Lying in bed on Sunday afternoon, hearing the television set from the other room, and feeling as if it were fifty years ago--these brought back the memories of people whom I loved, and who loved me, and who are gone.
But coming to consciousness, as I reflected on the pleasantness I felt, it struck me that the entire gist of the feeling of happiness in that moment came from the knowledge that someone else was out in the other room, that I was not alone. It was the knowledge, that I could go through the door and see a face of a person I loved, and that loved me, and that I could spend the rest of the day in contented fellowship with that person---all of this in the present moment, and the near future--this is what gave me the deepest satisfaction.
That feeling, that I am welcome, and that I can share fellowship and love with others, has been at the core of the search of much of my adult life. I have felt it at times, and at other times barely felt it. As the years have gone by I have to come to treasure the memories of times I felt that.
Lately I feel barely connected to other people, as if my world has whittled down to just a few people who would even notice if I were gone from the world, or even care. But one is infinitely more than none, and even if there were no other people, God is present, and to worship and adore him, even in complete solitude and isolation, would be enough to get up in the morning, and enough to go on living day to day.
But I am not alone. I have the blessings of love and company with me. One is infinitely more than none. For today at least, it is all I need.
Sunday continued the beautiful, merciful rains here. These were not thunderstorms but gentle soaking rains of grey skies that lasted the entire day. Such days are so rare here. I found myself sitting outside on the porch to listen to the sound, and draw in the sweet humid air.
In the afternoon I went into the bedroom to take a nap for half an hour while Ginger sat in the living room watching a football game. When I take naps in the afternoon, I can fall asleep almost instantly.
After about twenty minutes I awoke from my dreamless nap, in those seconds after waking, I was in a state of suspension from the world, my conscious thoughts not having returned yet.
I could hear the sound of the television set from the next room, and in that instant, I was carried back to a sensation from long ago, fifty years perhaps, of being in my grandparents house on a Sunday afternoon, with the television set on. The purity of the feeling was a great comfort to me. The veil between the present and the past was pierced.
As my awareness returned to me, of my surroundings, and of the present of my life, I held the sensation I had felt, of being fifty years in the past, on me like a warm blanket.
How beautiful it had been, so long ago, to have lived those moments with my family. I reflected on how I had spent my childhood only wanting to grow up, to leave behind my childhood, and to live an adult life. Here I was, five decades later, drinking the pure water of memory like the waters of life.
Grief can be overwhelming at times, even years after one loses someone. The finality of death is brutal, One somehow believe the absence will pass. But it cannot pass in this lifetime. These moments when the veil between past and present is pierced are merciful gifts with no downside. One cannot manufacture them, yet they come, often enough to make life pleasant, and to quench the thirst one feels for the comforting love that has fled with the death of others.
This morning, in the pre-dawn darkness, when I opened the sliding door to go out to the porch, the pleasant smell of the overnight shower filled my nostrils. At once I remembered that I had woken in the middle of the night, at some undetermined time, and had heard the soothing sound of the rain on the roof.
I had forgotten about the rain, or rather it had no registered in my recollections on waking. It felt a dream that had come back to me, triggered by some incident in the waking hours that jarred the previously unretrievable memory of the images that filled one's mind during the night.
I had been having rather interesting dreams lately, ones in which certain people from my past, living and dead, were making repeated appearances. I rarely dream about anyone in my life at the moment. Mostly it is about people from whom I am estranged, and who have passed away into the next life.
There is often a sadness about these dreams, even as I dream them, as I often have felt the distance from these individuals who have been dear to me.
Lately, however, there has been a shift in the tone of these dreams. I feel in the dreams as if the estrangement is over, and that I with them in fellowship again. Even the dreams of the ones who have died seem to feel comforting. Of course there is still the poignancy of waking from these dreams, and realizing that it was merely in my imagination. Yet I am of the inclination to believe that something has changed, or is changing, on some scale that I cannot understand. I don't really expect to see any of these people again in this life. If my dream means anything, is connected to something that many people are probably experiencing, and its meaning can only be vaguely inferred from my own small nighttime imagination.
One of the core ideas of Structuralism as it was elaborated by the great French philosopher/anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was the overthrow of the idea that in regards to a story or a myth, there is one correct version of the story that can be taken as normative. Instead, all variations of the story or myth are considered part of a "space" of the story, with the story being not a single narrative but the space encompassing the variations.
The canonical example he gave was the Oedipus myth. In college one is apt to learn the version of Euripides, and this is the version that Freud took as normative in his discussion of human psychology. But this version is only one of many versions with many variations, including Oedipus' own birth, as well as his ultimate fate, and many other plot points. Lévi-Strauss famously made a chart of these variations in order to illustrate the "space" of the myth of Oedipus.
