Jonah's Whale Addresses the Almighty
Klein, Laurie
Jonah's Whale Addresses the Almighty Ruler of oceans, who can fathom this awkward summons? Pity my moans, this long throat aching for everyday air. Doubts are lice. They eat into brain and...
...Let the dripping thing live...
...I'll do as I'm told, only ease the lung-numbing gulp, the heavy breach, the intestinal hell...
...The situation is now reversed, with the arrival at Canterbury of Rowan Williams, theologian and poet, who is both an intellectual and a man of obvious pastoral warmth...
...They had a good grasp of the cognitive dimen-sion of faith, they knew that a sacrament was the outward sign of inward grace...
...Oh, to leap, to swim, to sink into you once more, before beaching...
...As Ivereigh put it, "As children, the cons were taught to obey and to learn...
...You command my breath, as ever...
...Oh, Maker of magnificent tails, reconsider stranding this body, far from the circle of my kind...
...With a word, I'm consigned to unknown shores...
...I can recognize the postcons' stance, though I find it disconcerting...
...Postcons are suspicious not of authority but of ideology...
...He distinguished between the now aging generation who were excited by Vatican II (into which the present writer fits), whom he calls "cons"—an unfortunate term, I think, but let it pass—and their younger successors, the "postcons...
...Postcons lack faith-knowledge because the ones who taught them were anxious not to impose rigid orthodoxies...
...He acknowledged that the general decline in public worship and orthodox belief presented problems for all churches, but he thought they might be worse for the Church of England, which is the institutional church of the nation, with the monarch as its head...
...Never mind...
...Laurie Klein and that Christian churches still have a visible presence, if only for marriages and funerals and to offer prayers at moments of national crisis...
...Then, may whatever end you design, kindly close its mouth over me...
...But experience, as it so often does, brings surprises...
...I am irreverently prompted to adapt a line from Ernst Lubitsch's famous film Ninotchka, which satirized the Soviets: "we shall have fewer and better Catholics...
...I have heard it said that bishops known to be conservative now have the most students for the priesthood...
...She is a senior academic and a columnist for center-left papers, once a Marxist and, I have always assumed, a typical member of the secular intelligentsia...
...there are parishes that provide Tridentine Masses in Latin, where Communion has to be taken in the mouth, while kneeling...
...Before he retired from the Tablet, John Wilkins surveyed the scene...
...When Cardinal Hume was alive he was regarded as the de facto leader of English Christianity...
...In recent years it has done a fine job of keeping intelligence and a broadly liberal spirit alive in English Catholicism, under a succession of exceptionally able editors: Tom Bums, John Wilkins, and now Catherine Pepinster...
...The post-cons, though, have grown up in a world without clear ideas of authority: "Their concern is not freedom from authority but in identifying an authority that is authentic...
...This is an acute account...
...Though Ivereigh does not pursue the point, more people—some of them young—think like Waugh than old cons like me care to admit...
...Evelyn Waugh might have dismissed them as pathetic muddlers who did not belong in the church...
...Jonah's Whale Addresses the Almighty Ruler of oceans, who can fathom this awkward summons...
...Traditionalist attitudes are propagated in some Catholic publications and from some pulpits...
...One gets a good sense of the current state of English Catholicism from the Tablet, that admirable Catholic paper founded in 1840 (very similar to Commonweal, though it comes out weekly...
...They eat into brain and heart...
...Though I gulp back salt, your breakers sweep over me, they drown my songs, they will flense my flesh...
...The probably inevitable loss of that old order will, I think, be a real one...
...She asked if I would act as her sponsor and I was happy to agree...
...Catholics, he suggested, are more familiar with the idea of a "church whose membership rises and falls, knowing that in the eighteenth century the Catholic faith was nearly extinguished in their country...
...Their concern, when the council came, was to make authority accountable...
...They have no automatic loyalty—as the cons had—to the church as an institution...
...A few months ago I ran into a former colleague I have known for thirty years but see little of now...
...But over lunch she told me that she attended Mass and was moving toward becoming a Catholic (and so, independently of her decision, was her fourteen-year-old son...
...the worst the cons say about anyone is that he or she is 'authoritarian...
...But experience—of God, love, communion—hits them between the eyes...
...The Holy Spirit stays ahead of the game...
...It looks unlikely that the old idea of a distinctively Catholic culture, preserved in families and Catholic schools, and producing down the generations a steadily increasing phalanx of believers, will ever recur in that form...
...Columns of blubbles rise, our spoken net to enfold a wayward son...
...My response is to recall the words from Scripture that are often in my mind: "In my Father's house there are many mansions"—as long as the number is not reduced...
...The Church of England, which is virtually part of the state, and the Catholic Church, a suspect and fugitive body until not so long ago, now seem to have equal esteem, and indeed roughly the same number of regular worshipers...
...Last year Austen Ivereigh, a staff writer, set down some plausible reflections about the present state of English Catholicism...
...Commonweal 20 June 18, 2004...
...Instead, as Wilkins puts it, "faith is reached by individual decision, which cuts down the members...
...Groups inculcating South European devotional practices are becoming noticeable...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 12
