That old-time religion
Johnson, Bud
in his notebooks, together with samples of their penmanship. ...
...Around the globe, the church both adapts to and ple...
...present a challenge to the Catholic church, which in important respects retains a premodern outlook in its thinking and its structure...
...Were we more distant from the so- faced by modernity: How do we know anything...
...I watch out for nostalgia, which tends to lend a sac- ous on a long waiting line...
...We main- out on this matter, I think...
...remarkable efficiency...
...After the bills are paid every month there finish that essay about Blake...
...No further comment at this time...
...A puzzle...
...Nothing to be done dinner, to remind him that they had no money...
...Few the Southern Railway...
...The mind works relatively smoothly...
...But one thing leads to another...
...I love you more than I can say," says my is a family magazine...
...Those three qualities are discontinuity, disembeddedness, and reflexivity...
...GIVE IT THAT His notebooks also register the frustrations of a teacher in those rural hills...
...in other, larger part, it develops out of our own histo- ture and religion stems from the realization that "the Enlightry...
...perhaps, after years not positive that I'll see them after I die...
...month...
...is the most boisterpoignancy...
...a pet theory...
...Prospects of same dim- will bequeath it to her also...
...I grip my pencil with resolve and purpose, and start on the top of the page, on the left side...
...I n late August, with subtle colors just beginning to show (Continued on page 10) up in the trees outside my dusty window, I take stock of the year past...
...of several colleges and universities over many years...
...As soon as I finin my checkbook and carefully securing the bill envelopes with ish reading this long essay about Quebec I will certainly bucka large clip...
...In the spring I met a painter...
...I pay the bills on the first pose in mind, to observe at least the semblance of a pattern...
...Right after that I will certainly buckle further down tinize the envelope to make sure that I have carefully printed and mop up those last few books I'd wanted to read before I my return address...
...an essay by Charles Lamb, the police log in the local news• Nose: A major item, period...
...Not young, not old...
...D sociologist Anthony Giddens identifies three qualities of Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine, published modernity that are of particular interest here in that they by the University of Portland, in Oregon...
...Have paper, an impassioned defense of the spelling bee as competreached a truce over the years...
...smiled at her deft poetry...
...Perhaps I am editing myself with subtle grace...
...On the other hand, he is fafor Melvillean and Whitmanesque proportions...
...And that was just today...
...Cam- As his family grew, grandfather left teaching in 1895 and pus ministers usually understand that they face a major chal- moved to Louisville where he took a job cleaning coaches for lenge in developing and maintaining a sense of community...
...Joyce's has held firm...
...This child named Lily...
...Religion is like management, a nebulous idea on Withdrawal and contemplation were in order...
...day...
...Indifference, indigent circumstances, and sickness all together I have observed and participated in the campus religious life are the reason for such a small enrollment at this time...
...They are surgery next year, probably...
...The process of change, like death and taxes, is Brian Doyle inevitable and the community knows it...
...I am camped out in mid-life, right on the continental divide...
...William Blake's wife used to serve him an empty plate at *Eyesight: Hopeless...
...The first two refer to the tendency of modem society to segment time and places so as to separate people from (Steinfels continued from page 8) the past and from a locale, to separate them from the signs, symbols, history, and journey of their family, their people, their reservatives...
...How many times have I told myself to write down wealth to speak of, and yet my shoes are clean, my car hums, lists of prospective books, to order my reading with some purwine sparkles merrily on my table...
...The equation of knowledge with certitude has turned and great-grandchildren of those immigrant Catholics into the out to be misconceived...
...As I drop each in the mailbox I scru- in my study...
...day of each month, rounding off numbers to my own detriment Many times...
...Ah, Surgery Day," I'll think, and envision log schoolhouse in Hardin County, Kentucky, where planks succulent salmon steaks and heaping mounds of peas, and served as desks while the blackboard was made of "old rough- nameless uncles sleeping off the meal in the parlor, with their ly dressed lumber," and wrote the words I read now: "Owing vests half-buttoned and their cigars smoking themselves quito unfavorable weather, have only attendance of three pupils...
...Jury still do so, striving only to be a suitable beard for a rabbi...
...The result is a dynamic and changing community that Catholics rarely encounter elsewhere in the church...
...What allegiance do we owe any 16: 10 September 1993 Commonweal...
...My childhood was pleasant but not bucolic, for exam- of boredom...
...How do we cial deference of our immigrant forebearers, we would more know whether or not it is true...
...It is said that he except to praise the man or woman who invented spectacles...
...To her I bequeath my precious live Springsteen tapes, my able for the most part while at work, get most of my work done, books, the copyrights to my published writings, and whatever fudge only under extreme duress, occasionally write a blind- car I possess at the time of my demise...
...I am glad of that, I say to myself...
...I will be sad to have to die, but even ming...
...Most parts of the body easily see that the tensions we feel as American Catholics have and mind are, considering the years of wear, performing with as much to do with being American as with being Catholic...
...I had back down...
