Some laypeople, when they read of what they perceive as the strictures of monastic life, are often puzzled or even shocked. It’s a defense mechanism, I believe, to prevent us from examining our own messy lifestyles. This is not to say that monks don’t have their own personal interior messes, but, when the world is stripped away and you’re left with just yourself, they’re very hard to avoid. I was reading recently about the world of the medieval Cistercian monastery, and I was struck at how beautifully deliberate it all is. Nothing is left to chance.

Just one example—and I suspect this has changed in the past seven or eight centuries—but I was very struck how there was even a proper way to lay down on your bed. Sit down and swing your legs into it, don’t just flop down like a kid. That can seem quaint and even silly at first glance, but you realize that it’s one less thing to think about, and more time to focus on bigger and better things. I am reminded of the scholastic definition of curiosity as the vice opposed to studiousness—mere inquiry is useless unless directed towards a point.

And the motion itself has a reason behind it—it is simple, dignified, neither sloppy nor showy, but getting the job done in the most logical and sensible way. It is the proper gesture for a human being, not an animal or a puffed-up king. It seems to me a perfect encapsulation of the entire Cistercian worldview.

We have liturgical rubrics for the same reason. First and foremost, they get the job done and save dithering that could be spent on prayer and reflection. They teach obedience, both to external authorities, and within yourself. And they have, laid on top of this from centuries of observation and thinking, a discrete symbolic component. This sensibility—this practical simplicity that leads to a sort of beauty—runs throughout the entire Cistercian monastic tradition; work becomes prayer, prayer becomes work. Liturgy—like life—is hard work. It is not merely a series of rituals for their own sake, but a streamlined program that gives you the tools, conscious and subsconscious, to pray for grace and sanctification. Which, rather than a sort of Zen-like emptiness for its own sake, is the point of life, after all. Many admirers of western monasticism, who might come from a pop-eastern mystical perspective, don’t realize that the Christian empties himself not so he might remain an empty vessel, but so God can have room to come in.

The Emperor Justinian is said to have cried (sounding a bit like the ecclesial equivalent of a superpowered comic-book villain) "Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" upon beholding the interior of Hagia Sophia, which he paid for, but did not actually design. I feel a bit like Solomon right now: I acknowledge a sound defeat in the realm of Catholic nerdry upon beholding the Hallowe'en photo posted by the Sober Sophomore showing some of our successors in Catholic mayhem at Notre Dame, dressed as the pope and four Swiss guards, complete with halberds. The best I could manage was the time I went to a costume party as a Knight of Malta.* Oh, for the days of college-student free time. (Which, being an arkie, somehow I missed.) I bow to the masters.

*More on that later, sometime. It involves a Methodist cassock saleswoman. Really.

Matthew Alderman. St. Vincent of Saragossa, Deacon and Martyr. Ink. Private Collection, England.

It would be interesting to see how many different details--both of the saint's rather complex legend and those of liturgical interest--our readers could pick out of this particular image. I will restrict myself to saying that the client instructed me to make sure the saint was shown in traditional vestments, an instruction I took as far as I possibly could--down to the Spanish collar on his dalmatic, the biretta, and the maniple. Certainly the real Vincent never wore these, but it is a testament to the Communion of Saints that stands outside of time, and reminds us that Christian iconography and Christian archaeology are two rather different things.

It occurred to me recently during a Solemn Mass what a wonderful symbol (however unintended and Rorschach-like it might be) the humeral veil is as a representation of God's mercy. The subdeacon, not being ordained in the way that priest or deacon is, is not worthy to touch even the paten, yet he is entrusted with it, and even, hiding behind his upturned, muffled hands, plays the part of the veiled seraph, because God has given him the veil to cover his sinful self--the grace, the strength, the means to be found worthy of transcending the old Adam entering into the sacred mysteries. God does all the hard work in changing our hearts if we just say the word, down to giving us His Son as the perfect sacrifice to give back to Him as thanksgiving.

My soul is weary of my life,
I will let go my speech against myself,
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say to God: Do not condemn me:
Tell me why thou judgest me so.
Doth it seem good to thee that Thou shouldst calumniate me,
And oppress me, the work of thy own hands,
And help the counsel of the wicked?
Hast thou eyes of flesh: or,
Shalt thou see as man seeth?
Are thy days as the days of man,
And are thy years as the times of men:
That thou shouldst inquire after my iniquity, and search after my sin?
And shouldst know that I have done no wicked thing,
Whereas there is no man that can deliver out of Thy hand.

