Regarding Artists

Tajci

We went to a very interesting and good concert last night. The performer was a woman named Tajci. She was at one time a fabulously popular pop star in Europe, seen regularly on television and with Gold and Platinum albums under her belt. She was a teen idol.

But war came to her homeland, Croatia, and something changed in her. Her webs site says that thousands of young people looked to her for answers, but she had none for herself.

I don't know the details of what she was thinking, and she chose not to share much about her past with the audience. What I did see was an extremely talented musician singing to a small crowd (maybe  300 people) in a church in Modesto, Ca.. This artist had a grueling schedule -- a concert every night in a a new town in a new church. She doesn't charge for her concerts, no admission fee, no charge to the host parish. There is a freewill collection taken near the end of the concert, and there are the CD's for sale, but it's a free concert.

I am guessing that she could have a lucrative career if she compromised a bit. She is talented, she is experienced, she is good looking, a demonstrated superstar in Europe. But here she is in Modesto singing to a small crowd in a church. And although she obviously knows what is popular, she chooses to be obviously Catholic, adamantly pro-life, and modest -- not a formula for success in our culture.

Maybe she's just mining a musical niche. I can not tell you with absolute surety if she is real, although it seems like it. She seems to understand what John Paul II said in his letter to artists:  
 
        "The particular vocation of individual artists decides the arena in which they serve and points as well to  the tasks they must assume, the hard work they must endure and the responsibility they must accept. Artists who are conscious of all this know too that they must labour without allowing themselves to be driven by the search for empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity, and still less by the calculation of some possible profit for themselves. There is therefore an ethic, even a “spirituality” of artistic service, which contributes in its way to the life and renewal of a people. It is precisely this to which Cyprian Norwid seems to allude in declaring that “beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up”.

There are plenty of good artist out there who are good people. They create because it's in them to do so. They create knowing they probably will never be "discovered." They do so because it contributes to life and makes people grow and maybe even feel good. I would hope that if you have an urge to draw, paint , write or sing, you do it. It is an act of creation.

Lent and the Pharaoh

Pharaoh Qui-tankhamun

It's Ash Wednesday. I was tooling around the Net and ran across this description of Lent: "Mardi Gras is short-lived friends: For, tomorrow, we begin Lent, the 40-day bummer of a tradition that forces us (Catholics) to give up some prized possession or idea until Easter. Of course, since I am a horrible Catholic, I won’t be giving up chocolate, macaroni and cheese..." (Click if you'd like to see the rest)

One of the comments left on the site said "It's times like this that I thank God He didn't make me Catholic." Another one said "Lent is for #@%. Just live."

It got me to thinking that I was too hard on Yul Brynner. I always thought that Yul looked a bit silly as Rameses in The Ten Commandments. The guy would run around wearing his little camp skirt with no top, loaded with bling... I mean how silly can you get?

 It is possible, I suppose, that Rameses might have dressed that way because even back then dressing for success was important. It could be that when he put his skirt on, slipped into the little armbands, donned the pharaoh's headdress, he felt good. His clothes were well tailored and made from the finest linen; his bling was real bling. He would have stood out in any crowd, and then as now, being that well decked out gives you a psychological boost. You carry yourself a bit differently. Ask any man if he feels differently in a tuxedo, and the answer will almost always be yes.

Our "forty day bummer of a tradition" is like a tux -- if we put on Lenten activities correctly, they work on our psyche in a subtle fashion, and we begin to stand up a little straighter, feel a little more responsible. We begin to believe that we are capable of being a better person, more aware, more in control.

Bernie dressed as Pharaoh

Admittedly, there are limits to the 'clothes make the man" adage. There comes a point at which another phrase comes to mind...lipstick on a pig. This is why it is important to both understand why Lenten activities are necessary and desirable and to choose a Lenten activity that makes sense. Lenten activities are supposed to jar us out of our normal routines and to remind us to contemplate our relationship with God -- kind of like tying a string around your finger to remind you do do something, or setting your phone to remind of whose birthday it is. Of course if you have no relationship with God, giving something up to remind yourself to think about that might be pretty useless. In that case, it might be better to do something positive, like everyday writing a one or two sentence answer to the question "in what ways today did I demonstrate that I  was truly an  #@%?" If you need help with the answer, ask the people you work with.

I'm not giving anything up for Lent, although I may tag along with anybody in the household who is trying to eat less. I'll do that because I simply can't fit into my camp skirt anymore. I am going to  try an old Catholic Lenten practice and recite the Seven Penitential Psalms each day, something Pope Innocent III suggested we all do back in the 1200's. I'll use the Good News Bible's translation of the psalms since that is easier for me to understand.

It times like this that I thank God he made me Catholic. And as Rameses used to say, so let it be written, so let it be done.

On the Nature of Waves

I had an interesting thought.

As some of you may know, I am a catechist, that is I am a  person who catechizes, one who instructs catechumens in preparation for admission into the Catholic church. Catechumens are those who want to be admitted to the Church and who choose of their own free will to listen to a catechist (bless their hearts).

In my catechetical sessions I am very careful to point out that I will convey to the best of my ability only what the Church says about stuff, and if I am to present my opinion about something, or if I want to offer my interpretation of something the Church says, I will clearly designate it as my opinion. For example, the Church teaches that there are two things we know about the end of times: one, Christ will come again, and two, we don't know when that will be. That's it, that's all we know for certain. I can speculate all I want about the details, and I can even try to pick a date for the Second Coming as some people do, but that would be entirely my opinion. My thought falls clearly into the later category. In fact, it really may well be considered more of an anthropological than a theological observation.

Natural forces and events seem to run in waves. Throughout history, there are periods of war followed by periods of peace followed by periods of war. Trends in the arts rush in one direction and peak, then rush off in another direction to peak somewhere else. Areas that were poor become rich, then become poor, then become rich again and again. Empires are built, decline and are built somewhere else. Some of these things can occur relatively quickly (like fashion trends), some can take decades or even centuries to play out (like the rise and fall of empires). I suggest that there might be one of these cycles that is longer, deeper and more fundamental to all of these, and it occurred to me as I was looking at a picture I took in Japan

The Japanese are the most nonreligious people in the world. Almost 90% of them would say they are either agnostics or atheists. They do not appear to be particularly anti-religious people. In my encounters with them, they are very tolerant of other people's beliefs. Nor because they do not espouse any religious beliefs are they immoral or amoral people. Indeed, Japan has one of the most honest and orderly societies on the planet. I think however they are what most of the world will become -- a society that chooses not to believe in God.

Europe is well on its way to the same state. The vast majority of Europeans now have no regular participation in a church. They still like to identify themselves as one thing or another, but I think that is because they have had hundreds of years of being Catholic or Lutheran or some other Christian denomination. Give them another generation or two or three, and their children or grandchildren will be far enough removed from religious practice that even these vestigial associations will disappear.

I think maybe what we are seeing is the ebbing of the wave of religion, and I think we have seen it before. The Garden of Eden stories in Jewish literature tells of the first time that man opted out. Similarly Noah's generation had a reputation for being nonreligious. In the generations following Christ's crucifixion, Israel would be destroyed, Rome would be brought to its knees, and the world would decline into ignorance and violence that lasted for more than 600 years.

I think that the ebb of religion in our world will continue, maybe quickly, maybe over the next 100 or 200 years, leading to a cataclysm, either natural or man-made, and that will remind man of his place in the scheme of things and renew his search for what is good.

Of course by then I'll be dead, and I will know for sure whether or not I was a nut case.