My crack Blog Post Title Mutation Team identified ‘potpori’ as possibly the lamest blog post title ever imagined. So I’m going with it. It was supposed to be ‘Sunday Potpori’ but then I didn’t get it posted. Join us here on Yard Sale of the Mind as we push the tattered edge of the lameness envelope into uncharted, ragged territory. We live to serve.
1 Lots of nice brickwork getting done. By end of the day, hope to have reached a more photogenic point, and so might post an update. I can just hear you squirming in anticipation! You need to stand up or wear more slippery pants.
2 Through working with the RCIA program the last few years, regularly run into concerns about posture and gesture at Mass – people want to know when to sit, stand, kneel, and so on, and are confused when not everyone at Mass does exactly the same thing, or just generally want to do it ‘right’. We always assure them that if they just follow along with what must people are doing, they’ll be fine, and at any event nobody (much) is going to care if they get it ‘wrong’. If they are still concerned, we point them to the instructions in the missalette.
All in all, this concern to do it right is seen as charming, but not all that big a deal, and we want the RCIA candidates to feel comfortable coming to Mass, not worried about getting every little thing ‘right’.
But is this right? It seems we have not only an instinct to worship, but an instinct to do it right. In Exodus, there are detailed instructions on how to build a proper tabernacle, the furnishing, tent, altars, even the priestly vestments, and what materials to use, correct dimensions where appropriate, as well as explicit and implicit descriptions of the rituals to be performed. These instructions were delivered after the Israelites had build and worshipped the Golden Calf, and received the 10 Commandments, which start off with the command to not have strange gods before the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is important to know there definitely are right and wrong ways to worship God.
The challenge for this next year, which will be starting formal meeting in about a month, is to find a way to address and nurture the candidates’ and catechumens’ instinct for worship without dismissing it trying to calm their anxiety.
3 Despite misgivings, I posted on Twitter about the 7th anniversary of our son Andrew’s death this past Saturday. While I started out on Twitter to follow SciFi authors, I follow and am followed by a lot of nice Catholics and other Christians as well. There is some overlap.
Tomorrow is the 7th anniversary of our son Andrew’s death. He was hit by a car on a rural Indiana road on a pro-life walk across America, 1 mo shy of his 21st BD.
He was a very good kid. I miss him & am honored to have been his dad. Ask for his intercession, tell me what happens— Joseph Moore (@Yardsale_Mind) July 19, 2019
I really don’t know what to make of this, because I truly do not understand Twitter. Over 30,000 people and counting have looked at that tweet, retweeting it approaching 100 times, lots of comments, approaching 1,000 ‘likes’, about 60 new people follow my Twitter account. This is like 3 orders of magnitude more views over my typical tweets; my typical tweets are also generally ignored (no ‘engagements’ in Twit-speak).
I have no idea what this means, but I trust Andrew is interceding for the intentions of all these people.
4 This Sunday marked the end of our parish’s Summer Bible Camp. According to a tradition that traces all the way back to the Apostles Moonbeam and Kumbaya, all the kids who were roped into free daycare attended camp came up at the end of Mass, assembled in front of the altar, and ‘sang’ this year’s camp song, something about roaring. There were t-shirts with cartoon lions on them. What a coincidence that the live action remake of Lion King also happens this summer. Wow.
I give this here not as an example of liturgical abuse, but rather of, frankly, child abuse. It’s one of those things where people see what they expect, not what is there.
The audience laughed when a couple little girls did flamboyant roars at or near the appropriate spot in the song (there are always a couple 6 or 7 year old little girls in such a crowd who love being the center of attention – they almost all get over it); they clapped not once, but twice (upon the urging of the priest) to show – our appreciation? People, I imagine, saw just another school thing, just another moment when parents get to affirm and reinforce what the schools are having the kids do.
We had seat right up front, since those seats are designed to be easier to access for people like my 81 year old mother in law.
What I saw were 25-30 kids, all but 2 of whom were extremely uncomfortable being paraded before people they mostly don’t know. One boy, maybe 10? 11? stood as if catatonic, doing his best pre-teen I’m invisible act; another boy was fighting back tears and failing. Most were sheepishly doing absolutely the minimum movements the leader was trying to get them to do and mouthing the words, maybe half had an embarrassed smile.
And everybody in the pews smiled and clapped. You know how kids are. You just have to make them do stuff, sometimes. It’s good for them, you know.
Right. Like those boys are going to have fond memories of this summer, and develop a deeper relationship with our Lord, because they were humiliated into standing in front of people and pretending to sing a song.
Yet, this is the only kind of thing most people understand by ‘education’ – this is FUN education. The idea that adults should model and accompany children on their way to adulthood seems lost – instead, we inflict on them stuff no self-respecting adult would ever put up with. Kids are kids, and need kid time. But education, if it means anything, means helping them on their way to adulthood. What we inflict on them today doesn’t do that.
5. It is perhaps helpful to remember in this context that modern schooling has its roots in Fichte’s desire that Prussia have obedient soldiers who don’t spend any time thinking for themselves. The fundamental idea is to break down people as individuals, and turn them into, as Torry Harris put it, “…automata, careful to walk in the prescribed paths, careful to follow prescribed custom.” This is the goal of ‘substantial education’ in Harris-speak. The 1%, who are strangely never discussed, are presumed to decide what those paths and customs are. The Spirit having unfolded Itself to them, if they are Hegelians; History having raised their consciousness, if they are Marxists, such that, despite having their consciousness wholly determined by their class/place in the hegemony, they somehow have ideas that are not so determined. Hmmm.
In the military:
The first few weeks of military basic training is dedicated to breaking you down. During this period, you’ll find that you can’t do anything right. Even if you do it right, it’ll be wrong. Nobody’s perfect, and military drill instructors are trained to ferret out those imperfections and make sure that you know about them.
After you’ve been completely ripped apart, the real training begins — teaching you to do things the “basic training way,” without even having to think about it — you just react. If a military basic training instructor can make this reaction happen, then he has done his job.
From Basic Training for Dummies, copyright © 2011 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Every wonder why getting the right answer or already knowing what it is the teacher is putatively teaching doesn’t get you a pass? It’s because the lesson in not the lesson. The only real difference: you can get out of the army after a few years, and you don’t need to pretend that military training is the sole measure of your worth. Schooling goes on for a decade and half, and you are expected to own the identity that school gives you.
6. Finishing up a bunch of books, and have several I need to start soon. Hoping to get a book-review-alanche going this week.
Yard Sale of the Mind 
One of the few things that El Paso did that I seriously liked was the young guy priest basically hijacking his sermon to tell folks what to do or not do to fit in with the norms, and roughly why.
#4– we have a kid who would eat that up….she’s 4.
I remember junior high, and worse yet high school; most of the ‘fun’ stuff was aimed at folks 5-10 years younger, at bare minimum, or maybe it was just an extrovert thing.
…and you are expected to own the identity that school gives you.
And that’s one of the, if not THE reason, some had issue with my take on things and therefore me. My take was, roughly, “TO HELL WITH THAT IDEA!” And while I might not have expressed it so directly, I had this ‘terrible habit’ of quietly going on ignoring Das Narritif.