The Wine-Dark Sea

Part 1 of the series is here.

The full text of The Waste Land is here, if you want to follow along.

Yes, this is going to be an entire blog entry about the poem’s title. There is just so much to say before we even get to the main body of the text.

Already I’m grasping and fumbling for focus. Where to begin? Yes, focus has always been my weakness as a writer. When I fell in love with The Wasteland and wrote an essay on it in my freshman year I am positive it was a weak paper because I lacked focus. Still, what I chose to write on was the role of the Grail legend in the poem. To me the story of the grail was the key that unlocked the poem. So that is where I will start on this journey as well.

One of the things that makes The Waste Land so difficult is its density and fragmentation. The poem is made up of a series of either allusions to or direct quotations from other texts, poems, plays, operas, etc. Many are not even in English. It can be so overwhelming. (But then the Catholic liturgy is also intimidating to someone who has just stumbled in off the street.) Eliot’s technique of allusions makes the poem a kind of dense hypertext mosaic where each new line can contain a new reference to a different literary work. The poem is rather like one of those mosaic pictures where each panel is an entire picture in its own right. But as I will later show, there is a reason for this method. The method itself points to the meaning.

The Waste Land is like a treasure map and the title is the first clue. Once we understand that it is an allusion to a particular version of the Grail legend, then it tells us that we are on a quest. Yes, that’s right, as you read this poem you are setting out on the greatest of all quests: the Quest for the Holy Grail. That’s what I love about The Waste Land, it is a modern retelling of one of the greatest of all legends. From Monty Python, to Indiana Jones to Dan Brown, the quest for the grail continues to have a strong grip on the contemporary imagination.  In The Wasteland, however, you will find neither King Arthur nor the knights of the Round Table. You will not find heroic crusaders or intrepid archaeologists. And no grotesque fantasies about the sacred feminine or claptrap about Mary Magdalene being the bride of Jesus. Instead, Eliot’s version of the grail legend draws on the legend of the Fisher King and is a little more obscure—but more about that anon.

Another thing that makes the poem difficult is the cacophony of voices. Eliot’s original working title was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”, a reference to a character in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend who reads the newspaper with different voices. The allusion suggests a means to make sense of the cacophony: there is a controlling narrator to the poem who is “doing” all the different voices. There is a consciousness that is creating meaning. He is stitching together the various pieces that make up the poem and forming them into a sort of patchwork quilt. He is a sort of pilot steering a course in the seeming storm of words and images. Yes, I’m mixing my metaphors dreadfully, but it’s hard to talk about the poem without making a metaphor salad.

Now back to the Fisher King…. The version of the grail myth that Eliot is alluding to in the title might not be familiar to the reader as it is from Perceval, an unfinished romance by Chrétien de Troyes. (An aside: it’s fascinating to note that Eliot chooses to base his poem on a version of the grail story that is a fragment, unfinished. Fragmentation is a major theme in the poem.) Though the story of the Fisher King does appear in modern form in the fabulous movie of that name directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Robin Williams—I highly recommend it. I’m going from memory here and not looking up the story but the basic gist is that a knight on a quest comes to a barren land that has been stricken by some kind of plague or famine. He goes to a castle whee he finds a king, fishing. He finds that the king of the land is also wounded and wasting away. There is some kind of mystical connection between the king’s illness (a wound in his leg or groin. infertility?) and the sickness that has infested his realm. Only the grail can heal the wounded king. The knight must find the grail and heal the king, which will then heal the land.

While the knight is dining at the king’s hall he is presented with a vision of a youth carrying a spear and a maiden carrying the grail. Here he makes a fatal error in that he doesn’t exhibit any curiosity about the strange vision and fails to ask any questions about what it means. So he fails in the quest and goes off to wander aimlessly. The asking of the questions is somehow key to finding out what the grail is and that is somehow key to healing the king and his land.

Eliot has stated that the story of the Fisher King is a part of the mythological backdrop behind his poem and this is one poem that demands that you reach beyond the bare words of the text and into the various works that the text alludes to. The poem casts the reader in the role of the questing knight. In order to understand the poem, you, the reader, are required to become the knight. You are required to ask the questions that will make sense of the fragments that Eliot lays out before you. You are required to do the hard work of stitching them together into a coherent picture, a patchwork quilt. You must exhibit curiosity, ask questions of the text, delve into the meaning behind the symbols that Eliot mysteriously parades before you. The poem’s very obscurity points to the meaning, the need to cease being a passive observer, to ask questions, to realize that perhaps you are as much in need of the grail as is the wounded king.