--Job 10:1-7

Unusually bleak and accusatory it may be, but this text and setting has always haunted me. May we never be so quick to rush to judgment--unless we are as holy as Job was. Especially since once God responds to old Job, He gets...well...sarcastic, for want of a better word. And I'm not sure any of us poor mortals could handle that. Still, such passages are in Scripture (and read out during the liturgy) good reason, and it is worth considering that even Holy Mother Church admits there are times where we want to cry out and ask "Why?" in the face of our own suffering.

Mercifully, this is not one of those times for me, and instead this All Souls' Day I am grateful for the opportunity to add my prayers to those of the other faithful in freeing souls from the halfway-house of Purgatory.

Mom: (Over phone) So do you have anything fun planned for this week?
Me: Well, we're having a sung Requiem tomorrow...

Advertised on a church signboard downtown: "9:30 AM - CAPPUCINO SERVICE." Presumably they use the Missale Romano-Seraphicum. And Low Mass is Espresso. Elsewhere, at another church, this one Catholic, the notation: "All Souls' Day Mass: Saturday, October 31 5 PM." Hmmm. If they didn't wear black, then they're really just not trying.

*

Halloween was once again at our throats this last week. (Mwaha.) They were advertising a showing of the film (which I was only vaguely aware of) The Haunting in Connecticut in the lounge of my apartment complex next week. Mercifully, I will be out of town anyway, but what struck me was that not only had the poster advertising the event reiterated virtually the entire plot in small type at the bottom (why?) but it had been lifted wholesale from Wikipedia, with the link underlines and even the footnote superscripts (lacking the actual footnotes) intact. This is beyond the increasingly-quixotic demand for good grammar and spelling, it's just a total failure of common sense.

*

There is an image of Our Lady in the stained glass at Holy Hill that looks uncannily like Maggie Gyllenhaal, despite predating her (the actress's, not the Great Mother of God's) birth by at least half-a-century. I'm afraid to ask what this means about my subconscious, but now when someone complains my drawing of St. Agnes looks too much like Ellen Page (who does look rather like a Murillo painting, if, say, Murillo knew what a Hamburgerphone looked like), I have an excuse. Not a very good one, but still.

*

It occurs to me that one of the real wonders of the Trinity is that it shows how utterly perfect God is. C.S. Lewis once made the point that you cannot demand God do the impossible (in the sense of a logical contradiction, not in the sense of moving mountains or eating six whole elephants before breakfast), because the logical contradiction simply does not have an independent existence. Though it also seems one of the more clumsy atheistic taunts of this sort--"If God is so amazing, why can't He make another one of Himself?"--is neatly solved by the Trinity. God cannot make another god, as God is supreme, and two gods would negate that. So would a created god, since God has no beginning or end. But the eternal generation of the Son from the Father and the Holy Ghost from both (i.e., God is love) is the only way one could have multiple beings that were uncreated and still were one God in three persons, with each equally divine. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. But they are not three gods but one God.

We cannot, of course, say that the Trinity is quite properly God the Father "copying" or "reproducing" Himself, but it seems to me that He has done about as close as He could through the elegant framework of the Trinity without negating those very things that make God God. This may well be very bad theology, but the thought came to me Sunday up in the choirloft during the Creed, and it seemed at least worth repeating.

*

The other truly wonderful thing about the Trinity is that it means God is a society. One person would leave us with the perfect, eternally self-interested God described by Aristotle, or the various versions of indulgent grandfather, divine despot or watchmaker envisioned by various heresies over the centuries. And two would destroy the equilibrium of the thing. With three...well, there is a good reason that the triangle is the strongest shape. A Trinity explains not only love and marriage and children, but the desire of Man to seek out his own kind, and thrive, and, to paraphrase Chesterton, even when Christians seek to be alone, as with monks, they do it together. Two people are a duo. Three people are a culture.