...I would like it to branch out, to strive ing English lessons, a job he hated...
...Only in part is this the result of the about those practices...
...Maybe I should just plan on it every like letters from a close relative in a distant land...
...the baby died...
...But I think of James Joyce, finally reduced, or elevated, to writing only a (Doyle continued from page 9) couple of sentences a day...
...Here too, I don't believe anything can • Wealth: Relativity is the word of the day here...
...year, like Thanksgiving...
...I have promised to not let it be itive educational experience, a traffic survey, two pages of broken anymore, and it has not gotten any larger or lumpier for Paradise Lost, and the list of ingredients on the side of a cesome years...
...His full enrollment was fourteen-seven girls and seven • Hair: Hanging on with surprising strength...
...We are abroad in a world which is economic and social mainstream, making questions about Ca- thoroughly constituted through reflexively applied knowledge," tholic identity pressing not only for individuals but for all of Giddens says, "...[and] we can never be sure that any given elthose institutions that have been essential links in the commu- ement of that knowledge will not be revised" (Modernity and nal network...
...on your own wisdom is like giving yourself a nickname...
...middle of the highway, walking along the median strip, observing Yet even as the church wrestles with those forces, they themthe vibrant weeds with interest...
...Time has conferred upon it a size and dignity not real box...
...The same day finds me reading cartoons, raid the neighbors or slay grizzly bears and there I would be, a mammoth poem by William Blake, an article about moles, old Wood Eye, keeper of the fire coals...
...Neither of us is quite on the ball here but when he announced that he had written two good sentences that there's time...
...The machine chugs along...
...He was especially proud of seven-year-old Bertha Fowler who wrote in a large, firm hand: "The man has a hat...
...He was not a writer, but he liked to put things decrepit...
...Today, Catholics social practices, such as marriage and divorce, child-bearing and have everything those immigrant generations worked for-ac- child-rearing...
...No organizational Sioux family 200 years ago...
...The third characteristic, reflexivity, sums up a events...
...I hear the belly laugh of tounlike that of the Matterhorn...
...Time goes too fast, and children sprout like weeds, and the men and women I love decline and Bud Johnson fall, also like weeds...
...ward the ceiling...
...A travel book conwas born in Pittsburgh, his father earned less than that every taining a long essay about Toronto...
...flect back upon itself, leading, as Giddens says, to "the chronBut in 1993, thirty years after the council, this church is still ic revision of social practices in the light of [new] knowledge in a state of transition...
...Three centuries after the Enlightenment we ceptance, assimilation, political power, social status, money, have come to a point where our capacity to reflect upon and and clout-everything but a disciplined immigrant church and look back upon this long process "actually subverts reason, at eager recruits for convents and rectories...
...He sold glass...
...There is no be done...
...the church truly is people moving through life...
...The heart con- American Catholics often forget that they are members of tinues to grow more tender by the year and my memory is un- an ancient institution having finally to come to terms with modaccountably expanding...
...six years later she is feeding a delightful and energetic • Sex Life: Excellent...
...The easy road would be to avoid played chess and carefully noted the changing plumage of sea- the question, but I have to be honest and face up to the fact birds...
...In this scheme of things, all gregationalism of American Protestant Christianity, and the knowledge is provisional...
...I n The Consequences ofModernity (Stanford, 1990), British Will keep you posted...
...Despair...
...Commonweal 10 September 1993: 15 I believe this covers the major points...
...Her casket cost a lot of money...
...My adolescence was a tad painful, my young manhood con- resists those forces of modernity that flowed from the Enfused, and my adulthood a constant surprise...
...Maybe I should write a brief essay tain an uneasy alliance...
...Flashes of discipline pop up here and • Love Life: To be loved with such humor and compassion there like walkways in a swamp but they are quickly overis not what I expected...
...The weather is remarkable...
...I wonder a lot what James Joyce's wife said to him cutting it unevenly...
...em world reflected in American Catholic involvement in urban Reflexivity refers to the propensity of our knowledge to repolitics, unions, and national government...
...But much that the council decreed was not unfamiliar pattern of historical consciousness and critical thinking that repto American Catholics and in some places was already rooted resents a challenge not only to the "world" and our culture, but in ordinary parish life, including participation in the liturgy, an to the Catholic church and how it understands itself, its misactive role for the laity, and a facility in dealing with the mod- sion, its own definition of truth...
...Everyone else would ride off to principle whatsoever...
...Indeed, many of its reforms were heaven-shaking ligious beliefs...
...Two years later we mar- that God is eminently probable...
...Books published: none...
...He would spend all day writing two sentences, emerging triumphantly at dusk to announce there was a brief flurry of activity on the flanks but the center to his wife that he had written two superb sentences...
...For a year he had three children before • Spiritual Life: In same state as reading life, I'm afraid...
...Because this temporary condition is understood, campus religious communities treat the phenomenon of "passing through" I'M OK, I'M OK...
...I think about the time left to me and I realize that time is without apt metaphor or simiTIME RELIGION le...
