2019: The Year That Was/Education Reading Update

A Happy and Prosperous New Year to my followry! May you be fruitful and multiply (for my benefit, right? Oh, never mind.)

Lately, I’ve been reading some 19th century American Catholic writers, to get a better feel for how the people involved thought and felt about those tumultuous times. Thomas Hecker, who is a Servant of God, is both loved and loathed, typically according to how ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ the critic is. He is baffling in some ways, vigorously defending the Church’s core teachings as one would expect a Servant of God to do, but then proposing ideas that, if they mean anything, don’t square with those vigorous apologetics. I’ll write more on this when I get a little farther. He and Brownson, two American Protestant converts who tower over the middle of the 19th century, have, each in his own way, incorporated aspects of their Protestant upbringing into their new Catholicism without, it seems so far, acknowledging any risk or downside.

Hecker focuses on the direct work of the Spirit in our lives. While of course the Church recognizes this aspect of our faith as central – the feast of the founding of the Church is Pentecost, after all – the Spirit is seen to act primarily through the Sacraments and supremely through the Eucharist. The most vigorously active saints, those whose lives most show forth the action of the Spirit in the world, are invariably those most devoted to the Eucharist. Hecker, in the softest of terms and with constant deference to the teaching authority and Sacraments of the Church, nonetheless sets up a conflict between the normal Magestarium and the life in the Spirit. He dwells at length on the perceived enervating effect of the Church’s Counter Reformation emphasis on obedience and authority, which culminated in Vatican I’s declaration of papal infallibility. He falls all over himself confirming how this emphasis on obedience was a good and necessary thing, but insists that it has, somehow, caused Catholics to be far more passive than is good for them. He points to contemporary troubles of the Church in Europe, where the politics in even majority Catholic countries were dominated by secularists and other anti-Catholics.

He makes passing reference to the Jesuits, who (at least, in their fundamental form) were *the most* obedient body in the Church, thumbing their noses at the Protestants by adding an additional vow of obedience to the Pope. Jesuits (as founded, and sometimes in practice) were both the most obedient AND the most active of orders. Meaning, whatever supposed problems (excessive? hard not to see this) obedience presents, it seems to have missed the contemporary Jebbies.

It all rings false. On the one hand, he is careful not to criticize obedience to the Church too directly, and to even praise it; on the other, he’s inescapably criticizing obedience as the source of the *political* passivity of Catholics, and proposing shifting focus to the Spirit as a remedy.

Not surprising, he is a sort of patron saint to the American ‘spirit of Vatican II’ crowd. As in their interpretation of the council documents, the spirit of what Hecker means is to be followed, even when it contradicts the actual words he wrote.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau – The Difficult Lesson. Ha.
Love me some Bouguereau, but he’s *almost* doing that big eyes thing here.

Brownson shares with Hecker a tendency to see America as the next step in Salvation History. Men, freed from the shackles of a European history full of bad or at least outdated political ideas, finally build a near-Heaven on earth upon the foundational American ideas, which can only be sustained by the Catholic faith. To his credit, Brownson seems to have gotten over this ideas – the post-Civil War destruction of many of those supposedly foundational ideas, such as a minimal Federal government that respects the local rights of states – probably contributed to this.

Lots more to read. Just doing background at the moment, but both Brownson and Hecker have a lot to say about education. I want to know where they are coming from, first, before I get too deep into it. We need a term, say, Black Rabbit Holes or Rabbit Black Hole, to describe both the randomness and irresistable gravitational pull of the things that come up whenever one attempts a little scholarly research…

From the sublime to the ridiculous: On the whole, 2019 was better than 2018. This is not saying an awful lot. In 2018, I was fired from a job I’d had for 20+ years; slipped and fell on the rocks in the American River, cracking some ribs and needing stitches in my hand; learned what bedbugs are; and in general was some combination of ill or hurt or depressed for pretty much the entire year. Not a high bar to hurdle.