The Month of the Holy Souls is once again at our doorstep, and how kind of so many merchants and shopkeepers to decorate their stores with purgatorial skulls and black crepe--though I'm a bit confused about the spiderwebs, mummies and werewolves. But all this talk of black vestments and Dies Irae got one of our alert readers, Nathaniel P., thinking:

Thinking about the Verdi Requiem got me thinking: What if Verdi had written a Mass? I'm assuming it would have the following plot:

The Priest is a hunchback who mentors the subdeacon, a seminarian, with a shady past and unknown origins. We discover all this by the Kyrie. The graduale is the hit chant "La Nonna Immobile" [in honor of a particularly ferociously stolid Italian churchlady, no doubt. --MGA] By the time we get to the Credo we learn that the subdeacon is actually the schola director in disguise, as the two happen to be identical twins. Confusion ensues, but is merrily resolved. At the Sanctus we discover that the priest and the deacon were switched at ordination (Two hunchbacks--Take that, Rigoletto!), and a fight breaks out at the first step (see Fortescue, p. 47 for the staging of said fight). By the Agnus Dei the deacon has killed the priest (thurible fight!), and repeats the prayer of consecration to make the Mass valid. While he says the prayers, the subdeacon and schola director join in in perfect counterpoint. The people receive communion and the Mass concludes with "Ah! Ah! La Benedictio-oh-ne!" The sacred ministers recess.

And it's all staged by Zeffirelli, with costumes by Wippel. Like the Mass will be in heaven.

Alert Reader Sam responds to the (non-musical) question, "Why is Christ the King the final Sunday in October in the 1962 calendar?" Straight from the horse's mouth, he points me to Pius XI's Quas Primas establishing the feast:

We have commanded its observance on a Sunday in order that not only the clergy may perform their duty by saying Mass and reciting the Office, but that the laity too, free from their daily tasks, may in a spirit of holy joy give ample testimony of their obedience and subjection to Christ. The last Sunday of October seemed the most convenient of all for this purpose, because it is at the end of the liturgical year, and thus the feast of the Kingship of Christ sets the crowning glory upon the mysteries of the life of Christ already commemorated during the year, and, before celebrating the triumph of all the Saints, we proclaim and extol the glory of him who triumphs in all the Saints and in all the Elect.

Now you know!

In the beginning were the ninjas. And then came the Anglican Fox Hunters with their lasers and guitara. And the Swiss Guards.

And now, Catholic litterateurs. Everyone's favorite literary shogun, Bernardo, writes:

Hi, this message is all about ninjas Dappled Things,* THE NEW ISSUE OF DAPPLED THINGS. This message is awesome. My name is Bernardo and I can’t stop thinking about the new issue. This issue is cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

Facts:

1. Dappled Things is made by mammals. Rational mammals.
2. Dappled Things is awesome ALL the time.
3. The purpose of Dappled Things is to flip out and kill bad writing.

The new issue’s weapons and gear:

1. Fiction by best-selling science fiction writer John C. Wright, as well as an interview with him that you will LOVE—if you know what’s good for you. “Oh, what’s the big deal?” you foolishly ask. Fine, I’ll give you a sample. But if you don’t like it, there’s no hope for you, and you need to go away and read some Dan Brown. Here is a totally sweet passage:

I first noticed the angel across the platform when I went in to buy my ticket. Admittedly, the sight made me nervous. I nonchalantly tried to keep him in view and I even bought a newspaper so I could hide my face while staring, just like a spy in a bad sitcom.

2. Killer stories by Tony France, Fiorella de Maria, and Gerald C. Matics.
3. Ninja outfit Sweet new cover design.
4. Essays that will explode your brain with their awesomeness, like Michael L. Ortiz’s “Some Remarks on Autism and Catholicism” or the second part of Eileen Cunis’s “On the Vocation of the Christian Artist.” In his sweet essay, Mr. Ortiz, who has Asperger Syndrome, gives us a window into his mind:

The first thing that some people notice upon meeting me is that I do not make eye contact. This is not because I am shy or devious; eye contact simply overloads my senses and makes me unable to think. To me, eyes are like the sun, which blinds by its excess of light. Furthermore, faces refuse to resolve themselves into recognizable composites for me: they remain mere assortments of features. . . . Sometimes I fail to recognize acquaintances, and sometimes I mistake strangers for friends. I once recognized my wife’s nose from a distance -in a crowded public place, well before I realized that my wife was attached to
it.

If you don’t think that sounds like a TOTALLY COOL essay, then go away and sit at the loser’s table, ’cause you obviously don’t have a clue.

5. Poetry and art so absurdly strong that they’ll leave you weeping like a little girl. Yeah, that’s right. Run to Mommy.

The new issue is so crazy and awesome that it flips out ALL the time. I heard that there was a copy of the new issue that was eating at a diner. And when some dude split an infinitive, the copy killed the whole town. (Metaphorically.) My friend said that he saw a copy totally uppercut some kid just because he didn’t understand that beauty is the enjoyment that comes from the contemplation of being.

