Monday, October 18, 2004
24
I've just finished reading American Gods, and am experiencing that almost afterglow that comes with reading a very good book. There are people who just write, and then there are writers - craftsmen. I could start a little rant here about how much I hate the way today's world obsesses with insta-celebrity and fabricates neo-talent, but I'm simply not in the mood right now.
I attended mass yesterday at the Cathedral church and was appalled. Not that the priest was barely comprehensible with his strange sing-song ultra-chinky drawl, or that the acting cantor hadn't figured out the art of holding the mike just a few centimetres further from his mouth : these are, to my mind insignificant on the grand scheme of worship, and they can't help themselves. Is okay, just a trifle irritating...
I became appalled during the sermon, which flirted lightly around the first reading of the day before taking off wildly into outer space. Fragmented statements followed statements, tenuously linked together by the all powerful Binder in Faith, the word "So". So St Theresa said... so a woman had no job... so prayer is important... so jews pray five times a day... so muslims pray seven times... so catholics pray three times... so prayer is important.
Somewhere inside me I began to wonder
1) if the man was tripping, or perhaps simply demented
2) how the heck this chap passed through the seminary
And then, to make matters even worse, this man wearing the vestments proceeded to speak a parable that sounded suspiciously more like a real life account, about a woman who became unemployed, and waited and prayed faithfully, and waited, and then her prayers were answered and she received an offer at (name of company!)... which paid $3000 a month, but then she held out, and she waited and prayed some more, and so God heard her and she got a job at (name of company) for $6000 a month, So my dear brothers and sisters, this is the power of prayer.
And I thought : BULLSH*T. YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND CHRISTIANTY, HOW DARE YOU MISLEAD THIS CONGREGATION BEFORE YOU.
God is NOT santa claus. How many Christians in Iraq prayed for peace even as their churches and their bodies exploded into a million pieces of broken glass and wet flesh this weekend? And here we have a priest trivialising everything by turning God from a being we acknowledge works in His own way and not for the way of man - into a celestial ATM.
We should pray to God because we will become RICH? Not spiritually either, but financially?
Is that all there is to us Christians, and Catholics? Are we just mercenaries at heart in this secular world, siding with the winning team??? What of the martyrs who have died for this cause then, what of the carmelites who swear vows of silence? Is our God nothing more than an idol to worship, who will rain gold and silver down upon our voraciously grabbing hands?
I felt sick - truly sick during that sermon. I had seen it only once before, in a methodist church (prayers for the financial prosperity of the country) : a fundamental misunderstanding of everything Christ-like (did Jesus himself ride around in a gilded chariot wearing a crown of jewels???).
Christianity is not about having all your prayers answered by God - surely a murderer who prays he will not be caught has no right making these prayers? Christianity - as I have heard it preached in countless other churches - is about the difficult road, that leads through the narrow door : how He responds to our prayers is up to Him, and how we pray, and the things we pray for - whether sensibly and responsibly - is up to us. And to be grateful for what we have, and what He deigns to give us. We are not worthy so much as to eat the crumbs beneath Your table...?
Never have I felt so disillusioned or shocked as this, hearing preaching of this nature at a CATHEDRAL. Perhaps, again it's my anglican roots, but the sermons at the cathedrals in England have always somehow been wiser, grander, and lengthier than the sermons heard in backwater little churches - it shouldn't be the case, I know, but unfortunately that's how the real world occasionally operates -- and I had become accustomed to that. Hearing this man preach near-falsehood to a cathedral packed to overflowing by a massive, listening congregation, I couldn't help but wonder : why had they all come? And where would they go from here?
******
I watched Pandamonium (yes, actually spelt that way for some reason) by the BBC over the weekend and it was beautiful.
It told the tale (with, I suspect, a liberal amount of embellishment) of how Wordsworth and Coleridge teamed up to create Lyrical Ballads, and of how Wordsworth was a near-bumbling incompetent, whilst Coleridge was a shooting star burning up with his addiction to laudinum (opium water), and how, in the very end Wordsworth out of sheer malice and jealousy tried to prevent Kubla Khan from being published.
It was visually stunning (stage props, victorian dress, shiny things everywhere) with some of the most powerful cinematic images I have seen (coleridge climbing a tree that turns into the mast of the ship of the Ancient Mariner amidst the storm raging through his tormented, opium-saturated soul) blended masterfully into audio seas of poetry, reaching up almost, it felt, to my soul and dragging it down into the chocolatey depths of lyrical excess.
I'll admit that at times it was a little overdone, and a trifle too cloying for my tastes, but the aftertaste the movie left on my lips was delightful.
Unsurprisingly, it was produced by the BBC. -5 points, leaving it at 94/100 in my books.
******
It's an almost perverse fact to me that I only ever feel the need to write when I'm upset, when a certain unease eats through me in a certain way, somehow releasing the floodgates of the suddenly swelling tides of words that normally lie dormant within the calm seas of my head (picture buoy bells clanging occasionally and not much else going on, maybe the occasional seagull crapping onto a buoy, and you have an image of the inside of my brain. sad, but true.)
It's probably a very ordinary phenomenon, and I'm sure it happens to everyone else.