A great book on the subject of the Holy Grail is The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence by Mike Aquilina (I blogged about it very briefly here.) Aquilina maintains that the search for the grail is the search for the Real Presence of Christ. Frankly, I can’t see how this is even arguable. You can only imagine the Grail as something other than a symbol for Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist if you have divorced the legend from history and are reading it through a hermeneutic of suspicion. The plain meaning of the Grail has always been that it was the chalice that Christ used at the Last Supper. Sometimes it is also said to have caught Christ’s blood at the crucifixion. But of course to a Catholic sacramental imagination that is really a symbolic redundancy.

The Fisher King is an image both of Christ, the wounded king, the fisher of men, and also of humanity, wounded, in need of a savior. The act of fishing represents hope. Christ is often symbolized by a fish. Thus fishing can be seen as a representation of the search Christ. The Fisher King is a symbol of how the Body of Christ is wounded. The knight’s failure to ask questions speaks of our unwillingness to seek answers,our unwillingness to ask for healing. It speaks to me of my own situation, stuck in sin, avoiding confrontation with my own sinfulness, avoiding the confessional where I can confront that sin and have it washed away.

I could say so much more about this; but I think I’ll leave it at that for now. We will meet the Fisher King again in the poem. Keep him in mind as you read. He is part of a whole series of images that speak about the sacraments, especially the sacraments of baptism and of Eucharist.

Previous post: Blogging The Waste Land

Next post: Blogging The Waste Land Part 3—Epigraph and Dedication

Master Index of Waste Land posts.

Sometimes you read a book and immediately want to tell everyone all about it. It’s that good. Fortunately I have a blog.

I just read the most marvelous book that we got from the library last week, A Snow Story by Melvin J. Leavitt, illustrated by Jo Ellen McAllister Stammen. After we came home from the library it was dumped into the book basket and forgotten until I excavated it at Ben’s nap time today. I’d pulled it off the shelf because the title seemed seasonally appropriate and the cover intrigued me. Then when I peeked inside and saw something about Granddad writing poems in the snow with his boots I suspected this might be a book for us. Oh and it was. I kept having to pause because my voice kept catching. I may have even had to wipe away a few tears.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be in print anymore, though Amazon did have a few copies. I’ve already ordered one for us because it was that lovely. The illustrations are soft and wonderful and compliment the text perfectly. But oh it was the story that grabbed me. It’s about a dreamy boy named Johnny growing up on a farm with practical parents. Sometimes in January or February on the day after a big storm he goes out to the frozen lake and walks back and forth. When his mother asks what he was doing, he explains that he was writing a poem, “In the snow. With my boots.” The pattern continues with his wife and then his children and then his grandchildren asking what he is doing. His answer is the same every time. And then…. well, poems written in snow don’t last… or do they? I love the way this book speaks to the heart of what a poem is: a marvelous thing that sparks more wonders. Sometimes long after the words have faded, when you least expect it, the magic reappears and your heart leaps up.

All aboard the breakfast train!

It’s been a long weekend—a good weekend; but long. and it’s not really over because Dom is taking the day off today. I had a quick takes post all done and ready to be published Saturday night but my computer ate it. So I’m just going to skip ahead and try to recap the whole weekend from Friday on in one massive omnibus post.

On Friday I had some last-minute Epiphany shopping to do. Santa brings the kids each a book or two and a couple of toys. Then Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandad (my parents) give them gifts at Epiphany. So I asked my sister to watch the big kids and I took Anthony with me and we hit a bunch of different stores. Most of the time with all four kids I only ever make one stop. Two very short ones at most. With the exigencies of meals and nap times and nursing and the added time of getting four little people ready and four little people in and out of car seats anything else just becomes unwieldy. So it was a treat just getting to go to places I don’t usually have time for and to only have one little body to buckle and unbuckle. We ended up at the mall that is right near Dom’s work so I called him up and asked him if he had lunch plans. He didn’t and so after Anthony and I had run our errands we met Dom at the nearby sushi buffet.

Anthony, my sweet traveling companion.

Yes, I had a real lunch date with my husband. Anthony is so quiet and calm that it was almost as if the two of us were alone. We were able to have real conversation without interruptions and not having to talk over the babble and giggles of three energetic preschoolers. I stuffed myself with miso soup and sushi and udon noodles and sesame chicken. Oh yum!

Bella, vacuuming!!!

On Friday evening Bella surprised me by announcing that she wanted to learn how to vacuum. To understand how incredible this is, you have to understand how much Bella used to hate, loathe, and abhor the vacuum. She used to burst into hysterical tears when I turned it on. As a toddler she’d run from the room and slam the door behind her. Even as recently as a few months ago she’d go to her room and shut the door when I ran it. And now she’d decided she wanted to run it. I thought it was probably too heavy for her; but if she was so eager I was willing to let her have a go. Amazingly, once I’d plugged it in and showed her how to work it, she did a wonderful job, even moving boxes and lifting the rug to vacuum under them. It was a dream come true. 