I didn't really get this concept fully until I listened to a Youtube recording of a lecture he gave at Berkeley in 1984, towards the end of his active career. In this lecture, which I've linked here, Lévi-Strauss describes the work of an anthropologist from a century earlier who traveled in the remote river valleys of British Columbia collecting myths from the tribals groups. These groups has long lived in loose contact with each over the millennia. The anthropologist (whose name escapes me) noticed that the groups had essentially the same myth, but with variations of the plot. In one version, the main character journeys to the mountains. In another he goes down to the sea, etc.
Lévi-Strauss asserted that just as the tribal groups had dispersed so as to fill all of the inhabitable valleys over time, so too the myth common to them had developed variations to fill out the space of variations within the story. There was no "true" version. All of the versions and variations together were the myth. The variations were not incidental. What was varied was in fact the key to understanding the story. Understanding this is necessary to understanding the core of Structuralism (and by extension, Post-Strucutalism).
I thought about this aspect of Structuralism while reflecting on the Ave Maria prayer. Of course there are small variations of the prayer, line by line, in any language. But what is more fascinating to me is the variational space created by the languages together as a set. The fact that the prayer was "originally" in Latin (dating at least from the early 11th century) is not important in the Structuralist sense. The Latin version as it exists today is only one of the variations within the space.
When comparing the Ave Maria in different languages line by line, by far the greatest variation occurs in the first words, in which one greets Mary:
English: Hail Mary
Latin: Ave Maria (Hail Mary)
Portuguese: Ave Maria (Hail Mary)
Greek:Χαίρε Μαρία(Hail Mary)
Polish: Zdrowaś Maryjo (Hail Mary)
Italian: Ave o Maria (Hail O Mary)
French: Je vous salue Marie (I greet/salute you Mary)
Spanish: Dios te salve Maria (God save thee Mary)
German: Gegrüßet seist du, Maria (Greeted be thou, Mary)
Irish: Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire (Welcome [to thee], o Mary)
Here I've translated to either thou (familiar) or you (formal, polite) as appropriate. In some languages, the distinction cannot be made from the greeting itself, while in others it is implicit. Among these my personal favorite is German, as it uses not only the familiar pronoun but the subjunctive of the verb sein (to be). The Spanish also uses the subjunctive mood in the greeting.
The French verb saluer and the Spanish verb salvar both obvious descend form the Latin salvare, from which comes the common greeting salve, which is used to greet Mary is the Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen) prayer. The common French greeting salut comes from the same root (I think), and our English word salute likewise.
At the other end of the spectrum in the Rosary is the entire second stanza,
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Now and in the hour of our death.
In nearly every case of the languages above, the wording is as close as possible to the English version given here. The only exception is a slight variation in the Greek version, where Mary is not called "Mother of God" but Θεοτόκε, which is the vocative form of the noun theotokos, meaning roughly "God-birther," which is the most common epithet of Mary among the Greek Christians, and by extension in many of the Orthodox churches. The Orthodox actually have their own variation of the Hail Mary, but I'll discuss that a different time.
There is something comforting to me that all of the versions end with a reference to one's own death. The words our death are invariably the last words in the prayer in all versions. They bring a great big thud to the prayer that stars off soaring with an invocation to the mother of God. This is perhaps the central point of the prayer. To remember our own inevitable death and look forward to Mary's help at that moment, whether it is only minutes away, or many years from now. It invokes Mary to be present not only as death approaches, but when death is imminent.
Thus in praying the Rosary, one contemplates (by vocalization) one's inevitable demise at least 50 times a day. Without this the prayer would not be half as powerful. It is the ultimate sobriety, the ultimate realism of life.
By the way from the above, you can probably tell which language I'm trying to add as my tenth way of reciting the Rosary. I needed a Celtic language in the mix. Irish Gaelic is very challenging and intimidating to the beginner but thankfully I began learning it over 25 years ago, so the spelling and pronunciation seem somewhat natural to me at this point.
Not all of the mistakes and alterations one hears in the recitation of the rosary in the livestreams arise from not being a native speaker. In plenty of cases, across the spectrum of languages, one hears variations and alterations in pronunciation and wording that, if one picks up on them, can be highly insightful about the language one is hearing.
In pronunciation, the biggest variation one hears is in Portuguese. Anyone who speaks Portuguese would not be surprised by this. Any of them could tell you how the R-sound at the beginning of words becomes an H in Brazilian pronunciation, and that the round pure O vowel becomes an OO. Thus the Brazilians actually pronounce Rio as "Hee-oo.: But one hears this in continental Portuguese too. It is not cut and dry.