And that’s what I call Ultimate Literary Power!

If you don’t believe that the new issue of Dappled Things has Ultimate Literary Power, you better get a life right now or it will chop your head off! (Intellectually.) It’s an easy choice, if you ask me.

Also, the new issue (and every issue) is soooo sweet that you need to buy a subscription now for all of your friends. I can’t believe how good it is sometimes, but I feel it inside my heart. This issue is totally awesome, and that’s a fact. It is fast, smooth, cool, strong, powerful, and sweet. I can’t wait to read all of it. I love Dappled Things with all of my intellect (including my aesthetic sense).

Q and A:

Q: Why is everyone so obsessed about Dappled Things?
A: Dappled Things is the ultimate paradox. On the one hand, it doesn’t care for the fads and fallacies of contemporary culture, but on the other hand, it’s at the cutting edge.

Q: I heard that ninjas the editors of Dappled Things are always cruel or mean. What’s their problem?
A: Whoever told you that is a total liar. Just like other mammals who love good writing, the editors can be mean OR totally awesome.

Q: What do issues of Dappled Things do when they’re not killing fallacies or flipping out?
A: Most of their free time is spent flying, but sometimes they build cathedrals. (Ask Matthew Alderman if you don’t believe me.)

If you are ready for Ultimate Literary Power, then come to our website now. Don’t come if you liked Confessions of a Shopaholic. (SERIOUSLY.)

* Editor-in-Chief’s Note: The hardworking, fun-loving, and (figuratively) nunchaku-wielding staff of Dappled Things takes no responsibility for injuries incurred by a too literal reading of the comparison of utterly awesome literary writing’s effect on the mind to that of ninjas on the body. Any resemblance to actual ninjas, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Posted by: Matthew / 6:56 AM
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I am somewhat less of an Anglophile than I used to be growing up, having discovered the rich and occasionally bittersweet world of old Spain and the charming, courtly fatalism of the geographical mess that was once Hapsburg Austria, but there still is much to recommend Old Blighty--at least before it is legislated out of existence by Brussels--and all of it is represented perfectly in miniature in this little clip. (We will overlook the fact that had England hung onto her French lands, France might not now be a Catholic nation, as opposed to today where it is a vibrantly...um... Er. Um. Long awkward pause. Okay, maybe it didn't matter that much after all. Apologies, Joanie, you did your best.)

This speech, and Olivier's masterful (and at times highly stylized) film of Shakespeare's Henry V was a huge formative influence in my childhood--with all its knights, chivalry, pomp, and star-sunbursted black armor, set against a background borrowed wholesale from the Hours of the Duke of Berry--and I was blessed to have parents who thought to put such things in my way. (And then there were some bits that just baffled me, like Falstaff's death.) I had seen it so many times that, when we were called to memorize and recite a monologue from Shakespeare years later in high school it was fairly easy for me to simply brush off Henry's rousing speech before Agincourt with a minimum of fuss.

Incidentally, Sts. Crispin and Crispinian were twin preachers who moonlighted (elves-and-shoemaker-style) as cobblers, eventually getting martyred in Soissons circa 286. They are patrons of all those who work with leather, among other things. Naturally, some tiresome persons have suggested they are the result of Christianizing some local fertility cult, I suppose, because it would seem to some people that's how saints are apparently made, not because some good Christians had the courage to go out and die for their beliefs. Imagine that.

*

Today, in the 1962 calendar, is the Feast of Christ the King. I love the old calendar a lot, with its various ranks of feasts and its octaves (even if some of those were suppressed from the still older 1952 calendar), but I am mystified why our celebration of Christ's very real rulership over the earth and His paramount place in our society and homes, is stuck at the end of October. But liturgy is not about a priori logic, so I can let it slide. Maybe it has something to do with the October Revolution or something. But the intersection of Christus Rex and Crispin Crispian is an apt one this year, given the wonderful rah-rah nature of this feast's collects, which shine out in our embattled age just as brightly as Henry's speech before Agincourt:

We have received the food of immortality and beg, Lord,
that we who are proud to fight under the banner of Christ our King,
may reign with Him for ever in His realm above.