Let’s count the blessings: Starting around 6 months ago, finally started feeling better, lost about 30 lbs (got a ways to go!), had the youngest son get totally into the Boy Scouts & hiking and all that good nature-y stuff, had 2 kids graduate from college, had a daughter get engaged to marry a fine young man. So that’s pretty darn good! Not to mention the stock market has been very good to the retirement funds. (A couple more years along those lines might even make up for the last 20…)

However, after having burned through 2/3 of the emergency savings, I need a job. My wife lost her job of 15 years when the school we’d help found and sustain for 20 years went full gender theory on us. So I’ve now been unemployed for 18 months, and the missus for 6. Not sustainable!

May God bless you and yours over the next year, and save us from time getting any more interesting than necessary. For me and mine, 2020 is the Year of Getting a Job. Preferably sooner rather than later.

Beauty, Intellect, Beethoven & Scripture

A Happy, Holy & Blessed Christmas to all, and to all a happy and prosperous New Year!

Consider the 2nd movembt of Beethoven’s 7th symphony:

The story goes that when Beethoven debuted this work, the audience stopped the concert after this movement, and insisted it be repeated. Classical music audiences were a little more outgoing back in the day, it seems.

The audience’s reaction is perfectly understandable: pre-recorded music, one might die before getting a chance to hear this sublime and beautiful piece again, so why not now? A work this beautiful is life-changing. It may sound like just another overly-familiar classical work to jaded ears, but in context it is strikingly unusual: listen to the whole 7th, which is one of civilizations greatest works of art in any medium, and the 2nd movement still stands out.

But this Allegretto isn’t just aesthetically pleasing, it’s also deeply satisfying intellectually. The more you listen and think about it, the better it gets. Beethoven sets himself a series of puzzles or challenges, and ‘solves’ each one in inventive and unusual ways, yet, somehow, after you’ve heard it, all the little departures from expectations (or beauty where you didn’t know what to expect) sound utterly inevitable. And it fits perfectly within the symphony as a whole – as hard as it is to believe, it was only with this 7th symphony that Beethoven finally won over all the critics, many of whom had disliked his 3rd and nit-picked his 5th. The 7th is just perfect, and that 2nd movement slayed people.

Finally, as is true of all great art, the 7th, especially the 2nd movement, is bottomless: you can go as deep as you want, and there’s always more.

This confluence of soul stirring beauty and soul-stirring intellectual gratification is , of course, what makes great art great in the first place. Only in these dark modern times would anyone think to divorce emotional force from intellectual beauty.

These (mundane & traditional) thoughts were occasioned by the Christmas Gospel reading:

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus
that the whole world should be enrolled.
This was the first enrollment,
when Quirinius was governor of Syria.
So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town.
And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth
to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem,
because he was of the house and family of David,
to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.
While they were there,
the time came for her to have her child,
and she gave birth to her firstborn son.
She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger,
because there was no room for them in the inn.

Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields
and keeping the night watch over their flock.
The angel of the Lord appeared to them
and the glory of the Lord shone around them,
and they were struck with great fear.
The angel said to them,
“Do not be afraid;
for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy
that will be for all the people.
For today in the city of David
a savior has been born for you who is Christ and Lord.
And this will be a sign for you:
you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes
and lying in a manger.”
And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel,
praising God and saying:
“Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

LK 2:1-14

This Gospel story from Luke is beautiful in a specific and somewhat odd way. Consider these 2 sentences from the middle of the selection:

While they were there,
the time came for her to have her child,
and she gave birth to her firstborn son.
She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger,
because there was no room for them in the inn.

This is the climax of the story: Mary gives birth to the son foretold by the prophets and announced to her by an angel of God, yet Luke gives it a sentence, as if it were any other birth of any man. The Lord and Creator of the the Universe, as described in the opening of John’s Gospel, or even as, in a similarly subtle and understated way, in Mary’s encounter with her cousin Elizabeth in the passage immediately preceding this one, is wrapped in the cloth of the poor and laid in a feeding trough for animals, with the casual, after the fact explanation: there was no room in the inn.