Barefoot Bella.

Anthony grazing.

Sweet Sophie

Bella, stripped to her undershirt because she got overheated while running around. January 7 folks! The only way you can tell this is winter is the lengths of the shadows at 2 pm.

On Saturday the weather was like summer. 61 degrees! The girls were running around in the backyard barefoot and in short sleeves. Dom pushed Anthony and Sophie in the swings and I sat on the back step and chatted with my parents on the phone. Then we let Anthony crawl around on the grass. He was so gleeful to be outside and mobile. He shrieked and clapped, lifted fistfuls of leaves and grass in his fists and even shoved some into his mouth. After he’d sat and explored for twenty minutes or so he began to crawl around. There was something so determined, almost manic, in his head-down rush through the grass, crackling dried leaves under his hands and knees. He was muddy and cold but happy when he finally gave in and crawled over to be picked up. Poor Ben napped through the whole backyard extravaganza. By the time he woke everyone had come in and the sun was setting.

Also on Saturday the kids asked to make gingerbread men and so I had a flash of inspiration and decided we could make gingerbread kings in honor of the feast of Epiphany. We cut out gingerbread men and then I stuck on points to the tops of their heads to make crowns of a sort. Good enough for my crew. They each got three kings plus a star and a present to decorate with currants. Ben later decided he didn’t like the strong tasting cookies but the girls were very pleased with their creations.

My stash of new books.

Today we got up and went to Mass and then came home to open presents. There was a big pile from Dom and I and another huge pile of Amazon boxes from my parents. I wish I’d got pictures but I didn’t. The kids mostly got books. The only exception was a twin sized quilt for Sophie who keeps waking up several times every night wanting her blankets tucked over her again. We’re hoping a big quilt will be easier for her to put back on for herself and maybe we’ll get more sleep. Also, Ben and Anthony got a toy tug boat for the bath tub. I’ll post book lists later of these plus the books they got at Christmas.

My new Madonna.

Dom got me a couple of books plus a beautiful statue of Mary and baby Jesus that I’d put on my wishlist. My mom gave me more books and a pair of down-filled slippers and some smart touch gloves. They’re knit with some kind of metal threads so that all ten fingers can be used with my iPhone. So cool! I gave Dom a new baseball cap—he’s been wanting one—plus a knit winter cap with a Patriots logo that was on sale at the store where I got the ball cap. It is handy when husbands tell you exactly what they want and where to get it. My sister got a set of Father Barron’s Catholicism dvds. We all watched the first episode and part of a second. Wow! They are really spectacular. I’ll probably be writing more about them.

I love how Jesus is nestled against Mary’s shoulder.

We did a video chat with my parents and brothers (and my brother Tim’s finace). Not much communication happened, in fact I ended up with a headache. But the kids love to see everyone and everyone loves to see the kids so it’s worth the chaos.

Then tonight we went out for dinner because I’d neglected to buy anything special for today and no one really wanted chicken and no one felt like cooking anyway. We went to this fabulous Indian/Nepalese restaurant called Fishtail that just opened near us. So very good. A little odd that they had a huge copy of a Winslow Homer piece as a mural on one wall. The food was really some of the best I’ve had. The kids survived on rice, naan, and tandoori chicken. They also really liked the rice pudding dessert. Anthony mostly had Cheerios but also gnawed on a piece of naan. It felt kind of appropriate, after all the kings did come from the East. Certainly it was festive and made it feel like a real holiday. When the girls are old enough to really help int he kitchen then it might be a treat to have big, home-cooked meals on holidays but right now it’s just not something I can pull off.

I think that this year the one resolution I am going to make it to learn how to be realistic about what I can and can’t do with four children under six. I have all these lofty ideas and ambitions but the reality is that I just don’t have all that much free time. My life is one long series of interruptions and everything takes a back seat to making sure the children are fed and clothed and the household reasonably maintained. Schooling Bella is something that happens when I think about it—though the girl is sharp as can be and is always learning even if we’re not doing formal lessons. I’m learning to make a sort of truce with chaos and mess and never really getting the house to a satisfactory level of clean and tidy. I’m learning to make a sort of truce with the fact that I can’t spend as much time being a creative cook, doing crafty projects with the kids, sewing, reading, playing, napping, or any one of a number of other things I wish I was doing more of. This is life right now and it’s not going to change. I need to find the right balance still, but I’m starting to recognize my need to make much more sever compromises than I’d ever thought I’d find myself making. And I suppose that is a part of the adventure of motherhood.

At least I can drink a little wine, beer, or port now and then. And lace my cocoa with a bit of amaretto or kahlua.