Some Portuguese continental speakers still roll out their r's in the Spanish way. This is common at Fatima, of course. But like I said, it's complicated. It is not uncommon to hear the same speaker, from one repetition of the Ave Maria to the next, pronounce rogai por nos peccadores (pray for us sinners), in the continental way and then in the Brazilian style. Obviously this is not done in some purposeful way, but "just happens" as they recite it. I did not at all expect this. What does this tell us? It says that to the Portuguese ear, these two ways of pronouncing the word have the same value of interpretation to the ear. In a Structuralist sense, they form part of an axis of pronunciation in the variation of the line, which are all equivalent.
Even more interesting to me are when a native speaker alters the wording of a prayer, either by a mistake, or on purpose. One mistake I heard by a Spanish woman greatly intrigued me. As anyone who has learned Spanish knows, that language has two different verbs that are equivalent to our verb "to be," namely ser and estar.
One learns in Spanish class that, roughly, ser is used for permanent conditions and identity, whereas estar is used for temporary conditions and spatial location.
Learning the distinction between them is easy in theory, but remembering to use them correctly and naturally when speaking is a different matter. I am still susceptible to saying Yo soy (the ser form) when I should be using Yo estoy. Spanish speakers probably expect to hear this mistake made by English speakers, in almost a stereotypical way.
In the Rosary, the distinction between the two verbs is crucial to the meaning. In asseting that Mary is blessed among women, one says in Spanish bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, which (because eres is the conjugated form of ser) asserts that Maris is permanently blessed among women as part of her identity and being. It is not a passing condition. Likewise in the Spanish equivalent of "the Lord is with thee", one says El Señor es contigo, asserting that the Lord being with Mary is a fixed condition.
Well, normally at least. Last week I heard this mix-up happen by a native speaker of Spanish, while reciting the Ave Maria at Lourdes. By her accent, the woman who made it was obviously continental, as are most of the Spanish-speaking priests and sisters at Lourdes. Yet in reciting the line I mentioned, on one of the ten sequential repetitions of the prayer that form a decade of the Rosary, she spontaneously said El Señor está contigo, which means that the Lord happens to be with Mary at the moment.
By the next repetition, she had fixed her mistake. She only made it once. Yet it blew me away to hear it by a native speaker of Spanish.
Even more intriguing to me are when one of the reciters changes the wording of the prayer, freestyling perhaps to provide an alternate version. Today during the fifth and final decade of the Italian Rosary at Lourdes, which is always done by Italian priests, of which they are plenty at Lourdes, the older priest who was tasked with being clean-up changed tu sei benedetta fra le donne "thou art blessed among the women", to tu sei benedetta fra tutte le donne "thou art blessed among all the women". As he did so, he punched the pronunciation of tutte, lingering on the double t as Italian speakers do. It was very pleasing. I felt his joy and enthusiasm in his recitation. It felt like hearing a jazz musician cutting loose in a solo.
In the last few weeks, one of the other non-native speakers who has taken his turn in leading the crowd at Lourdes for the English-language rosary is from a country I cannot quite identify. He is obviously European, and is accent is pretty good. A first I thought he was Irish, but then he gave himself away with a few mistakes. Notably he almost always says "blessed art thou among woman." A native speaker would never get the plural wrong that way.
Today I noticed that he was jumping back and forth between the two forms of the English second-person. He would (correctly) begin by addressing the Holy Mother using the archaic familiar thou, but in the next line he would switch to "and blessed is the fruit of your womb..."
Personally it is one of the joys of recitation of the rosary in English that I get to address Mary using the archaic singular second-person thou, which has mostly disappeared from everyday English. The archaic thou always indicates that one is addressing one individual, not many, and that this person is familiar enough to you as a friend or family member.
Most of the other European languages still preserve this distinction in their pronouns, so speakers of those languages would have little trouble understanding why one would use thou in English in the Ave Maria prayer to address Mary. Yet I still find it admirably that they invariably bother to use the archaic from. To me, to hear it recited with you seems unnatural, as if I am putting unnecessary distance between myself as the Blessed Mother. It is too formal.
In some of the languages which still actively preserve the thou-you pronoun distinction, one uses the familiar (thou) form in the Ave Maria. In German one addresses her as du. In Italian, one addresses her as tu; in Spanish, tú; in Polish ty; in Latin tu. In Greek, where Maria is called theotokos (the "God-bearer"), one uses the familiar pronoun form too to address her.
Yet in a few others, one addresses Maria more formally. In Portuguese, one uses vós, which is archaic in Portuguese and was formerly only used for multiple individuals. Today it is an old-fashioned way to refer to multiple people, or to one individual in a formal sense. So it feels archaic to the Portuguese ear, but also is deferential. Portuguese has many different ways of saying "thou/you". The use of vós is probably heard by most speakers of Portuguese only in prayers or in the mass.