So, two matter-of-fact sentences that lay out the entirety of the Christian claim, paradox and stumbling block: That God became Man in this very specific time and place, utterly weak and humbled, and was wrapped and bound and laid among the food for animals by his own mother’s hands. He wasn’t even able to find a place at what was no doubt the very humble inn.

The artwork inspired by these two lines could fill any number of museums; a concert of the music written to commemorate them would go on for months; and the books holding the writings about them would fill any number libraries. And the flood shows no signs of abating.

Then, a great multitude of angels sing a song of infinite glory – to a bunch of sheep, and the shepherds watching over them.

The story of Christ’s birth is as beautiful as it is simple, and satisfies the soul. But it is also intellectually satisfying, not in the sense of providing a tidy summation, but in the sense of offering infinite depths to explore.

Glory to God in the highest!

Polls, Un-Polls, & Invisible Statistics

Doing a little pew research…

As is often the case, an off-hand remark by Severian over on Rotten Chestnuts got me to thinking. He was discussing our nature as Dufflepuds – as self-congratulating idiots. Our – my – stupidity is generally more or less harmless, except when we start trying to run things or submit to being ‘ruled,’ an exercise with remarkable similarities to a herd being driven off a cliff. The risk is seriously exacerbated by democracy, in even the very small doses we tend to see in practice.

Severian’s remarks got around to polls and statistics, which as readers here know, I don’t hold in very high esteem for the simple reason that I know how they work. What would happen if ‘we, the people’ were actually consulted on major policy issues? Here’s the remark:

The borders, of course, would be closed — they don’t allow those polls to be taken anymore, because “immigration restriction” polled at something like 75% just a few years ago and the lunacy of the political class in a “democracy” going hard against three-quarters of the entire population is too glaring even for this tv-and-iCrap-addled country to stomach.

The People keep giving the wrong answer, in other words, so The People will not be asked anything of importance.  Same as it ever was.

There exist – I hope you’re sitting down – people who seem to take polling results from ‘respectable’ organizations like Pew and 538 as some sort of scientific results, requiring respect and submission. You can tell these people within a sentence or two, when they simply state some poll number as if it’s an established fact, and are baffled if not incensed if you push back.

Amazing, right? See: dufflepuds above. What Severian points out is that, on a deeper level, those organizations simple will not ask questions for which they don’t like the answers. I mean, they might ask the questions, but if the answers aren’t to their liking, we’ll never know about it.

In addition to the examples Severian gives, and honest pollster (ha! as likely as an honest politician or Bigfoot dropping into a local anthropology department for tea) might ask:

• should aborting a completely healthy baby who stands a near 100% chance of living if delivered by c-section be banned?
• should the state have the power to seize relatively inexpensive firearms (avoiding the controversial & undefined term ‘assault rifle’) from their law-abiding owners?
• should elected officials who destroy public records of their work, records required by law to be preserved, be removed from office, and banned from holding future office?
• should people convicted of any crime whatsoever, who are in this country without having been vetted by our legally established immigration services, be promptly and permanently deported?
• should tax-paying parents be allowed to drop into any state-funded classroom, K-grad school, at any time to see first hand what is being taught to their children, provided they remain quiet and respectful?

And many more you might think up – these will never be asked, or, if somehow they sneak through, never see the light of day. Call these Un-Polls.

What Pew, 538, etc., produce are *useful* polling results. Even if they have to make them up. Usually, they just bias the questions away from the way you or I or any honest person might ask them. Easy peasy. And they bias the pool. Only when that doesn’t work, do they just lie. Oh, I’m sure their lies are subtle enough at least to themselves as to trigger no twinge in what’s left of their consciences. Usually. Years of critical thinking has prepared them to quash any qualms that might sneak through.

We will simply not see polling results that don’t support a particular political agenda. This is a foreshadowing of what’s now being done in social media: when completed, we simply shall not see, and thus not be able to network with, people guilty of wrongthink.