Today was a rather hard day. I forgot last night that mulligatawny soup has lentils in it. Lentils and beans are not friendly to my dear Anthony. I’ve had to remove them from my diet completely while he’s nursing. Even though I really like beans, I do not like having a baby who screams for hours in the middle of the night and writhes and kicks my stomach black and blue. Oh no I do not like it at all. Poor little fellow was so so miserable. And once I realized what the problem was I felt so bad. Evidently Anthony does not know that beans are good and cheap. Nope, no beans for me until he weans. Thank God Dom was home today. It meant I got a little tiny nap with Anthony (he wouldn’t sleep unless I was lying down with him.) And it means things didn’t fall apart completely. Dom made dinner and cleaned up after accidents and helped keep cranky kids in line.

Today we also took down the tree and removed the wreath from the front door and boxed up all the ornaments and decorations. The house feels sad. I think this week I need to give everything a good cleaning to lift my spirits. Still, I suppose in a way it’s nice not to have the packing up looming over me as one more task to be done. And I’m grateful to Dom for doing the bulk of the tree un-trimming. And now back to ordinary time. Goodbye, Christmas, it feels like we hardly knew you this year.

Sophie says everyone is having Midnight Mass in the stable. I’m going to miss the antics of the stable.

Happy Feast of the Epiphany. I have so much to write about our recent doings and especially our celebration of today’s feast; but am not sure I’ll get it posted tonight. But I wanted to get this up before the day is over. Late though it is, better than missing it altogether.

The Journey of the Magi
by T. S. Eliot

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

You can hear a recording of Eliot reading The Journey of the Magi at the Poetry Archive.

When Dom was first setting up this site for me, almost exactly seven years ago, and we were brainstorming about a name, one of the first names that I considered was The Waste Land, after the poem by T. S. Eliot, which is one of my favorites. That domain name, in just about any permutation, was already taken and so I went with a second choice, which is actually probably a better one. But I still adore the Eliot poem and recently I have conceived a hankering to share it with everyone in this space. It began when Calah mentioned it in a blog post at Barefoot and Pregnant. In the comments someone said that it was bizarre and too obscure for her. And my heart yearned to explain to the (poor! benighted!) commenter how absolutely wonderful, beautiful and good and true the poem is. Then I found myself mentioning it again in my blog post about People Look East.

After I mentioned The Waste Land in my Make your House Fair post, I found myself pondering it in the shower (All my best ideas come to me in the shower). I was recalling my youthful zeal to enlighten the masses about how wonderful Eliot is. I have found that even among people who love The Waste Land it is often misunderstood. (See my soapbox down there. I’m climbing up on it, which means I’m liable to get a bit pretentious. So if you don’t like that sort of thing, you can skip these posts and go look at the cute pictures of my kids.) When I first encountered it, I was told that The Waste Land is a poem about the bleakness and despair of the modern world—which is true to a point; but if it is a poem about doubt it is also a poem about hope. In the Judeo-Christian tradition the desert has often been a place of renewal, in the Bible new life is always springing up in places that were thought to be barren. I prefer to read The Waste Land as a great Christian epic that asserts that the problem of faith in the modern of world is not really a new problem but that people in every age need to seek again for the source of life.

So I said to myself, “Self, you should write a series of blog posts about The Waste Land. It would make a wonderful Lenten meditation, for example.” I’m not sure where the idea came from because it isn’t the sort of thing I’m likely to want to do. Still, I’ve learned to trust these moments of inspiration. However, I don’t want to wait until Lent to begin—by then i might have lost my initial impetus—so I’m going to just jump into it now and see where it goes. Though if I take this series as slowly as I suspect I will have to, I may very well be continuing it through Lent and beyond.Depending on how much I linger on each section and how often I post, this project could take months and months.

So there you go. My new project. A completely crazy return to my roots both as an academic and a writer and a new grand goal for the new year.

I don’t want this to be an academic paper, an essay, nothing that formall, although I have been an academic and so I suspect that despite my best efforts to the contrary, the tone will tend to creep in that direction unless I hold very firm to my blogging voice. Still, lapses in tone notwithstanding, instead of a well-organized piece of academic writing, this will be very much a series of unedited blog posts by a sleepy mommy who just wants to exercise the part of her brain that she fears is declining into mush. I hope to jot down my various thoughts and impressions on the poem as they come to me in a of consciousness kind of way. I don’t propose to consider every word or even every line, just such bits and pieces as catch my fancy. It will not happen on any kind of predetermined schedule and it may in fact be irregular and infrequent. I have no idea how it will play out at all. But I am very excited at the prospect of being able to share one of my favorites—one of the great poems of the English language—with you. I do hope you will read along and add your comments and insights to mine. Feel free to argue with me, to dispute my interpretations. I love a good debate, so long as it stays civil.