In French, one addresses Maria using vous, which is not archaic at all but is strictly a formal address to another person, meant to indicate respect or politeness. Unlike Portuguese, where the pronoun situation is quite messy, in French it is very clear the distinction between the familiar/singular and the formal plural.
I've spent quite a bit of time reflecting on this. Why does French address the Blessed Mother deferentially like this, whereas in Spanish and German, and other languages, one uses the equivalent of thou, addressing Mary like a family member?
I want to make something out of it, but I can only guess at the linguistic aspects of this and how it relates to French culture. In a lot of ways, French culture is still a big mystery to me. I have learned to take things in France as they are, without trying to make big conclusions about what they mean.
During a particular day, between the livestreams at the shrines Lourdes and Fatima, it is possible to recite the rosary live in five different languages--English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese (and sixth, Polish, on Saturdays).
Of the these six languages I just mentioned, five of the recitations are always done by priests and sisters who are native speakers of the language. In the one of the languages, however, the recitation is almost almost done by non-native speakers of the language. Guess which language it is? Of course it is English. The recitation of the rosary (from Lourdes at 6 AM Pacific) is almost always done by people who have learned English as a second or third language.
Occasionally, one hears a native English speaker, for example a priest from English, Ireland, or the United States. Instead one hears from a rotating group of speakers from around the world. Often the English-language recitation is done by what I assume are priests from Francophone Africa. They often do the French language ones as well, as often as priests from France itself.
Over the summer, the English-language rosary was often led by a German priest, who himself occasionally led a German-language rosary when there was a special pilgrimage group that provided a large-enough crowd. I was delighted to have the opportunity to recite the German version with them, but it only happens from time to time. By the way, the German word for rosary is Rosenkrantz, like the minor character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, who was later made famous by Tom Stoppard.
One learns much from hearing the non-native speakers attempt to lead the crowd at the grotto in the sequence of prayers. The German priest I mentioned invariably pronounced the first line of the Ave Maria prayer as "Hail Mary, full of gray." The s-sound at the end of the word grace disappeared entirely. He always pronounced it like this. I inferred that for German speakers, it is no normal to play that strong s-sound at the end of words. If I had a few minutes with the priest, I could no doubt help him improve his recitation, as it is sometimes humorously distracting to hear mispronounce that word over and over.
In the last week, my morning routine on the porch has evolved slightly to accommodate a curious development here in North Scottsdale. The extra-heavy monsoon we got this year in August resulted in, among other things, an explosion of the insect population. For the first time since we have lived here in the Phoenix area, we have been confronted by mosquitoes.
Ginger in particular, being a ginger, feels at the mercy of them, so we must keep our patio door shut. This also keeps out the wasps that seem to find their way onto our porch, and sometimes get too curious in exploring the interior of the apartment. The wasps too are novel visitors because of the rain.
The mosquitoes start coming after me about an hour before dawn and keep up their attack for the next three hours while I pray, meditate, and work from the rocking chair.
In order to fend them off, I have made it part of my evening routine to place a pair of socks, as well as a long sleeve button shirt, on the porch next to the chair. Evening still wearing my pajamas, I don the shirt and put on the socks as a defense against the mosquitoes. Nevertheless my hands are exposed and within an hour after dawn, usually my fingers are slightly swollen from the bites I have gotten without noticing.
Of course I could just buy some mosquito repellent. I think every morning I will do this, and yet I have let the days go by. Part of my things that surely the mosquitoes will go away any day now, and thus I will not need the repellent anymore. Yet they keep coming.
One good about the insect boom is that there has been a corresponding increase all the way up the food chain. As many would point out to you, the Sonoran Desert is full of life, especially birds.
Ginger was awakened in the middle of the night this week by loud hooting outside our window. She went to the kitchen to a great horned owl perched on the roof, silhouetted against the dark sky. I woke up shortly afterwards and went out to the porch and heard it hooting without seeing it.
The sound of an owl is very comforting. It's too bad they don't eat mosquitoes.
A few minutes before five thirty a.m. this morning Pacific time, the Youtube interface indicates that there are two people waiting for the start of the live feed from the grotto at Lourdes for the Saturday recitation of the holy rosary in the Polish language.
I think how odd it is, that one of those two people, in the whole world, is a guy in his pajamas on his apartment porch in Scottsdale, Arizona, who is not Polish, who has not been to Poland in over thirty years, who barely speaks any of the language, and who is not even Catholic.
When the broadcast starts at five thirty, I see the small group of pilgrims huddled in front of the entrance of the opening in the rock. They have umbrellas. Inside the opening the priest in white robes comes up to the lectern. The feed cuts to a close up of him as he welcomes the pilgrims in the language they understand, and makes the sign of the cross and pronounces words that I understand: W imię Ojca i Syna i Ducha Świętego (vvee-MYEH noyt-SAH ee see-NAH ee doo-HA swen-TEH-go).