The good news: it didn’t work in 2016. It didn’t work in England. The bad news: when it has worked, we are unlikely to ever have that brought to our attention.

…In Particular…

This section taken from the last long quotation from Orestes Brownson, from around 1870, is striking:

The exclusion of the Bible would not help the matter. This would only make the schools purely secular, which were worse than making them purely Protestant; for as it regards the state, society, morality, all the interests of this world, Protestantism we hold to be far better than no religion – unless you include under its name free-lovism, free-religion, woman’s-rightism, and the various other similar isms struggling to get themselves recognized and adopted, and to which the more respectable Protestants, we presume, are hardly less opposed than we are.

These “more respectable Protestants” have, with few exceptions, completely caved to the ‘ism-itis’ mocked by Brownson above. You want to see the fruits of an unbridled embrace of faddish isms? Check out your local Episcopalian or Methodist church. With, of course, some few exceptions.

A related quotation. Note that his use of ‘pastor’ and ‘parish’ is more after the English usage, and does not refer here to Catholics in particular, as the context makes clear:

The schools were originally founded by a religious people for a religious end, not by seculars for a purely secular end. The people at so early a day had not advanced so far as they have now, and did not dream of divorcing secular education from religion. The schools were intended to give both religious and secular education in their natural union, and there was no thought of the feasibility of separating what God had joined together. The Bible was read as a class-book, the catechism was taught as a regular school exercise, and the pastor of the parish visited the schools and instructed them in religion as often as he saw proper. Indeed, he was, it might be said, ex officio the superintendent of the parish schools; and whether he was chosen as committeeman or not, his voice was all-potent in the management of the school, in the selection of studies, and in the appointment and dismissal of teachers. The superiority in a religious and moral point of view to the schools as now developed may be seen by contrasting the present moral and religious state of New England with what it was then.

The religion, as we Catholics hold, was defective and even false; but the principle on which the schools were founded was sound and worked well in the beginning, did no injustice to anyone, and violated no conscience; for Congregationalism was the established religion, and the people were all Congregationalists. Even where there was no established religion and different denominations obtained, conscience was respected; for the character of the school, as well as the religion taught in it, was determined by the inhabitants of the school district, and nobody was obliged to send his children to it, and those only who did send were taxed for its support.

Vol. 13, pp. 242-244. (of his collected works?)

Finally, here he is, as timeless as Chesterton:

The great misery of society is in the fact that the people do not and cannot discriminate, and are carried away by half-truths, or by some particular phase of truth.  The human mind never does or can embrace pure, unmixed falsehood, and it is the true mingled with the false, or truth misapprehended, misapplied, or perverted, that gives currency to error and renders it dangerous.  It was the mingling of the true and the false in regard to religion that gave to the so-called Reformation its destructive power, and it is the mingling of the true and the false in regard to education that vitiates the popular theories of its necessity or utility in developing and sustaining the virtue of the people.

BQR January, 1874

Education Reading Update: More Orestes Brownson

Organizing materials for the book, came across some Brownson I’d collected but, as far as I can remember, have not commented on. He wrote quite a bit on education, and was typically blunt in his withering criticism of secular education, as education without religions is miseducation, and religious education that isn’t Catholic is simply the inculcation of heresy.

This small sample is from (I think) Brownson’s Quarterly Review sometime after the Civil War, in the last decade of his life. He is addressing the problem of state schools in America, at a time and place where Protestants and Catholics live intermingled :

Hitherto the attempt has been made to meet the difficulty by excluding from the public schools what the state calls sectarianism- that is, whatever is distinctive of any particular denomination or peculiar to it- and allowing to be introduced only what is common to all, or, as it is called, “our common Christianity.” [ Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’ – ed] This would, perhaps, meet the difficulty if the several denominations were only different varieties of Protestantism. The several Protestant denominations differ from one another only in details or particulars, which can easily be supplied at home in the family or in the Sunday-school. But this solution is impracticable where the division is not one between Protestant sects only, but between Catholics and Protestants. The difference between Catholics and Protestants is not a difference in details or particulars only, but a difference in principle. Catholicity must be taught as a whole, in its unity and its integrity, or it is not taught at all. It must everywhere be all or nothing. It is not a simple theory of truth or a collection of doctrines; it is an organism, a living body, living and operating from its own central life, and is necessarily one and indivisible, and cannot have anything in common with any other body. To exclude from the schools all that it distinctive or peculiar in Catholicity is simply to exclude Catholicity itself, and to make the schools either purely Protestant or purely secular, and therefore hostile to our religion, and such as we cannot in conscience support.