Before We Begin

I want to go ahead and jump right in with a few framing observations to set the scene. Eliot is often accused of being inaccessible and hard to read. Perhaps that is a just charge. I don’t think Eliot set out to be easy but I don’t think the poem is meant to be impossible either. It’s not like Finnegan’s Wake, which I suspect is difficult just for the sake of being difficult.

Poetry has always been the way I see the world; but I know for many people it is very hard. Still, I have never found Eliot anything other than a challenge, an invitation to dig deep or to scale the heights, I can’t quite decide which metaphor to use. I suppose you could say that he is my Everest, the mountain I had to climb because it was there.

I do know that I loved Eliot from the first time I met when, as a sophomore in high school, I was assigned The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Oh that poem still delights and amazes me! When a few years later I read The Waste Land as a freshman in college, in the spring of 1993—can it really be that it was almost twenty years ago?! I feel so old!—I was absolutely blown away, swept off my feet. The romance between Eliot and I lasted all four years of college and has continued to this day. To say that Eliot is my favorite poet is such an understatement. After I did my junior poet project on Eliot, I came to know him more thoroughly than I know any other author. His poetry reaches deep into the core of my being and is a part of who I am at the very heart of my spiritual and intellectual life. So in a way this is another rough draft of the paper I couldn’t really write as an inarticulate freshman or as a slightly less tongue-tied junior English major. I still can’t really write it fully; but I’m willing to give it another go.

I believe The Waste Land is the poem par excellence that grapples with the problem of faith in a post-Christian world. True, the poem doesn’t mention Christ by name nor is it explicitly Christian in its imagery. But it is, to borrow a phrase from Flannery O’Connor, Christ-haunted. I believe that one must enter into the world of the poem and to accept it on its own terms but that it does help to have a tour guide. I propose to become that guide, to offer my own insights and experiences of it. The poem is only difficult because the subject matter is difficult. It is only obscure because so much of the material it takes for granted has been lost. Reading it is participating in an archeological dig of sorts, you wade into the rubbish heap certain that you will find a treasure whose value is beyond price.

Now that I think about it, I suppose this project is really about my own renewal as well. I want to dive into the poem in the hopes of recovering the zeal I had a decade ago as a young English major. I want to restore that which has been lost, to dig deeper in the hops that this time I will uncover even more than I had found before. But I hope that for you, the blog reader, it will be interesting and entertaining. Even if you have no interest in Eliot or poetry, perhaps you will find something in these posts that will speak to you.

* Image credit: Black Cross with Red Sky by Georgia O’Keefe

Next post: T.S. Eliot and the Last Crusade—Blogging the Waste Land Part 2

Master Index of Waste Land posts.

Monday morning we were invited to a special Mass of dedication for the chapel of the new convent of the Daughters of Mary of Nazareth. Dom said it was going to be a very small affair, there wouldn’t be a large crowd there. Even he was surprised at how small it was. There was a grand total of twenty people in the tiny chapel. That number included the Cardinal and all the clergy and Mother Olga and three of her four candidates (the fourth was away visiting her family for the holidays.) Which means our family was almost a third of the people there. Dom’s colleague, George was videotaping the Mass and we were agonizingly aware of how noisy our little crew was. Dom kept reminding himself that Mother Olga specifically invited the children to come. None of them were bad; but their usual noise tends to get lost in a larger church, in a smaller space you knew everyone heard every whine and giggle.

The chapel was tiny, about the size of our living room. In fact, it used to be the living room of the house. The left wall had a fireplace in it and was lined with built-in bookshelves. Ben was especially fascinated by the fact that during the Mass the Cardinal’s crozier was resting on top of the mantle right next to us. The altar stood in a large bay window and the right side of the room had several more windows so the whole space was bright and cheerful. Sophie was fascinated by the flowers on the rug. There was a lovely statue of the Holy Family, Joseph tenderly holding the hand of the child Jesus.

It was a very beautiful Mass. There was incense. I love incense. We sang the Litany of the Saints. I adore the Litany of the Saints. There was singing but no musicians, no accompaniment, just voices raised in joyful praise. I think in general that the Mass is more restful without musicians playing. Acapella singing really is so beautiful. The children knew both of the hymns—the processional was Hark the Herald Angels Sing and the recessional was Immaculate Mary. Oh the joy! They love being able to sing in church but all too often the hymns at our parish are ones they don’t know. Bella was fascinated during the actual blessing of the altar and asked Dom to lift her up so she could see Cardinal Sean sprinkle it with holy water and then bless it with incense.