Over the next half hour I listen in the dark of my porch wearing the noise-canceling headphones that Apple gave me as a free bonus when I bought my last laptop two years ago. I had only begun using them in the last couple months (I had even thought of giving them away as a gift), but had discovered how wonderfully they work, especially for the close listening of languages one is trying to learn.
The Poles only get to do their rosary once a week at Lourdes, always on Saturday, and they make they most of it. The same cadre of priests, together with one woman who is probably a nun, tag team in the recitations, like a rap group. They speak quickly as if to make sure they will get through the whole thing in their allotted half hour of time before the next group of priests will the stage in the little cave opening.
For the first couple minutes, the priests words are ones I can only partially understand, mostly through context. He asks for our prayers for the intentions of various people he names. There is usually a "Dorota" in the group, a common woman's name. Or maybe it's the same Dorota every week. I can't tell. I have a good friend in Poland whom I met in 1985 in Athens, and he later married a woman named Dorota and had four children with her. I met her in 1990 when I visited them. I always think of her when the priest says that name.
Amidst the words I barely understand, suddenly the priest launches into the Apostle's Creed in Polish. I recognize it, and understand it line by line, but I cannot yet recite it. I make the most of it by echoing the last few words of each line that I hear. Slowly I will build up the competency to recite the whole thing from memory.
Then, as if by magic, comes words I know well by now from my drills. Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie (OY-cheh nash. Kuh-TOOR-us yest vv NYEH-byeh).They roll out of the priest's mouth quickly. He has been reciting these same words from his earliest childhood no doubt, and they familiar to every Pole, just as the words of the Lord's Prayer are in English to me.
The minute I hear them, I try to speak them along with the priest at the same speed, without having to think about the next line, and getting each syllable right. I fumble over a few lines at the start, and have to catch up a half beat later, but I do well. There will be five more times to hear it and recite it during the next half hour, from the different speakers on stage as they take their turns, each seemingly outdoing each other in the fluidity at which they let it roll off their tongue. I will never be quite as good as they are, but I can almost match their speed at this point, when I am in the groove.
Much easier at this point is the Hail Mary itself, which comes in five sets of ten, with the the two stanzas recited in call and response fashion. Zdrowaś Maryjo, łaski pełna, Pan z Tobą
(ZDROH-vas mah-REE-oh, VAS-kees pay-OH-na pan STOH-boam.
At this point I am almost at native speed. With my headphones I relax and begin to listen to the priest or the nun in the recitation of the words while speaking them myself along with them. I hear my own pronunciation resonating in my skull while I hear theirs and my brain makes notes as to where I am not pronouncing the syllables the way they are, allowing fine tuning each time through. Their is a mental trick one can do, where one pretends that the words of the native speaker are actually coming out of one's own mouth, and at that instant, one can become aware of the way one's lips and tongue are not in the right positions to actually make those syllables that way.
It is in these moments of special consciousness that one can feel ones lips shifting subtly to make the syllables more correctly, to match the voice that one is attempting to reproduce, that is coming into one's ears. It must be connected to primal way we learn our native languages, because somehow it works. One knows this when one feels a strain on ones lips and facial muscles because they are now working in a new way that puts a strain on ones normal facial muscles. It is, I suppose, like being an athlete who is training, and who feels the limitations of one's leg muscles while running, but then shifts into a groove in which those muscles become activated in the way they should.
As I mentioned in the past, each language has its own demands on one's facial muscles that way, stretching them in a particular unique fashion.
Each priest in turns speaks also in a different register. I try to match it, in the same way one shifts keys while singing. When the woman takes her turn, I try to match her high feminine pitch as well. She is perhaps not a nun, but a lay helper, as her long blond hair is uncovered. She is tall and pretty, and I have a tiny crush on her in that pure way that is inspired by a common devotion to the Mother of God, the way boys have crushes on their elementary school teachers.
This week, however, I don't even notice her appearance, as I have kept my eyes closed the entire half hour, to focus on what I am hearing and speaking.
Her voice, however, is familiar to me. It is a refreshing drink of cool water after the gruff masculine recitation of the aged priest who took his turn just before her (see 23:00 in the video below). Anyone who thinks that Marian devotion is somehow demeaning to women is, to me, insane.
She is a good singe. A couple weeks ago she ended the Saturday half hour by singing what I later learned was a Polish hymn. It took some digging to find the words online, as I had to transliterate them from her singing by guessing at how to spell the words, so I could look them. The fact that I could successfully find the name of the hymn, with help from Google's auto correct of my spelling, was a little triumph in my language learning journey.