Yet this is the system adopted, and while the law enables non-Catholics to use the public schools with the approbation of their consciences, it excludes the children of Catholics unless their parents are willing to violate their Catholic conscience, to neglect their duty as fathers and mothers, and expose their children to the danger of losing their faith and with it the chance of salvation. We are not free to expose our children to so great a danger, and are bound in our conscience to do all in our power to guard them against it and to bring them up in the faith of the church, to be good and exemplary Catholics.

The exclusion of the Bible would not help the matter. This would only make the schools purely secular, which were worse than making them purely Protestant; for as it regards the state, society, morality, all the interests of this world, Protestantism we hold to be far better than no religion – unless you include under its name free-lovism, free-religion, woman’s-rightism, and the various other similar isms struggling to get themselves recognized and adopted, and to which the more respectable Protestants, we presume, are hardly less opposed than we are. If some Catholics in particular localities have supposed that the exclusion of the Protestant Bible from the public schools would remove the objection to them as schools for Catholic children, they have, in our opinion, fallen into a very grave mistake. The question lies deeper than reading or not reading the Bible in the schools, in one version or another. Of course, our church disapproves the Protestant version of the Bible as a faulty translation of a mutilated text; but its exclusion from the public schools would by no means remove our objections to them. We object to them not merely because they teach more or less of the Protestant religion, but also on the ground that we cannot freely and fully teach our religion and train up our children in them to be true and unwavering Catholics; and we deny the right of the state, the city, the town, or the school district to tax us for schools in which we are not free to do so.

We value education, and even universal education- which overlooks no class or child, however rich or however poor, however honored or however despised – as highly as any of our countrymen do or can; but we value no education that is divorced from religion and religious culture. Religion is the supreme law, the one thing to be lived for; and all in life, individual or social, civil or political, should be subordinated to it, and esteemed only as a means to the eternal end for which man was created and exists. Religious education is their chief thing, and we wish our children to be accustomed, from the first dawning of reason, so to regard it, and to regard whatever they learn or do as having a bearing on their religious character or their duty to God. … We hold that education, either of the intellect or of the heart, or of both combined, divorced from faith and religious discipline, is dangerous alike to the individual and to society. All education should be religious and intended to train the child for a religious end; not for this life only, but for eternal life; for this life is nothing if severed from that which is to come. …

Of course, we do not and cannot expect, in a state where Protestants have equal rights with Catholics before the state, to carry our religion into public schools designed equally for all. We have no right to do it. But Protestants have no more right to carry their religion into them than we have to carry ours; and carry theirs they do, when ours is excluded. Their rights are equal to ours, and ours equal to theirs; and neither does or can, in the eyes of the state, override the other. As the question is a matter of conscience and therefore of the rights of God, there can be no compromise, no splitting of differences or yielding of the one party to the other. Here comes up the precise difficulty. The state is bound equally to recognize and respect the conscience of Protestants and of Catholics, and has no right to restrain the conscience of either. There must, then, be a dead-lock, unless some method can be devised by which the public schools can be saved without lesion either to the Protestant or the Catholic.

(Vol. 13, pp. 244-247.)

Here is the argument as seen by a passionate Catholic intellectual in the second half of the 19th century, just as the Prussian model was starting to dominate the thinking of the elites. In practice, more kids at the time were being educated in one-room schools that graded classroom schools. These one-room schools were run exactly as Brownson describes: the local community, a true community in the sense that everybody knew everybody, built, funded, staffed, and managed their own school. In Protestant areas – most everywhere – they would be Protestant. I would assume, but do not know, that in the many Catholic immigrant farming settlements that sprang up across the Midwest and Great Plains during the last half of the 19th century, such schools would have been Catholic.