When we first came in Jen, one of the candidates, handed us a couple of the laminated crib sheets that remind you of the prayers that have changed with the new translation. I thanked her and promised I’d try to keep Anthony from destroying it, remembering how he’s chewed the corners off of about six of them by now. She gravely informed me that they were laminated so I needn’t worry. Oh but she doesn’t know Anthony. Sure enough, he’d managed to grab it when I was distracted and had chewed off a corner well before time for communion. When she came around after the Mass and gathered the cards I apologized and told her I’d warned her. She merely smiled and said that she would treasure it. Anthony was pretty good through the Mass even though it was his nap time. He almost fell asleep on my shoulder during the Litany of saints but it ended a few minutes too soon. At the end of Mass I had put him down on the floor in front of me to stand holding onto the back of the pew. I thought he was fine there and so dared to stand for the recessional hymn. I looked down too late to see him disappear under the pew in front of me, crawling towards Dom’s boss’s legs. I had a vision of him grabbing onto Scot’s pants and trying to pull himself to a stand. Yikes!

I think my favorite part of the Mass was the Cardinal’s homily. The first reading for the Mass of the dedication of a church is from the book of Maccabees and tells about the dedication of the altar after the Temple has been rebuilt and cleansed. So Cardinal Sean talked a bit about the significance of the altar and the history of the early Christians celbrating MAss in the catacombs ont he tombs of the saints. The Gospel was the story of Zaccheus, which has always been one of my favorites. The Cardinal pointed out how Zaccheus, the chief tax-collector, was willing to be so undignified as to climb a tree merely to get a glimpse of Jesus, just hearing about Jesus had inflamed his desire to such a point that he didn’t care about his appearance or what people thought. He had indeed become like a child, for tree-climbing is a childish activity. (Oh isn’t that wonderful!) He also contrasted the figure of Zaccheus with the figure of the rich young man. When Jesus called Zaccheus by name was further inflamed by the knowledge of Christ’s love for him so that he resolves to pay back the money he’s taken and to give half of what he has to the poor. The rich young man looks down and refuses to meet Jesus’ gaze when Jesus looks on him with love and he is unwilling to part with his possessions. The Cardinal spoke especially to the evangelistic calling of the Daughters of Mary Nazareth when he said that we are all called to look with love on the tax-collectors and outcasts among us.

So yes, as usual I spent most of the Mass riding herd on my little flock of children, keeping them in place and trying to keep them from being too loud, putting on shoes that fell off, kissing fingers and heads that got smashed, breaking up squabbles and grabbing everything away from Anthony’s grasp… but I did get to hear the homily and absorbed it! And at the end of Mass I felt a profound peace and happiness. I wanted to linger and not go home. But soon we had our coats and we’d said our farewells and happy new years. Snow was starting to fall as we walked outside.

We did stop by the garden to take in the statues of Our Lady of Fatima and the shepherd children. While Ben and Sophie were running about hugging the statues and playing peek-a-boo around Mary the Cardinal came out to bless the statues and to admire the view of the lake that you could see through the trees. He led us in praying a Hail Mary and singing a Marian song in Portuguese while Ben and Sophie, heedless of the prayers, continued to shriek and play. Then Ben fell and got muddy and it really was time to go.

It took us forever to get the children into the car and give them the snacks they were so hungry for. I looked back over my shoulder to see that Mother Olga and her candidates were still standing before the door, none of them wearing coats, the girls shivering in the cold breeze. So I hopped into the car and we drove to the end of the drive where we finished getting everything together for the ride home.

We did stop for lunch, a special treat of burritos at Anna’s Taqueria. Everyone had a very happy lunch and the boys fell asleep on the car ride home. What a lovely way to begin a new year!

Here’s a video of the Mass. I doubt very much anyone will want to watch the whole thing. But you can hear Anthony and the others interrupting a few times. Especially during Cardinal Sean’s homily.

Blessing of new Altar - St. Joseph of Nazareth Convent from Archdiocese of Boston on Vimeo.

La Salette Shrine

Last year my mother-in-law had a special birthday request. On the eve of St Nicholas, the family gathered at La Salette Shrine and had birthday cake and saw the lights. It was a good time. This year on St Nicholas day Bella asked why we hadn’t gone to the shrine again. I promised her we would; but we never were able to organize the extended family for a trip. Christmas came and we still hadn’t made it. So we said we’d go one day this week because Dom was off, and yet day after day we didn’t quite make it. At the beginning of the week we were still recovering from Midnight Mass. Later in the week, well, we just got busy. We knew New Year’s Day is the last day for the lights. Going last night was cutting it rather close; but go we did.

Bella, Sophie and Ben at the rosary pool.

We went to Longhorn Steakhouse for dinner first. (Dom had won a gift card.) It was a little crazy to take four kids out on New Year’s Eve. Even as early as 5pm there was already a one hour wait. So we grabbed the kids a snack at Panera next door while we waited for our table. Dinner was nice. I got an excellent steak salad, very peppery steak cooked perfectly.