During the rosary, it is always a challenge to keeps one's mind focussed on the prayer itself. This is especially true when one is using it the way I am, to learn a language little by little. My mind wonders to what my Polish friend would think, if he heard me suddenly spit out the words of the Lord's Prayer or the Hail Mary in his own language. I could tell him I have learned it, via email, but such knowledge expressed that way doesn't have the impact it would, just hearing someone say it. He has never heard me speak his language. It would be fun to surprise him, just to see his reaction. I wonder if I will get the chance. Who knows when I will ever be in Europe again, or when he will come here.
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. (Rev. 12:1)
Today (Sept. 8) in Catholic Church, as well as in some of the Orthodox Churches, is celebrated the nativity of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God (the Theotokos, as the Orthodox say, using the Greek term).
Not surprisingly when I tuned into the livestream for the rosary at Fatima (the site of the last officially Catholic-sanctioned Marian apparition in 1917), I saw the shrine was decorated with many more flowers than normal. I let the livestream continuing playing after the rosary and listened in on the celebration of the mass afterwards, during the which the priest explained in Portuguese the importance of the day, all the while emphasizing that Mary is a created being, uma pessoa como cada um de nós (a person like each one of us), although in Catholic doctrine (but not in Orthodox), she was conceived without the stain of original sin. The proliferation of this idea (the Immaculate Conception of Mary) dates back many centuries but was only promulgated as infallible dogma in the year 1854. Contrary to what many, if not most, non-Catholics believe, the Pope very rarely speaks from a position of infallibility.
According to the Catholic thinking, we can be sure of that Mary was created without original sin, and that she remained as such, specifically because she bore the Living God as a foetus inside of her. She was thus, in effect, the "Second Ark of the Covenant." She also was also the "Second Eve," who by God's grace (and by her free choice in accepting it) undid what Eve did in the garden. This is why one often sees images of Mary crushing the Serpent with her foot.
Likewise, when Mary died, according to Catholic doctrine, her body was saved from corruption. Instead she was lifted bodily into heaven. Thus, unlike the rest of us, who will get our bodies back in perfect form in heaven, Mary never had to do without hers.
Many Protestants of course find the Catholic adoration of Mary quite repulsive. She did not remain a virgin after Jesus' birth but had normal marital relations with Joseph, and bore him other children. Catholics and Protestants thus argue over the meaning of the term "brother of Jesus" in the Gospels.
The Catholic dogma about Mary thus requires that only did Mary main celibate, but also that Joseph remained celibate during his lifetime (about which very little is known---much less than his wife). He is thus held up as a model not only for the celibacy of priests, but of anyone who is not in a holy marriage, including, for example, single people who struggle with homosexual attraction (i.e. gay people). Of course in the modern world, the concept of celibacy is considered perhaps to be the worst possible burden to bear, as in our material-centered world, sexuality and having experiences with the people of your preference is considered the ne plus ultra of existence.
In Catholic (and Orthodox) doctrine, all the saints are able to intercede for us, in that we can ask them to pray for us, and their prayers will be heard and will be extra potent before God. Mary is by far the most powerful as an intercessor. She is the Queen of Heaven (the Catholics believe that the woman mentioned in Revelation with a crown of twelve stars is Mary). She is the terror of demons. Catholic exorcists seem to be unanimous in their assertion that the mention of Mary's name sends the demonic spirits screeching in terror. Anything but her!
After the mass from the Fatima shrine was over, I switched over to listen to the celebration of the Nativity of the Theotokos from St. Sophia, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Like all things Orthodox, it has a different feeling that everything Catholic. Orthodox celebrations feel different. They are less in the head than Catholic celebrations, and more in the body, if that makes sense. The Orthodox would tell you this exactly stems from the fundamental theological difference between the two branches of Christianity over the wording of the Nicene Creed in 1054, the original source of the Great Schism. As well all know, the original Nicene Creed, as agreed upon by the Council of bishops in the 4th Century, states that the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, "proceeds from the Father." For various reasons, the Bishop of Rome (aka the Pope) added "...and from the Son". The reason the Pope felt he had to do this was because of certain historical factors at the time, that were present in western Europe but not in the East.
This might seem like a minor point, and until a couple weeks ago I was convicted of the truth of the Catholic position, based on Scripture. I thought the Orthodox only objected because of the unilateral nature of the Pope's action in revising the Nicene Creed without the consensus of the eastern bishops. Not so. The Orthodox believe this is important is because by asserting that the Third Person of the Trinity proceeds from both the First (the Creator) and the Second (Logos), one demotes the Spirit to a by-product of Logos. To them this is exactly why the Catholics (and the West) went down the road of over-emphasis of Reason. To them Thomas Aquinas (whose writings laid the foundations for the rise of western thought) is the supreme example of this over-emphasis of Reason versus reliance on the Spirit.