Naturally, at my local ICRSP oratory, we had quite a blowout, the first solemn high mass I have seen since our pilgrimage out to Holy Hill, and the choir (in the words of friend Matt N.) rocked the Christus Vincit complete with an abbreviated version of the Laudes Regiae, that old papal litany of saints with the wonderful repetition of Tu illam adjuva. Viva Cristo Rey!

Come one! Come all! I'll be speaking at the Essen Haus in beautiful downtown Madison next Thursday, October 29, at 7 PM. Thrill to the Spirit of the Liturgy! Be introduced to the mysterious practices of Early Christian architecture! Boo and Hiss at the villainous architectural modernist Sovik the Destroyer! See some of the author's latest work! And there may even be a few jokes at the expense of disco and 1970s architecture!

Photo by Br. Stephen, O. Cist.

It appears I am not the only person to design a seminary chapel dedicated to Our Lord's kingship in La Crosse, Wisconsin. (For those of you entering this in progress, my thesis project was a hypothetical American seminary for our friends over at the Institute, sited on a very real location east of the city, nestled amid the bluffs.) The former seminary chapel--now the diocesan chancery's--is dedicated under that title as well, and is a real (if highly unusual) gem. It is the work of the twentieth century's most underrated liturgical architect, the great and miraculously versatile Edward J. Schulte.

Photo by Br. Stephen, O. Cist.

Schulte was a Cincinnati-based designer, and his enormously long career in the field started after an encounter with Ralph Adams Cram at the start of the century and closed in 1967, his death coming only a few years later in 1975. Schulte's great strength was his ability to design traditional churches with a modern flair, and embody even his more austere, modernistic designs (depending on the client) with an unparalelled sense of groundedness, liturgical decorum and beauty. [Some of his later work was admittedly uneven, as I was recently told his son did a good deal of the late-in-life work attributed to him, due to ill-health, but at the very least, there are interesting aspects to it.] There is shockingly little about him in print, save for a few scattered references and unpublished dissertations, but with the growing interest in the architects of that era, perhaps this will change.

Schulte also designed the impressive (and, at its completion at 1962, surprisingly new) cathedral in La Crosse, which I will cover in a future post. It deals with many of the same decorative and iconographic themes as the chapel, but in a much-enlarged way. It would be interesting to see which came first.

Here follow a few more photos of the interior, taken on a recent visit to the area. Fellow blogger and friend Br. Stephen of Spring Bank (who joined me on my tour of sacred La Crosse this time) has also covered this chapel at his site as well.

"Let not the Trojans keep you at arm's length, Achaeans, but go for them and fight them man for man. ... so far as in me lies I will show no slackness of hand or foot nor want of endurance, not even for a moment; I will utterly break their ranks, and woe to the Trojan who shall venture within reach of my spear." -Iliad, Book XX

For our new readers, here's another good introduction to my work and design philosophy. I frequently undertake designs for counter-proposals to existing churches and cathedrals to help illustrate and develop my architectural and liturgical philosophy. The inimitable Cusack has a whole category devoted to them over at his website here.

Sketch for an Ideal Parish, featured in "Incarnating the Mass," St. Austin Review, May/June 2007 and in "Heaven Made Manifest," the 2008 volume of Antiphon, the Journal of the Society for Catholic Liturgy.

Note the simplicity of the volume and the prominence of the altar--showing what can be achieved on a budget with simple proportions, strategic ornamentation, and a logical sense of liturgical planning.

I just wanted to wish a hearty welcome to those new readers who heard my interview this morning on EWTN Sacred Heart Radio. Just as an introduction, I am a graduate of the University of Notre Dame's classical architecture school, currently living and working in Milwaukee at a very fine traditional architecture firm, where I am involved in a number of current and pending sacred architecture projects (as well as several secular residential ones as well). I have written a number of articles on traditional liturgical planning and architectural design in scholarly journals such as Antiphon and Sacred Architecture, as well as pieces on related subjects for Dappled Things (my most recent article here), First Things (article here), Touchstone and elsewhere. You can also find me on the New Liturgical Movement website quite frequently, as I am their architectural critic. I am also an artist and illustrator, and my work is in collections from California to England to Austria.

While, through the firm I work for, I am soon to be involved in at least one traditional sacred architecture design (more on that in the future), I recently saw the completion of much of my furnishing designs for the newly-restored historic Catholic cathedral in Vladivostok, Russia, Most Holy Mother of God Catholic Church. You can find photographs of it at the Vladivostok mission's website, and I hope to post on it in the near future.