...I remember everything with increasing em democratic societies...
...I mail them together, giving them all an even chance le down and finish sickly old Marcel Proust, who is coughing to get where they must go...
...Am pleasant and ami- elf...
...Aristotle thought that thirty-five was the peak of a man's life...
...But what do I find next to the is approximately $200 left over...
...There is no desire for permanence...
...Many times I have thanked my stars that I wasn't born to a • Reading: A happy and disheveled mess...
...Soon THAT OLD- all my water will flow to another sea...
...Joyous and disheveled...
...Heirs: One, a girl...
...Though he died almost sixty years ago, he still surgery last year, I had back surgery this year, I'll have back speaks to me through the notebooks he left behind...
...Nothing to be done about it...
...Age: Thirty-six...
...ried...
...each semester, students go and new ones man, because of my Catholicity, Shelton being a member of come...
...I keep an eternal eye on the weath- subject of analysis lest he be accused of hubris...
...In 1921, the year my father magazine which contains the Quebec essay...
...All of these represent enticing alternatives to the com- leaders like Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, that the church is "counmunal, hierarchical, and sacramental understandings that lie tercultural," stems from their response to the challenges now at the heart of Catholicism...
...etly, the columns of smoke rising in unbroken columns toFirst snow of the season fell at about half-past eleven o' clock...
...Nothing to be done...
...in a confident way...
...At least one of the claims from lics...
...Waters are flowing west...
...Time is not like anything...
...gious series of miserable misadventures with girlfriends, I re- Documentation on the matter is unavailable, but everyone has tired from the field, taking up residence on a sandy island...
...Organizational skills, nil...
...I have decided there is a god...
...selves are in flux...
...The crisis this propensity raises for culcouncil...
...I flew kites and which everyone is an expert...
...Just as Christians are supposed to think of death as passage to a greater life, these Christian communities AREN'T I? treat passage to a different community following graduation in a positive way...
...This turnover guarantees that community must be re- (Continued on page 13) newed constantly if it is to survive, let alone prosper...
...I don't believe any fur- • Wisdom: Nebulous...
...Here I am, in the lightenment and that inspired our nation's founding principles...
...children went hungry a good deal and he spent many years teach• Beard: Status quo...
...pragmatic rationality of our economic and business systems One response of the church to this unsettling situation has are increasingly congenial to the mindset of American Catho- been "ah ha-we told you so...
...Things whiz by on both sides...
...American tional memory seems to be an honest, straightforward sort of Catholics are 100 percent more likely to die of apoplexy than boost...
...Their names are (Continued on page 15) Commonweal 10 September 1993: 9 of practice, I am writing only those words which should be writTHE LAITY ten...
...Some years ago boys-ranging in age from seven to eighteen...
...morrow in the distance...
...She is a small girl the size of a wood Long-term planning skills, negligible...
...Bertha is my name...
...Dimming fast...
...everything after that was a slide down the hill...
...We are approaching the endpoint in a long transition away enment's promise of reason seemed to offer a greater degree of from an immigrant church centered on school and parish and certitude than religious dogma"-certitude in medicine and scideeply embedded in a religious culture shaped by the perspec- ence, in the systemization of government by bureaucracy and tive of clergy and women religious...
...Encouraging...
...Must read...
...A majority of the pupils can neither Frank J. Macchiarola read nor write, while a large percent have never been at school...
...it keeps growing sideways and I keep about it...
...The prevailing individualism, the tempting con- Self-Identity, Stanford, 1991...
...Commenting er of my love life...
...Occupation: Editor, writer...
...any rate where reason is understood as the gaining of certain Today, American culture readily absorbs the grandchildren knowledge...
...ours in the U.S...
...At age twenty-eight, after a truly egre- whelmed by the mud...
...Worked three months without missing of those they minister to are born into a campus community a day," he tells me, " and was discharged by John Shelton, foreand few die there...
...Health: Overall, not bad...
...Nothing to be done about it...
...Not much to be said about it by the ther comment is necessary...
...It declines to mous and his books are devoured all over the world...
...A few years later he wrote at the beginning of a term: OLD COLLEGE TRY "There are but few persons in the district which take any interest at all in school affairs...
...Maybe I should have a special meal On Saturday, November 18, 1889, he sat in his one-room around the event...
...If I own a house then I ing sentence...
...wife, in characteristically direct fashion...
...I am writing shorter and shorter sadder is the fact that every year I love more people and I'm pieces...
...For whatever else we might want charine taste to things, but this enormous expansion of emo- to say about this church, it is noisy and impatient...
...In order to meet this challenge, campus ministers must delegate to others a number of important tasks...
...In the larger scheme of things I M y grandfather was not an intellectual, but he liked to am ruddily healthy, neither thin nor fat, neither acrobatic nor read...
...These gave the church def- impersonal standards of performance, in the rationalization of inition, continuity, and well-trained personnel...
...I don't know where I am going or where the exit is but I find the median strip fascinating...
Vol. 120 • September 1993 • No. 15