To me, both the Catholic and Orthodox positions feel like a breath of fresh air compared to the other. I would say that Mary appreciates both kinds, but I dare not ascribe my own beliefs to the Queen of Heaven.
While doing some research about the Lord's Prayer in various languages, I stumbled across an example of what I call the "stupidest word in Wikipedia." The word is original, and by extension its adverbial form, originally. If not the stupidest, it is certainly the most misused.
I used to see it all the time when I was an active Wikipedia editor, during the years 2004-2006 when I wrote over a thousand new articles, and contributed to thousands more. Many of my articles were about American history and geography. When writing about some place in the United States, I would often see a sentence like "eastern Oregon was originally inhabited by..." followed a mention of a Native American tribe who had lived in the area at the time of the first white settlement.
Most of the time it's used innocently, when editors using the colloquial way of writing historical articles on autopilot, but in other cases it is used with the baggage of anti-colonialist critical theory, as a way of emphasizing that white people steal other people's lands.
Whatever the case may be in that regard, the idea that we can ever know who originally inhabited a given piece of land on earth is ridiculous. This notion is itself controversial on the left, and among some Native Americans, and can be a sensitive topic. For example, everyone knows that Anasazi people once lived in the Four Corners area. But who were they? The word Anasazi means "ancestors of our enemies" in the Navajo language. That sort of cuts the legs out from the "we are the original inhabitants of this area" idea in this case. One can find this kind of example all over the map of North America. The tribes that inhabited a given area at the time of white settlement are generally known not to be the first known inhabitants of that area. In a place like the Colorado eastern plains, the tribes that were there arrived only a few decades before the white people in some cases.
And what about the Clovis People? Were they original? Some folks think that even they were later arrivals in North America?
But we all know would happen if we started to emphasize the fact that most Native American peoples are not the original inhabitants of any area. It would cause political chaos and would be considered rrrrrrrraaaaaacciiiiist, since it would be seen as "excusing" the fact that white people came and "took" the land from its "original owners." And let's not even get into the Solutrean hypothesis. If you're a Leftist who is obsessed with race, you might say that it's only important that the original inhabitants were racially kin to the Native Americans of today in some form. But aren't we all? No, white people aren't close enough kin to them. We all know how it works for the race-obsessed left.
We know it is never really about helping dark-skinned people. It's about tearing down western civilization in all its traditional forms and foundations, so it can be rebuilt into a glorious new Global Reset paradise. This includes destroying Christianity, above all else. It is very important to the Leftist that we learn that traditional forms of Christianity and assumptions about Jesus were wrong and stem from ignorance and bigotry. We Christians must be reeducated to accept a "better" interpretation that is inline with techoglobalist neopaganist dogma.
Yesterday when I came across the "original" usage in the context of the Lord's Prayer, I was reading the Italian-language Wikipedia article and saw that the editors had included the "original Aramaic" version of the Lord's Prayer alongside the Greek and Italian version. I almost burst out laughing.
The idea that anyone can know the "original" version that Jesus spoke in his sermon about prayer in Matthew 6 is, of course ludicrous. Even if we accept that the sermon was delivered in the Aramaic of the time (by no means a given), we still have little knowledge of the Galilean version of Aramaic that was current in that area. Many of the "original Aramaic" versions of the Lord's Prayer that one sees on line (Aboon d'beshmayo) are in classical or modern Syriac, which is related to, but not identical to the version that would have been spoken by most common folk in the Levant at the time.
Moreover, despite what you read in many articles online, it is by no means certain that Jesus delivered that sermon in Aramaic. There is a school of thought that he may have delivered it in exactly the language in which was written down, namely Greek.
Absurd! Jesus didn't speak Greek! Of coursehe spoke Greek. First off, all educated Jews spoke Greek at the time. It was the lingua franca of the area at the time during the Hellenistic period. It would be like someone in Israel choosing to give a speech in English instead of Hebrew, in order to reach a wider audience, something that happens all the time.
Moreover, Jesus was not only educated, he was a child prodigy who skillfully argued the Torah with rabbis in the temple at age twelve.
And this of course is leaving aside the extremely important point that Jesus is, according to his own words in scripture, God. I'm pretty sure God can speak all languages.
If you find someone who insists that the original Lord's prayer definitely had to be in colloquial Aramaic of the time, it is likely that person is the same kind of person who insists they also know that Jesus was a dark-skinned person of color, because, well, that's the color of Palestinian Arabs today, and we all know that Jesus was an oppressed person and the racial composition of places is fixed and never changes (unless we are talking about northern Europe). By that reasoning, we could assert that the people who lived in Arizona have always been white.
