12/30/24

 Monday, December 30, 2024

D+55

1972  Richard Nixon halted bombing of North Vietnam & announced peace talks

1993 Vatican recognized Israel

1996 Proposed budget cuts by Benjamin Netanyahu sparked protests from 250,000 workers who shut down services across Israel.

In bed at 9:00, awake at 12:45, and up at 1:15, unable to sleep.  I wrote in this journal until I turned the lights out at 3:30 because of trouble focusing my eyes.  No luck falling back to sleep; lights back on at 4:25, then off again at 6:25 and very slowly awake at 7:45, and up at 7:50.  Dozed off again at some point and woke up at 10:20.

Prednisone, day 230, 7.5 mg., day 45.  Prednisone at 5 a.m.  Three slices of Dave's Bread with blueberry preserves.  Other meds at 8:15.  

Further to my last, . . . "  I did a 'copy and paste' job on Larkin's "Church Going" yesterday and because of the lack of enough formatting options in Blogger, i.e., the inability to print poems with single spaces between lines, it made my daily journal longer than usual, six pages instead of my normal maximum of four.  I discovered the Larkin poem while reading an op-ed piece by Mary Townsend in yesterday's NY Times, "What I Am Looking for in Empty Churches."  She is a philosophy professor at St. John's University in New York.  She wrote of her need for, and delight in silence:   

I’m after a certain kind of silence. . . . I first discovered this kind of quiet some years back, when I’d gone to Italy for what seemed to be no reason at all. Without any sort of plan, I decided to go inside every church I came across, no exceptions.

 She reminded me of course of myself and my desire to visit churches, a desire so dominating that when, back in 1998, I went to Paris for the Easter Triduum, Geri gladly opted out, having no desire to bounce from one church to the next which is exactly what I did from Holy Thursday through Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday, and even Easter Monday.  Professor Townsend is a believer, raised a Catholic though "a teen atheist in Catholic high school," and now apparently an Episcopalian whose church is the magnificent Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, one of my favorite visiting sites.  In her essay, she cited the atheist poet Philip Larkin's Church Going," mentioning Larkin's desire to go into empty churches.  She wrote that she and Larkin both seek

 To find what is left after the services, the people, the Sunday clothes and the pageantry — something big and empty and acoustically live — as Larkin describes it, a “tense, musty, unignorable” silence. 

Larkin's poem has a very different 'vibe' than Townsend's essay.  She is a regular church-going believer and one who acknowledges being a pray-er.  The experiences she describes inside quiet empty churches seem like contemplation, meditation, and/or mindfulness, quietly and beneficially getting in touch with herself in spaces set aside for getting in touch with God.  Though Larkin, like Townsend, is drawn to step inside empty churches, he does so as an observer, a thinker, and a wonderer.  He checks out the seats, the 'little books,' the wilting flowers, the "brass and stuff up at the holy end," the organ, the pulpit, the baptismal font, and even the roof/ceiling.  None of it means anything to him except to cause him to reflect on the disappearance of religious Faith.⁰  As he leaves the church, he 

Reflect[s] the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,

When churches fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into,    

He is a non-believer/disbeliever.  I am struck by lines in the poem: 

But superstition, like belief, must die,

And what remains when disbelief has gone? 

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,

A purpose more obscure. 

Can both belief and disbelief be gone?  What would remain would be nothingness, nihil.   In any case, Larkin, like Townsend, reminded me of how I too am drawn to churches though, like Larkin, I am not a believer.  Have I ever been a believer?  I agonized over 'the sin of Doubt' as an 11-year-old altar boy and never stopped struggling with Doubt.  Larkin ruminates that, even "when churches fall completely out of use," when "superstition, like belief,  must die,"  even a church in ruins will draw men in, because

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

Churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples are all places where life's most serious dimensions and events are centered in attention: birth, marriage, sickness and death. joy and loss, beginnings and endings, Alpha and Omega.  Much like Larkin and Townsend,  I am a someone "surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious / And gravitating with it" to empty churches.  At some times in my life, I gravitated to full churches, St. Leo, Gesu, St. Peter and Paul, St. Francis of Assisi, though always dubitante, never as a full-fledged believer.  At best, I was like the father of the boy with an unclean spirit in Mark 9:24: "The father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

Thinking about these matters led me to look at the pocket notebook in which I made 88 pages of notes during my 1998 Easter trip to Paris.  My empty and full church itinerary over four days was: HOLY THURSDAY, St. Germain des Pres (Last Supper mass); GOOD FRIDAY, St. Thomas d'Aquin (prayer service); Chapel of the Miraculous Medal (Catherine Labouré private devotions); unsuccessful attempts to visit Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame (line too long); St. Gervais-St. Protais (eucharistic adoration); St. Eustache (choral singing): St. Germain L'Auxerrois (passsion service); St. Sulpice (passion service); HOLY SATURDAY,  Notre Dame (noon,  musical liturgy); St. Gervais-St. Protais (again, arrived after the office de la descente aux enfers); Notre Dame (3 hour Easter Vigil service); St. Serverin (after the Vigil, quiet, empty); EASTER SUNDAY, St. Eustache (solemn high Easter morning mass); St. Roch (mass ending); Polish church of the Assumption; St. Marie de Madeleine(ah, Fauré); St. Augustine (decrepit but lovely, an organ and trumpet concert); EASTER MONDAY, St. Francis Xavier chanting service of some sort); St. Clotilde; St. Pierre du Gros Caillou; and last, St. Pierre de Chaillot,

 

⁰ I was reminded of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.