In each case, too, the associative process is the same, with some item perceived in the present calling up a past memory that is related to it — in a manner that can generally be articulated and annotated.
Such is the mechanism of a typical “move” in a DoubleQuote or HipBone game.
It’s so simple that it barely needs saying — one thing reminds us of another — and yet so basic that we can really benefit from paying attention to it.
Two uses of the word “see”.
The one: “What do you see there?”—”I see this” (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: “I see a likeness between these two faces” — let the man I tell this to be seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself.
The importance of this is the difference of category between the two ‘objects’ of sight.
The one man might make an accurate drawing of the two faces, and the other notice in the drawing the likeness which the former did not see.
I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another.
I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect”.
Its causes are of interest to psychologists
So obvious. But it takes a Wittgenstein to see it, say it.
[ by Charles Cameron — a follow up to my post on the Vespers liturgy at Hampton Court Palace ]
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Boring as hell or blissful as paradise? Religious worship can be either one.
I know that when I was at Wellington College I must have sat through dozens of sermons in which one or another scriptural passage was read in that droning pastoral voice which Alan Bennett so skilfully skewered in his Beyond the Fringe satirical sermon on the text of Genesis 27.11, “Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man”:
I was a deeply religious kid, but verses like I Samuel 15.3, “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” went right past me. I had no qualms back then about Old Testament genocides, pretty much because I didn’t notice them — these were just sacred words, intoned, a strange blend of heaven, lullaby and snooze.
In my piece on the Hampton Court Vespers, I tried to give readers a sense of how things look from a perspective where liturgy and rites and rituals more generally need not be viewed as dry relics of a past best forgotten, but as well-springs of deep personal, interpersonal and transcendent inspiration and communion.
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Here, I’d like to supplement my attempt with two “cases” that I hope will illustrate the power of liturgy.
When the service began late on Saturday evening the cathedral was dimly lit, all the hangings and the altar cover were black in the color of Good Friday. Then the entire congregation went out into the street and marched slowly around the block. It was very cold. When we returned the cathedral was brilliantly lit and the color of everything was very bright. Easter had arrived.
So — somebody turned the lights on.
But no, it’s more than that, it’s the utter darkness of Christ’s descent from the cross and burial, it is grief physically imposed by that very cold pilgrimage around the block — and it’s the shock, the palpable beauty of the Resurrection dawn.
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Going back yet a day further, from Good Friday to the Maundy Thursday which in the church’s calendar porecedes it, we can see the similarly profound impact of a simple gesture as my old mentor, Fr. Trevor Huddleston, washes the feet of his students in Sophiatown, the Johannesberg shanty-town where for years he taught and preached. In his own words, drawn from his book Naught for Your Comfort, we read:
On Maundy Thursday, in the Liturgy of the Catholic Church, when the Mass of the day is ended, the priest takes a towel and girds himself with it; he takes a basin in his hands, and kneeling in front of those who have been chosen, he washes their feet and wipes them, kissing them also one by one. So he takes, momentarily, the place of his Master. The centuries are swept away, the Upper Room in the stillness of the night is all around him: “If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.” I have knelt in the sanctuary of our lovely church in Rosettenville and washed the feet of African students, stooping to kiss them. In this also I have known the meaning of identification. The difficulty is to carry the truth out into Johannesberg, into South Africa, into the world.
That world, for Fr Trevor, was the world of South African apartheid. He carried that truth out into Johannesberg and the world in his book, and as President of the Anti-Apartheid Movement — and with what impact! He lived to see apartheid gone.
I say that the consummation of the drama, the perfect and ideal drama, is to be found in the ceremony of the Mass. … And the only dramatic satisfaction that I find now is in a High Mass well performed. Have you not there everything necessary? And indeed, if you consider the ritual of the Church during the cycle of the year, you have the complete drama represented. The Mass is a small drama, having all the unities; but in the Church year you have represented the full drama of creation.
[ by Charles Cameron — defending someone i don’t much like ]
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I’m no fan of Glenn Beck, who talks quite a bit about Islamic apocalyptic and has been known to confuseTwelvers (the major branch of Shia Islam) with the Hojjatieh society (an anti-Bahai movement banned by the Ayatollah Khomeini), which is more or less like talking about Christianity and confusing the Catholic Church with the Legionnaires of Christ (which fell from grace under Benedict XVI, see also the note at the foot of this post).
I just woke the American people up. I took them out of the game show moment and woke enough of them up to say, look at how close your liberty is to being lost. You now have lost your liberty. You replace one guy, and you now have 5-4 decisions in the other direction. Just with this one guy, you’ve lost your liberty — so you’d better elect somebody that’s going to put somebody on (the Supreme Court) because for the next 30 years, if you don’t, the Constitution as you know it… the Constitution is hanging by a thread. That thread has just been cut, and the only way that we survive now is if we have a true constitutionalist.
If you listen to what Beck actually said:
I think you might conclude, as I do, that he could have been referring to himself, and specifically perhaps to this portion of his earlier presentation in suppoort of Ted Cruz:
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the gospel,” he [Pope Francis] said, according to CNN.
Trump immediately hit back. “If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy,” he said in a statement on his website, “I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened.”
It is perhaps noteworthy that one of the Bishop of Rome’s many titles is Supreme Pontiff, a pontiff being a bridge-builder. Robert Frost, on the other hand, only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
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Dan Scavino, from the Trump camp:
Amazing comments from the Pope- considering Vatican City is 100% surrounded by massive walls. pic.twitter.com/g3iVLDVGe5
Finally — finally! — there’s always this to consider, from the New York Times of December 28th last year:
Americans named President Obama and Hillary Clinton as the most admired man and woman in the world, according to a Gallup poll released on Monday, with Donald Trump tying Pope Francis as the second most admired man.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