But the most perverse thing to me is that while I write, I derive no pleasure from it. There is no catharsis, no realease. Only a certain... madness.
I remember.
I attended mass yesterday at the Cathedral church and was appalled. Not that the priest was barely comprehensible with his strange sing-song ultra-chinky drawl, or that the acting cantor hadn't figured out the art of holding the mike just a few centimetres further from his mouth : these are, to my mind insignificant on the grand scheme of worship, and they can't help themselves. Is okay, just a trifle irritating...
I became appalled during the sermon, which flirted lightly around the first reading of the day before taking off wildly into outer space. Fragmented statements followed statements, tenuously linked together by the all powerful Binder in Faith, the word "So". So St Theresa said... so a woman had no job... so prayer is important... so jews pray five times a day... so muslims pray seven times... so catholics pray three times... so prayer is important.
Somewhere inside me I began to wonder
1) if the man was tripping, or perhaps simply demented
2) how the heck this chap passed through the seminary
And then, to make matters even worse, this man wearing the vestments proceeded to speak a parable that sounded suspiciously more like a real life account, about a woman who became unemployed, and waited and prayed faithfully, and waited, and then her prayers were answered and she received an offer at (name of company!)... which paid $3000 a month, but then she held out, and she waited and prayed some more, and so God heard her and she got a job at (name of company) for $6000 a month, So my dear brothers and sisters, this is the power of prayer.
And I thought : BULLSH*T. YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND CHRISTIANTY, HOW DARE YOU MISLEAD THIS CONGREGATION BEFORE YOU.
God is NOT santa claus. How many Christians in Iraq prayed for peace even as their churches and their bodies exploded into a million pieces of broken glass and wet flesh this weekend? And here we have a priest trivialising everything by turning God from a being we acknowledge works in His own way and not for the way of man - into a celestial ATM.
We should pray to God because we will become RICH? Not spiritually either, but financially?
Is that all there is to us Christians, and Catholics? Are we just mercenaries at heart in this secular world, siding with the winning team??? What of the martyrs who have died for this cause then, what of the carmelites who swear vows of silence? Is our God nothing more than an idol to worship, who will rain gold and silver down upon our voraciously grabbing hands?
I felt sick - truly sick during that sermon. I had seen it only once before, in a methodist church (prayers for the financial prosperity of the country) : a fundamental misunderstanding of everything Christ-like (did Jesus himself ride around in a gilded chariot wearing a crown of jewels???).
Christianity is not about having all your prayers answered by God - surely a murderer who prays he will not be caught has no right making these prayers? Christianity - as I have heard it preached in countless other churches - is about the difficult road, that leads through the narrow door : how He responds to our prayers is up to Him, and how we pray, and the things we pray for - whether sensibly and responsibly - is up to us. And to be grateful for what we have, and what He deigns to give us. We are not worthy so much as to eat the crumbs beneath Your table...?
Never have I felt so disillusioned or shocked as this, hearing preaching of this nature at a CATHEDRAL. Perhaps, again it's my anglican roots, but the sermons at the cathedrals in England have always somehow been wiser, grander, and lengthier than the sermons heard in backwater little churches - it shouldn't be the case, I know, but unfortunately that's how the real world occasionally operates -- and I had become accustomed to that. Hearing this man preach near-falsehood to a cathedral packed to overflowing by a massive, listening congregation, I couldn't help but wonder : why had they all come? And where would they go from here?
******
I watched Pandamonium (yes, actually spelt that way for some reason) by the BBC over the weekend and it was beautiful.
It told the tale (with, I suspect, a liberal amount of embellishment) of how Wordsworth and Coleridge teamed up to create Lyrical Ballads, and of how Wordsworth was a near-bumbling incompetent, whilst Coleridge was a shooting star burning up with his addiction to laudinum (opium water), and how, in the very end Wordsworth out of sheer malice and jealousy tried to prevent Kubla Khan from being published.
It was visually stunning (stage props, victorian dress, shiny things everywhere) with some of the most powerful cinematic images I have seen (coleridge climbing a tree that turns into the mast of the ship of the Ancient Mariner amidst the storm raging through his tormented, opium-saturated soul) blended masterfully into audio seas of poetry, reaching up almost, it felt, to my soul and dragging it down into the chocolatey depths of lyrical excess.
I'll admit that at times it was a little overdone, and a trifle too cloying for my tastes, but the aftertaste the movie left on my lips was delightful.
Unsurprisingly, it was produced by the BBC. -5 points, leaving it at 94/100 in my books.
******
It's an almost perverse fact to me that I only ever feel the need to write when I'm upset, when a certain unease eats through me in a certain way, somehow releasing the floodgates of the suddenly swelling tides of words that normally lie dormant within the calm seas of my head (picture buoy bells clanging occasionally and not much else going on, maybe the occasional seagull crapping onto a buoy, and you have an image of the inside of my brain. sad, but true.)
It's probably a very ordinary phenomenon, and I'm sure it happens to everyone else.
But the most perverse thing to me is that while I write, I derive no pleasure from it. There is no catharsis, no realease. Only a certain... madness.
I remember.
