering of friends made a bonfire of Christmas trees, set off fireworks and drank booze to wave goodbye to the old year and welcome the new.

Fire + Explosives + Liquor. I try to set a good example.

It was just the kind of thing neighbors here in teh U.S. ought to do much more often through the year. It was cold as brass lingerie, but around the fire it was quite pleasant, and we all stayed out there talking and joking for hours, and I only saw one tech junkie who could not manage to keep away from his cell phone. He did carry a dandy silver flask, though, which improved my estimation of his overall character. I've been hunting around for a silver flask at flea markets and antique shops, but it has to be the right one, and I haven't found it yet.

I had it on my Christmas list, but buying a flask is almost too much responsibility for anyone but the individual him/herself. Very personal. And, as comic Jim Gaffigan says, giving a flask as a gift is like saying, "Yeah, you look like a drunk on the go."

It was a marvelous time, and one of those little events that ties together all the strands of life, spiritual, physical, emotional. A fully human experience.

Anyway, since I didn't get any photos... it was kinda like this;

 

... only sans the constant terror of gate-crashing Nazgul.

Via Moderna

Scott Hahn is one of the guys I had in mind originally when The League of Bearded Catholics first popped into my brain. He is certainly an Honorary Bearded Catholic, if he will have the title. Below, he and Fr. Robert Barron discuss just what the hell happened with modernity;



I'm grateful to have so many - really, a bumper crop - of wise and inspiring voices in the Church in such a challenging age. We miss the saints in our midst, sometimes.

Since my youth I have been, it's no good to deny, somewhat at war with modernity, and have spent my adult life discovering why. Partly, largely, it is because the modern age is and has been so self obsessed, myopic and amnesiac. It's not so much that we reject the wisdom of ages past - what Hahn calls the Via Antiqua - we simply (the great mass of us, very much including our ruling elite) don't know anything about "ages past", and what we think we know is mostly dead wrong. When we take any trouble to look back (which is not often) we see history in a fun-house mirror. Modernity is a kind of disease of the mind, very much like that suffered by many teenagers. We are not only sure we know everything worth knowing, we are almost sure that no one else - especially anyone older - knows anything at all.

This is why, I think, Tolkien worked on me like a kind of spell when I first read LOTR in college. It was the first beachhead the Via Antiqua really firmly established in my imagination. I had read the bible off and on my whole life, but it had remained mostly opaque to me. Though I gave it my best, Bible reading (I'm sure the language had something to do with it) was like looking at a frieze in some Greek temple. The figures were solid enough, but did not seem to be really alive. With Tolkien, the air of Middle Earth blew in bearing the scents of pastures and woodlands, and carrying faint voices and music. There was life here.

I had sensed early on that there was something just nuts and upside-down about the world (I mean as I knew it... the American suburbia that could not recall a time before television), but Tolkien awakened in me the perception of all that had come before, and which, with breathtaking suddeness (less than a century), had been left behind in a fog and become barely the memory of a memory.

Chesterton happened to be especially awake and alert during this process. We in the modern West grew up in a landscape shaped by the footprints of giants. We have known nothing else, and so the landscape seems normal enough, to us. But Chesterton and the other TLBC patrons were around, thinking and writing, when these giants - great steaming, clanking metal giants, belching smoke - were still striding around. They could smell them at breakfast and see them from their windows. The Four Patrons had a foot in each epoch - ancient and modern - and could articulate the characteristics of both because the contrasts were so vivid and stark. This is the common thread that runs through their art, and that makes them so compelling to me.

Many others caught the same whiff of living air in Tolkien, but so few of us knew what to do with it. I was in college (as are many of his readers when they first find him) and though I was deeply moved - shaken, even (not shaken as in "upset", but shaken as in "shaken awake"), I had no idea where to go from there. I knew I did not want to become one of THOSE Tolkien fans... the ones who dressed funny and learned Elvish and would talk of nothing else. It was harmless enough, mostly, but there was also a kind of sadness to some of these desperately seeking people. They (like me) knew they had found something in Tolkien, but did not know what. Some seemed adrift in the flotsam of Tolkiens tale, all the incidentals -  runes and armor and architecture - and never found the solid footing underlying it all, the riverbed under Tolkien's flowing current.

And many never will. I just finished watching a National Geographic documentary on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings wherein Tolkien's Catholic faith, the Catholicity and religiosity of so much of the story, was either studiously ignored or completely missed. There was a great deal of talk about Finnish saga and something about the rain forests and Cate Blanchett said some things about, well... courage and friendship and all. But the essential spirituality of the work was mostly absent.

One lady got very close, however, in saying that LOTR asks the question, "Could we, today, do this? Could we un-make something that never should have been made?"

It seems an easy enough question when we are talking about un-making (destroying) something clearly horrible like, oh... a giant robot that shoots death rays, or a mutant sewer alligator, or Jersey Shore. But LOTR asks whether we can - whether we have the will - to destroy something we find very useful and powerful and even lovely, in a way... whether we will destroy our precious. What are we willing to sacrifice in order to put the genie back in the bottle... and then destroy the bottle?

Tolkien Toast

 

Heigh-ho, bearded brethren, and a bodacious new year to you all!

It is, of course, the birthday of TLBC patron J.R.R. Tolkien, born on this date in 1892.

From the title of this post, one might wonder if it consisted of a recipe for Toliken Toast (toasted on one side), or maybe a story of someone having seen the professor's face in a piece of toast, but no. It concerns a growing new tradition - promulgated by the Tolkien Society - of toasting professor Tolkien on his day;

To make the birthday toast The Tolkien Society say you should stand and raise a glass of your choice of drink (it doesn’t have to be an alcoholic beverage) and say the words “The Professor.”

Wow, what could be easier? I like the way they allow that the beverage "doesn't have to be" alcoholic, implying that, ya know... it really ought to be. We here in the sovereign nation of Squirrelandia will definitely take part this evening, and mayhaps will read out a bit of The Lord of the Rings for good measure. I may take the occasion to declare January 3rd a national holiday.

(The Toast story comes from The Hobbit Movie blog, via Jen Pierce on Facebook)