Anyway, fun topics to research. Downloaded a couple more books from the period, adding another 800-1,000 pages to be read. Have to retain focus!

A Personal Archaeological Coincidence (and pictures of bricks!)

A few weeks ago, some observations and advice crossed my Twitter feed (yes, I have a Twitter account. So sue me.) about how, as a man, to work more effectively. It came from Adam Lane Smith, writer of Maxwell Cain: Burrito Avenger and the Gideon Ira novels, whose day gig is psychological therapist.

The advice involved recognizing and capitalizing on the single-track nature of how men work, and building rituals and habits to enhance focus and eliminate distractions, and was just the little extra push I needed at the moment. So, I cleaned up my home office, which I’d allowed to get so cluttered that it had been unusable for about a year.

Some of the clutter consisted of boxes of old paper and files that had followed me around for decades. I bit the bullet and dug in, determined to find an appropriate place to file this stuff, with a bias toward the trash can.

Well. The oldest stuff was from college, and included the first serious musical composition I’d ever tried. It was hilarious in one way: the style changed not once, but twice between the opening and conclusion: I was figuring out stuff as I went, and incorporating it on the fly.

I have a file for such things. Filed it.

Then came writings dating back to the late 1980s. At least three novels in various stages – an outline, a couple chapters, a bunch of chapters – and a half dozen short stories. Also a letter from a professional writer-friend critiquing one of the short stories, a copy of which I did not find.

Finally, I found these:

Some clippings from the Sante Fe Reporter from December 14, 1983, announcing the upcoming Christmas Concert of the Santa Fe Women’s Ensemble, directed by Suzanne MacLean, who was my composition teacher at the time.

From the above piece.

This is from the same reporter, a few days later, a review of the concert.

While I remember the concerts well, and remember getting the review, I had forgotten what the reviewer had actually said. At the age of 25, I had found a composition teacher in Santa Fe, who also happened to be the founding director of the Santa Fe Women’s Ensemble, one of a number of pro and semi-pro classical musical groups in Santa Fe back then. While in 1983 Santa Fe had only about 40,000 residents, it punched way above its weight musically: in addition to the famous Santa Fe Opera, which attracted talent from opera companies around the world, there were at least 2 professional orchestras and 2 professional choirs, in addition to the Chorus of Santa Fe community choir (which I sang in sometimes) and the semi-pro Women’s Ensemble: Suzanne had assembled a group from the hired gun singer community, the kind of people you can throw music at and have it sung well with minimal practice.

Earlier that year, Suzanne had offered a once-a-week class in composition; I signed up along with a few other people. A few sessions in, she gave an assignment where we were to write a short composition using only ii-V-I chords. I was spending that week in Eugene, OR, and had no access to a piano, so I wrote something for piano and voice directly to paper and hoped it was OK. It came out well, and Suzanne offered to take me on for private lessons. She told me that if I wrote something for the Women’s Ensemble, they’d perform it.

So I did, a 3-minute loing Kyrie in 4 parts, SSAA. I knew in advance that normal voicing rules didn’t really apply – these gals were pros, and could sing very high, and very low. So I pushed things a little. The Kyrie section is very much polyphonic, but more after the modal fashion of Faure than classic Palestrina style. She liked it, but told me to cut loose on the Christe as a contrast. I was doubtful, but did it: it’s a bunch of very dense chords moving in a funky chromatic manner – you want contrast? I’ll show you contrast! – brought back around to F for a near-repeat of the Kyrie, in the traditional manner. Some soprano got to sing an a above the staff, mezzo-piano, and hold it for a while. Good times.

I know I have a recording, but can’t lay my hands on it. It’s in The Pile somewhere. When I find it, I’ll throw it up here for your listening pleasure.

