Boorman? How portentous. Was not Boorman the name of the director of the movie "Deliverance"?
Must have been someone else. After all, "Deliverance" was about redemption from nihilistic ennui with one's "regular" life, by being forcibly deprived of that life by (1) the brutality of nature, (2) the brutality of human beings debased by nature, but above all, (3) a mostly self-inflicted isolation from one's own nature. The scene at the boarding house, where such gestures as passing a plate of fried chicken to one's fellows around a dinner table -- the simple, almost brainless act of sharing -- reduces Jon Voight to tears, says it all.
Fr Boorman seems as though he would seek to effect our promethean liberation from such bourgeois fetters.
James Dickey was from your neck of the woods, wasn't he PP? A rare fellow, a modern poet who actually consented to live on the same planet as the rest of us. I don't know if he was religious, but he seems to have had the sensibility for it.
James Dickey was from Atlanta and taught at the University of South Carolina. To denizens of those states, my state of North Carolina is vast northern, liberal wasteland of the Duke Devils and Chapel Hill Tarheels.
Actually, I've been doing a bit of spadework for PP Central, although my memory of it has mercifully begun to recede.
At my mother's parish, the pastor recently took a week off. His stand-in at Mass was a priest who was purportedly soliciting on behalf of a perfectly fine charity known as "Food for the Poor".
This priest, Fr Blowhardius, hales from the diocese of Weakland, a land of ear-flap caps and windowpane-plaid wool coats, lousy beer, and lots and lots of sausage-making. Iron Johns roam the woods freely, sniffing buttercups and baaing happily.
I believe the diocese of Weakland was the setting for H. P. Lovecraft's "Catholic" novel, but I many be wrong about that.
Anyway, Fr Blowhardius was plainly determined to "shake things up". His sermon was a real barnburner. Though he had been in town only a couple days, Fr Blowhardius sized us up in an instant and found us wanting. He told us that we were much, MUCH too concerned with being "good". Fr Blowhardius considers being "good" a cowardly and obnoxious thing [this does not explain why he kept individuals in the confessional for 10-15 minutes apiece -- maybe he was trying to show them the error of their unhealthy obsession with "being good"]. Far better it is than being good, he informed us, to be "change agents for Christ".
Fr Blowhardius then conducted a question and answer session from the pulpit. He asked us questions about the faith, challenged us to respond with gusto, like true "change agents for Christ" would do, and when we didn't, he bellowed his questions to poor little Kevin Monaghan, the young fellow who had drawn the short straw of altar server duty that day, and who looked for all the world like he was witnessing the long-feared emergence of the monster from his closet.
Fr Blowhardius carried on in this manner for quite some time. In his last few sentences, he mentioned "Foor For the Poor", but I forget exactly what he said, so enraptured was I by my new status as a "change agent for Christ". I was hoping that there would be badges and t-shirts with that keen new logo, but alas, such was not the case.
What's the point of this booring post? It's always easier to tear down than to build. Put the commentator in charge of a liturgy with his peers and watch the fur fly. I have no sympathy for either side of this sorry debate.
"Put the commentator in charge of a liturgy with his peers . . . . "
Been done. Didn't work. Have you ever tried to find decent cannoli in Teheran?
Again Doister von Bugnini runs off with the prize, particularly for the Blowhardian account, which I, for one, would love to see scripted for a Catholic version of Saturday Night Live, or, at least, YouTube.
K. Ahmed Gonzales von Finkelstein still labors courageously under the presumption that urbanity generally means better liturgy, forgetting that provincial settings are often regions of exile into which the more traditional and orthodox priests in some dioceses are sent to dispose of them, either to keep them out of trouble in the urban centers or to punish them for trying to "turn back the clock" by introducing cossacks and Gregorian chant in suburban parishes.
PP,
It is bizarre, but I assure you and everyone that it is a true account.
Neo-Caths safely escounced in major population centers always express disbelief, but that's how it is out here in the hinterlands.
PP: I take it that introducting cossacks is all part of letting the Church breathe with two lungs again>
RR-D: Sir, you are the very pine-apple of politeness! I am sorry that other contributors to the comments box seem resolved to decline every particle that you enjoin them. (And I laughed like the clappers, too.)
Sorry - that should have been 'introducing', with a ? instead of a > at the end. My tiddly Apple laptop, combined with my fat fingers...
At last! A comment response I can show to my mother! Thank you, Sue.
"It's always easier to tear down than to build."
So true; but it appears Fr. Boorman drew first blood. He is the one who 'pulls down' the liturgy, yes?
My condolences to K. Ahmed Gonzales von Finkelstein, and his family.
==
Always easier to tear down than to build? Cliché, cliché.
1. It isn't always easier. I'm sure you've decorated rooms before now - at least, I assume that Americans do this? If you have, you'll know that the tedious, dull and massively lengthy part of the work is the tearing down: steaming off the old wallpaper, burning off the flaky paintwork, filling the holes in the plaster and sanding everything down. In my house, that can take months. The actual decoration is far, far quicker, and a great deal more satisfying; but it can't be done without the initial destruction.
2. Coming closer to your metaphor, if we're going to build, it has to be on solid foundations- rock, if we're going to heed the One who presumably knows best. Try to build on anything but Petrus and you're sunk. The Fr. Boormans have their own little sandboxes; and if anything is built on them, it will come to nothing.
Sue, beautiful!
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