The fact is we don't know what color skin Jesus had, nor what language he spoke with his disciples, nor what language he used in the Lord's Prayer. It's a fascinating question on some level. We can guess the answer, but anyone who says that they know for certain probably has a political axe to grind. Jesus was a brown-skinned socialist, don't you know? These are the same people who reject the idea that Jesus was God while using the same Scripture where Jesus says himself that he is God. What Jesus are they talking about? The answer is that they are making up a character of Jesus for their own purposes, that is not the Jesus of the Bible (our only source for Jesus) but fits in with narrative they have created, in which they want Jesus to be a modernist John-Lennon-Imagine "cool with who you are" Jesus.
Personally I think the idea of Jesus being a socialist is about as far away from the truth as possible, whatever his skin color was, which itself is not important to me. I hope to find out someday when I meet him face to face.
I do intend to learn some form of the Syriac/Aramaic Lord's Prayer at some point. I have nothing at all against people learning such versions. I could learn one of the popular versions today in a couple hours, I suppose, but for the moment it would be only syllables to me, as I have not studied the language at all. When learning a version of the prayer I prefer to wait until I know the language a little, so that that all the words have meaning to me when I pronounce them. I want the prayer to be a manifestation of logos.
Since starting my new job two weeks ago, I've gotten back in the habit of getting up very early in the morning, usually between three and four in the morning. I go out to the porch in the dark and appreciate the quiet and slowness while the world is still asleep. Being up so early, I can start my morning prayers by bringing up the livestream of the Fatima shrine in Portugal, where they have recitation of the rosary every day at noon their time, which is 4 am Pacific.
Last year I decided I wanted to be able to recite the rosary in as many languages as possible, and I had learned it in five languages, first in Latin and English, and then in French, Greek and German. Definitely Greek was the hardest to learn to pronounce the syllables, even though I'd studied Greek in the past. Actually I should be honest and say that I learned the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria, and the Glory Be in all those languages.
This summer I decided I wanted to expand it out, and made a point of learning a few other languages. It is easy to practice a few of them using the livestream from Lourdes in France, where they have English, French, Spanish and Italian daily, and Polish on Saturdays. Polish was fun to learn. Now using the Fatima stream I can add Portuguese. That takes me up to nine.
One of the best things about this is that it gives me a chance to practice all these languages every day. I can at least recite the Lord's Prayer in every language in which I know it.
It's funny how the different languages give your mouth a work out in a different way. Each language has its own way in which you use the muscles of your mouth and and lips, and when you start speaking in a language, you work out those muscles in particular, and sometimes you can the effort. Even in French, which I've been speaking for almost forty years now, I can feel my lips getting fatigued from the particular way one makes French vowels. There is a French way of holding your mouth and lips in a resting position, and likewise in the other languages too. Polish makes you stretch your lower lip wide to make the syllables, in words like grzesznymi, which means "sinners", as in "pray for us sinners."
I've learned the wisdom of making my own prayer book that is effectively my phrasebook for all these prayers. I print out the prayers in the same format and put them in plastic sheet covers (my old habit from graduate school in Austin) and keep them in a binder, so I can flip from one to another. It's important to let your eye learn to read the words as you recite them, and at other times just to let your mouth make the syllables without seeing them written. It works out all the parts of your brain and memory to do it that way.
Another aspect of language learning that this method bring out is lateral jumping from one language to another. This can be harder than it seems. When reciting the Latin prayers, they come out of my mouth fluidly, reflexively, without having to think about them. But if I recite in Italian or Spanish, and then try to jump to Latin, at first it all came out like a train wreck, and I couldn't even remember some most basic words. "Ave Maria...then...uh....". The Latin words are often in reverse order. I discovered that one must make a specific mental route between one language and another. Thus I learn to jump not only from English into Latin but specifically from Italian or French into Latin. Different neural paths get activated.
One trouble I still have is that sometimes when reciting in Italian or Spanish, I will spontaneously jump from one to other, from one line to the next and not even notice. I will start the Ave Maria in Italian and end in Spanish, or vice versa. This is getting less frequent because of my method as I described in the previous paragraph, but it still happens in places where I don't have the words down exactly.
The ultimate trick is writing things down. Writing is the key to learning to speak a language (as opposed to understanding it while someone is speaking it). Writing supercharges language learning. I have my white board on a drafting table next to me, and I force myself to write down an entire prayer from memory. This was quite a challenge while learning the Polish prayers because of all the accents on letters that are not in English. Even making one mistake, I would force myself to write it from the beginning until I got it perfect. It's amazing what progress you can make if you force yourself to pay attention to the little things.
