2007 December archive at Cornell Society for a Good Time

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Archive for December, 2007

If you’re ever in the mid-Michigan area on Christmas Eve, it’s now safe to say that you wouldn’t want to be anywhere other than St. Joseph’s in downtown Detroit. While in previous years, the Midnight Mass of Christmas was the Mass of G. B. Montini (in Latin and ad orientem, mind you), but starting this year, it is the Mass of All Time (M.O.A.T.). What has remained constant is the exceptional music: vocal soloists of good quality and instrumentalists from the Windsor Symphony Orhestra. Even better still, the Mass and the wonderful music are to be found in a beautiful, completely unwreckovated, historical landmark church.

This year’s Mass setting was Mozart’s Spatzenmesse. Both that and the chant propers were beautifully done. Sadly (and oddly, I thought) there was only one clergyman present (the celebrant) and thus the distribution of Communion lasted well into the small hours. Bear in mind that this is a huge church and though there could easily have been another 100 people (the side aisles were sparcely populated compared to the pews lining the main aisle), there were at least 250 people there - and this is downtown Detroit at midnight! (What I mean is, this is not the neighborhood for leisurely strolls after dark.)

Published by Iosephus December 27th, 2007 0 Comments

Merry Christmas!

Published by Ambrosius December 25th, 2007 0 Comments

The Wolf Children

This weekend I went to the wedding of an old college roommate. (It was a good time, though of course a Catholic wedding really shouldn’t be held in Advent.) Now we’re on the way out the door again, off for our Christmas tour of relatives’ houses. But I thought I’d throw something up on the blog before I go, and despite many exciting things going on in the Catholic world, my fascinating discovery of the day has been this website concerning feral children raised by animals.

The topic of feral children came up in our philosophy reading group last week, with reference to a fascinating article about, of all things, walking. I’ll be writing more about that piece as soon as I get the chance, because it has some interesting implications for Catholics. However, one interesting question was: is it instinctive for people to begin walking upright as soon as they are physically able, or do they have to learn this behavior from others? In fact, there are documented cases of children who have grown up without any human contact, and since these cases seemed potentially relevant to the question, I googled the topic and was quite fascinated to read the stories of these feral children, particularly the ones who were raised by animals.
Continue reading

Published by Clara December 18th, 2007 12 Comments

Flashbacks and Answered Prayers

I’ve had some thoughts bouncing around in my head for the last week or so that I think I really need to post, and a visit from some Mormon missionaries this afternoon prompted me to finally sit down and do it. I promise it’ll be a change of pace from my sardonic Teen Life post. Actually, I’ll give you the punchline in advance: it’s pretty awesome to be Catholic.

The missionary visit was fairly brief and perhaps just a bit sad for me. They were two boys, presumably nineteen or twenty years old. They gave me their line about how they had “an important message about Jesus Christ” and I explained right away that I was an apostate Mormon and already pretty familiar with the message. In the past that’s been known to drive people away pretty quickly, but not this pair; they gracefully downshifted into small talk and asked me a little about myself and my occupation. I went along by asking where they were from. After two or three minutes of this casual chit-chat, they asked if they could come back at some future time to “get to know me better.” Continue reading

Published by Clara December 13th, 2007 3 Comments

The Mormon JFK?

I’ve been hearing quite a bit lately about Mitt Romney, and since there’s been some buzz about his religious commitments in light of his recent speech on the subject, I thought maybe I’d say a few words of my own about it. I should start off by saying that 1) It doesn’t seem terribly likely at this point that Romney will win the primaries anyway, and 2) even if he does, I’m not going to give him a hearty endorsement, if only because I haven’t been following the coverage of the ‘08 election all that closely. Once every few weeks I feel a spark of interest and read a thing or two, but mainly I’m trying not to bother about it yet. There’s lots of time to go before election day, and if I worry too much about it now, I’ll be sick to death of it all by September. Anyway, the bottom line is that I’m much too ignorant to feel good about endorsing any of the candidates. However, I do feel moderately qualified to speak to the question of Romney’s Mormonism. And my advice is: it shouldn’t be a concern. Catholics have no good reason to be dismayed by the prospect of a Mormon president.

Published by Clara December 12th, 2007 21 Comments

Married Monks

So, as everyone knows by now, it’s the Holiday Season and for us just like for everyone things have been a little hectic, what with the end of the semester, preparing to visit relatives, Christmas shopping, and all kinds of odds and ends. I’ve had two longish posts sitting around on my desktop unfinished for days now, but once again I’m going to have to put them off again because we’re having company for dinner tomorrow, and I’d like to put the house in some semblance of order. (This is, of course, one of the benefits of having people to dinner… it finally spurs me into the house cleaning that I should probably do more often.)

So, in the interim, I thought I’d share another brief piece of news that I noticed the other morning in the East Tennessee Catholic (our Diocesan newspaper.) It was a little piece on a local man who is aspiring to become a Trappist monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani (made famous, of course, by its star resident, Thomas Merton.) There was, however, something curious about the story. Let me just quote the first two sentences of the article so you can pick it out.

Published by Clara December 11th, 2007 7 Comments

Spreading the Word of God

I wanted to put up another long post today, but my husband and I are on our way out the door to spend a day with some of his family. So I’ll finish my post on Sunday, God willing, but for today I thought I’d just offer an amusing remark from my younger brother, whom the Doctor and I visited on our way back from the Notre Dame conference. This brother is a sophomore at Indiana University, and we took him to lunch on our way through town. Like me at that age, he isn’t really Mormon anymore, but hasn’t really become anything else either… and at the same time, it wouldn’t be fair to call him “nonreligious” since he seems to worry about religion quite a lot.

Anyway, I asked him whether he’d been going go church at all. He said no, not just lately. He’d tried for awhile to go to a local Evangelical church, but he stopped because all they ever talked about was spreading the Word of God. “How could I spread it,” he asked, “when they wouldn’t tell me what it was? They said I was supposed to be a missionary to others, but the only thing I had to tell them was that they should help spread the Word of God.”

He’s rather an astute young man in his way. If you reading this, would you do me a favor, and say an Ave for him?

Published by Clara December 7th, 2007 1 Comment

The Advent Problem

So, we’ve returned to the season of Advent, and once again I find myself puzzling over the same old questions. Advent is surely the most problematic season of the liturgical year. Good Catholics know, of course, that it is a penitential season. It is a time for discipline, for special penances, and for reflection on one’s own emptiness and on how desperately we are in need of the coming Lord. “O come, o come, Emmanuel!” should be the cry of the Advent season, and cultivating this feeling requires the kind of asceticism and penitential spirit that more famously characterizes Lent. True, it is appropriate that Advent should be milder. In Lent we trace Our Lord’s footsteps to the cross and humanity’s darkest hour, but in Advent we anticipate no such horror. Nevertheless, the Church in her wisdom knows that we humans, frail creatures that we are, will not properly appreciate the beauty of the dawn unless we have also sat through the darkest, coldest hour that comes right before. This must be the time when we, like the maidens of the Gospel story, sit in waiting for the Bridegroom.

Published by Clara December 5th, 2007 18 Comments

Trapped in a Nightmare

First of all: greetings to all readers, and apologies for the long delay in posting. I was so busy last week preparing for, and then attending, this conference that I did not deliver on my promise to describe the Teen Life Mass that the Doctor and I witnessed last Sunday. Why my fellow contributors have done nothing to fill the silence, I cannot say, but I at least have been fairly bursting with ideas that I’ve been wanting to post, so hopefully I can keep things humming over the next few weeks.

But first, I’d better fulfill my promise.

Published by Clara December 3rd, 2007 41 Comments