Sophie coming down the stairs from the recreation of the hill at La Salette, France where Mary appeared to a couple of peasant children.

After dinner we went to the shrine to see the lights. Not only is it a fabulous light display but its also very meditative and prayerful. My favorite moment was when a couple of teenagers decided to go up the prayer stairs up to the life-size crucifix on their knees.  Other highlights were a large series of the stations of the cross, the gigantic wooden rosary, a life-size Nativity scene, a live donkey named Clopper, a series of sign boards telling the story of St Nicholas and another series telling the nativity story. Bella amazed us all by correctly identifying all the joyful and glorious mysteries. She was a bit uncertain on the sorrowful mysteries, though. Oops.

Sophie and Bella descending the stairs from the crucifix. You can’t really make out me with Anthony in the background, but we’re there.

It was a lovely way to say farewell to the old year. Perhaps we’ll make this our family’s New Year’s Eve tradition. There weren’t huge crowds and it wasn’t too cold. The only thing I’d have changed was to get to the shrine earlier. We were much later than I expected because of the whole restaurant thing. But even that worked out pretty well.

Me with Anthony. Anthony loved the lights.

Happy New Year, everyone, may God bless you abundantly in the coming year.

I tried, I really did, to keep track of everything I read this year and I think I did a fairly credible job, though I am also positive that something or other has slipped through the cracks. Now that I go back to look at the year I’m kind of depressed at how meager the list is. I think I completed 29 books and began a dozen or so more. While my sister encourages me by saying that’s a very credible number for a mom of four little ones, I’m pretty sure it is a personal lifetime low. I used to read at least twice that many in a year. Oh well, I had my fourth baby at the beginning of this year and he’s really kept me on my toes.

What really makes me feel depressed is actually not the number of books I finished but the number of books I began and didn’t finish. So many times I got distracted and put a book aside meaning to come back and I never did. I want to go apologize to all those unfinished books, let them know it wasn’t their fault but my own negligence. I’m sure they were all wonderful books; they just got stuck with me in a flaky year when my attention span was very short and things were very much hit or miss with me.

My resolution for 2012 is to read more books, to concentrate on finishing what I start and to go back to finish all the books I didn’t finish this year…. and to spend less time on Facebook. (I’ve already stopped using Twitter for the most part. I miss it terribly at times but I decided I only could handle one social media venue at a time and Facebook is where the majority of my friends and family are.)

In January I read four books and began six more. Of those six I finished three of them. The other three are still waiting to be finished. That seems especially pathetic. Maybe I need to put them on the top of my to do list for 2012

Finished in January:

1. Lay Siege to Heaven by Louis de Wohl

2. The glorious folly;: A novel of the time of St. Paul by Louis de Wohl

3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

4. Our Lady of the Lost and Found by Diane Schoemperlen

In February I finished three of the books I started in January and started three more, one of which I still haven’t finished.

Finished in February:

1. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

2. The Winds of Marble Arch by Connie Willis

3. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep by Rumer Godden

In March I read three books, began two more and kept plugging away at one of my in progress books.

Finished in March:

1. The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr

2. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing Of The Dog…) by Jerome K. Jerome

3. Dreamers, Discoverers & Dynamos: How to Help the Child Who Is Bright, Bored and Having Problems in School (Formerly Titled ‘The Edison Trait’) by Lucy Jo Palladino PhD

In April I finished only one book but it was a whopper. I began one more. Not too shabby.

Finished in April:

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

In May I read six books (though three of them were YA and one was mostly pictures) and started two more that I never finished.

Finished in May:

1. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis

2. Your Baby Is Speaking to You by Dr Kevin Nugent with photographs by Abelardo Morell.

3. The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book I: The Mysterious Howling by Maryrose Wood

4.  The Road from Roxbury by Melissa Wiley.

5. The Penderwicks at Point Mouette by Jeanne Birdsall

6. Imperial Renegade by Louis de Wohl

In June, July and August I didn’t do much reading at all, evidently. I finished three books and read good portions of four more.

Finished in the summer:

1. I neglected to include one in my summer roundup post Scattered:  How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It by Gabor Mate M.D.

2. If Protestantism is True: The Reformation Meets Rome by Devin Rose

3.  The Spear by Louis de Wohl

In September I didn’t write a roundup post at all but I think I finished two books:

1. A Little Way of Homeschooling by Suzie Andres, begun in the summer; I don’t recall when I finished it but I know I did.

2. Still Alice

In October

Finished in October:

1. Lessons at Blackberry Inn: Adventures with the Gentle Art of Learning by Karen Andreola

2. The Pope & The CEO: John Paul II’s Leadership Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard by Andreas Widmer

3. Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope by Amy Welborn

4. Trees of New England: A Natural History by Charles Fergus—not actually finished; but this is the kind of book you don’t really read from cover to cover so I don’t feel so guilty about it.

5. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

In November I read Italian Shoes and Mortal Love and began reading Middlemarch.

In December I’ve been limping through Middlemarch, and dipping into Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness by Carole Silver. I sort of began Rumer and Jon Godden’s Two Under the Indian Sun; but have only read a chapter or two.

I’m not going to try to pick a favorite book or rank these in any way. My book notes express what I felt right after I’d read them. I will note that Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy seems especially
current with the death of Kim Jung Il.

So here are a few of my favorite people celebrating in their own inimitable ways.

Bella sings the Twelve Days of Christmas to Sophie.

Sophie sings with the pretend pencil people: “... day our earth sets down in the wind… Now, they said, we’re going to sing a different song… Baby Jesus is born on Christmas Day… Baby Jesus is born on Christmas Day… Baby Jesus is born on Christmas Day… Baby Jesus is born on Christmas Day. That’s true. That’s true. Emanuflue… and ransom captive Is… Oh baby…”

Sophie’s bedtime prayer: “Thank you, God, for Baby Jesus lying in the manger.”

It seems like it’s been forever since I’ve done a quick takes post. 

1. This week in the stable: The angel, St Joseph, and the donkey are going for a ride in the school bus while Mary changes Baby Jesus’ poopy diaper.

2. I’m sewing again. A bit. I’ve decided a realistic goal is to do just a little something or other on one Sunday afternoon a month. No sense of having to get anything finished, just make a little progress on my ongoing projects.

Before I could jump into my ongoing project I had to placate three children who were utterly fascinated by the whole thing. I promised to make each of them a dolly quilt. Sophie’s was first. She picked a bunch of fabrics and I stitched them together and then used some scraps I had for binding. For Ben I used some pre-sewn scraps that I’d been fooling around with a long time ago. It came together pretty quickly. Bella opted for a more complicated bunch of fabrics and is insisting that the dolly blanket is for one of her cousins intead of for herself, which I’d be all for except I suspect the cousin in question is a bit old to be interested in a doll quilt.

I also made each of the big kids a dolly pillow using some squares I already had stitched together. All I had to do was make the final seams and stuff them. All of them are so happy about these little projects and it’s been nice for me to have something that was easy to finish and therefore had an immediate payoff. I’ve got some bigger projects that it will take much longer to finish. The last time I was actively sewing was before Ben was born and I was able to get bigger things done more quickly because I had larger chunks of time to work with. I now know I can make progress in smaller increments but it does take some patience when I’m not progressing as fast as I’d like.

3. Here is Ben’s dolly blanket. (I couldn’t find any of the pillows or Sophie’s blanket to photograph. Which is another difference between now and then. Back then I’d never have let a project leave my hands till I’d photographed it thoroughly.)

Here’s the back side:

I love the fact that even with a dolly blanket you can see he’s all boy. He’s put it on the iguana, which he insists on calling a dinosaur.

4. My sister is teaching Bella to crochet. I hope they both stick with it and don’t get distracted. It makes Bella so happy to be able to imitate her aunt and to make something for herself.

5. Ben found the box of tri-color rotini in the shopping bag and insisted he wanted some for lunch. When I said I needed to cook it first he threw a fit. Stubborn child!  Rather than admit he was wrong sat there with a bunch of dried pasta on his plate trying to eat it with a fork. Finally he declared, “I’m done!” and agreed to let me cook him some. At least he did like it when it was cooked.

6. The other day in the car Bella was playing a game in which she and Sophie were firefighters in New York City. This is a recurring game but this was the first time I understood the full context of the game. There’s a huge cast of characters: John, Frank, Bernie, Sam, Patrick, Miss Irwin, Miss Jelsie, and Miss Leen, who is the fire chief. Sam and Miss Jelsie are the silly ones. Bella is Miss Irwin, I think. Sophie is Miss Jelsie. I think the name Miss Jelsie comes from Sophie’s mishearing the words to the GloriaL in excelsis Deo became first in dusty’s deo and then in Miss Jelsie’s Deo

7. Last Sunday at bedtime Ben told me, “I told God no.” Not sure what that was about except that Father’s homily that morning was about Mary’s fiat and telling God yes.

It was all I could do not to laugh. At least I didn’t have to keep a straight face because the light was out. This was during his nightly 20 minute winding-down monologue, which would be hilarious if I weren’t so tired and wanting to just go have some me-time before going to bed.

Bonus take:

Is there anything in the world better than a sleeping baby on your lap?

Well, maybe a baby who really, really wants to take a bath. (This was about fifteen minutes after he woke up, about two minutes after he threw up.)

For more quick takes visit Conversion Diary.