After that concert, my next assignment caught me a little off-guard: Suzanne told me to write a string quartet after the style of Mozart. Um, what? This blue-collar kid from SoCal had never intentionally listened to string quartets, Mozart’s or otherwise…

But before I got too far, I had an opportunity to move to Albuquerque and attend an art school, where I could get piano lessons as part of the schooling and would have access to a nice grand to practice on. The piano teacher, Matalie Wham, was awesome, still the best I’d ever had. She is a tall as me – 6′ 2″ – with huge hands, and damn, she could play. I was blessed to study with her.

So I did that, and lost touch with Suzanne. For the next 4-5 months, I practiced anywhere from 5 to 10 hours a day. At the end, I knew that, if I stuck it out for another year or two, I could be good. My meager skill on the piano all traces back to this period.

But the art school was becoming intolerable. The director was, frankly, a sociopath, and many of the people there – it was a tiny school – were, let’s say, less than stable. Nowhere to hide. So I left, and signed up for classes at UNM. A few months of deliveries for Fox Foto and living in a freezing converted cinder block garage, and I’d really had it. My beloved future wife lived in Santa Fe, we saw each other only rarely (an hour drive each way, so weekends, pretty much), and I was burned out. So I packed my few belongings and a cat into my car, and headed back to SoCal, to get a job, settle down, with the goal of getting my beloved to marry me.

The whole marriage thing worked out very well, but I had to pretty much kill any musical dreams I had. Off and on, I directed and sang in some choirs, played in a coupole rock bands. But rock was never really my thing, and I frankly have very meager skill as a performer. I wrote some rock songs, but stayed away, mostly, from composing. Around age 40, 20 years ago, I found a composition teacher and signed up for some lessons, but we really didn’t hit it off.

A couple years ago, as my job started its death spiral, I started coming home from work and heading straight to the piano, and playing for an hour or two. Took out Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique, and some Joplin rags, and had at it. This is the most I’d played since my time with Matalie. (The Beethoven was and is way over my head, BTW, but I can sorta hack my way through it.)

Here’s the coincidence part: Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco has founded the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship. This institute sponsors the Benedict XVI vocal ensemble (16 members, get it?), a very impressive professional group of singers, under the direction of Richard Sparks.

The Benedict XVI performed settings of the O Antiphons as part of an Advent prayer service lead by the Archbishop at beautiful St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park.

St. Patrick’s Seminary Chapel. Sorry for the poor picture quality. Under Archbishop Cordileone, old artwork – those angels, for example – are being retrieved from storage and put back where they belong. Unfortunately, the glorious main altar, removed years ago after V-II, has somehow disappeared…

It was awesome. In his opening comments, Richard Stark mentioned that they would be singing each of the traditional chant settings of the O Antiphons, followed by a choral setting, except in the case of the O Clavis David, where he had been unable to find a suitable setting.

Well.

So, for the first time in years, I grabbed some music paper and a couple of pencils, went to the piano, and started pounding away at a vocal setting. First, I printed out the texts and chant settings, sang through them a few times, made some notes on texts and music (the ‘O’ is set the same in all 7 chants; the ‘Veni’ is identical in all but one; each contains the same ascending climax figure; each ends with nearly identical cadences. And so on.)

I’ve gotten half way through a very rough draft of O Clavis David; plan is to set all 7, using related themes and treatments, but with unique twists to each, such that the whole represents a culmination and single statement.

Hey, dream big.

(Note: I’m working on the education history book in the afternoon, after spending the morning job hunting. Composing happens in my spare time, and will not interfere with other activities. )

On an unrelated note, while I have done no work on the Eternal Brick Project since the end of summer, a nice bit of moss has started growing on the path to front porch, and it looks cool!

Update: Catholic Education, etc.

Writing posts to this blog, usually between 8 and 20 a month, hs been perhaps my major hobby and creative outlet for almost a decade now. Recently, the need to find some gainful employment has commandeered a large amount of my time and energy; prayers would be appreciated. (And leads – anybody need an expert in corporate return measures, equipment finance deal structuring, or – my real strength – dabbling like a boss? I’m available.) I’ve been scarce around here.

But, in an attempt to manage my sanity, such as it is, I’ve decided to dedicate 3 hours a day to ‘projects,’ chief of which is the on-going Education History Research and Book Writin’ Jamboree.

My lack of scholarly planning is going to require me to reread, or at least skim, many of the books I’ve already read, as I’ve taken few notes outside the references embedded in these blog posts. Some will be fun; many are tedium embodied. To keep my sanity, I’m going to start with a good one, Walch’s Parish School, especially since about a year ago Dr. Walch kindly sent me his most recently revised edition. It’s both a pretty quick read and very well sourced, which has pointed me to so much of the earlier work in the field.

The curse of the internet: Began to research the John Ireland/Catholic Bishops controversy of 1890, and discovered Archbishop Ireland wrote a book The Church and Modern Society. Since I’m painfully aware of the inadequacy of my knowledge of the history of American Church/State relations and the attitudes of Catholics toward the rabidly anti-Catholic Protestant establishment of 19th century America, I found a free online copy of this book and downloaded it. Another +/-500 pages to read.

It never ends. I have to remind myself of the main premise, and view potential source materials through that lens: that the largely unexamined adoption by 19th century American Catholic schools of Pestalozzi’s fragmentation and control theory of teaching, as reshaped by Fichte, conceded the war without a fight, no matter how many battles were won since.

Ireland’s thoughts seem very relevant to this main thesis. He seems, based on the little I know so far and to put it positively, to be very focused on baptising as much of American secular society and conforming the Church’s practices to it as possible. The underlying idea, as expressed most amazingly by Orestes Brownson in his The American Republic, is that the Church Herself is destined, if not already realized, to be most perfectly expressed in America. Inescapably, this requires taking a dim view of how the Church has been realized in Europe, and sows the seeds of condescension and conflict.

Here’s the witch’s brew I think I’ve sniffed: you take a few intellectual leaders like Brownson and Ireland, mix with the eagerness to fit in of the typical immigrant, add a heavy dose of the psychological as well as cultural and physical damage done to the Irish by 500 years of murderous English tyranny, and you end up with a desperation to, on the one hand, accept America as the apex of civilization and (most dangerous and least Catholic) as ‘the Future,’ and, on the other, to ignore or overlook the patent anti-Catholicism of that American vision.

This deal, whereby real Americans agree to pretend Catholics are members of the club so long as they burn just a pinch of incense to their gods, results in many bad things, from Bath House Jim Coughlin running Chicago with the tacit support of the Church while his brothels sell their daughters and his protection rackets corrupt their sons, through loyalty to the Democratic Party while that party shared leadership with the Klan over most of its range, right on down to the USCCB choosing to overlook the party’s rabid support of abortion (and, fundamentally, rabid hatred of Catholicism) in exchange for a few programs and policies that, if you squint just right, can be seen as tools of social justice instead of the naked power grabs they most clearly are.

This scene, whereby a mobster rejects Satan and all of his works while simultaneously ordering a hit on all his opponents, somehow seems appropriate to this discussion.

Floating in this morass is the ready acceptance, back in the 2nd half of the 19th century, of the compulsory age-segregated graded classroom model developed and adopted specifically to destroy family and Church. That this system has since fallen under the control of Marxists and their useful idiots only makes a terrible, evil situation worse.

There are certainly a number of good scholars who have done the general work on the history of education in America and of Catholic education specifically. I can’t hope, in the decade or two of life that may be left to me, to match their lifetimes of work, but I can, I hope, lay out and document this one central thing, and, much more important, provide some guidance for Catholic educational thinking – guidance away from a model meant to turn us and our children into mindless anti-Catholics with no home other than the State.

Also, I’m working on an bibliography of my education resources, to be posted as a permanent page here. It’s a lot of tedious work, but I need to get it done.