Photo Essay: Notre Dame de Chartres

After quitting Paris, I made my way to Chartres, to see the famous cathedral there.  I arrived at night, and took a few pictures of the exterior illuminated:

Next day, after sleeping in a big ivy patch under the low hanging branches of a great pine tree on the lawn of the Eure et Loir departmental prefecture (I had to hop their fence, and then got yelled at in the morning by some woman bureaucrat from the window of her office, when jumping back out onto the street) I went back and took some very mediocre images of the interior.

The inside is being restored, and maybe a tenth of the interior marble - besmirched with centuries of candle smoke and other dirt - has been bleached its original white, most of that in the sanctuary and front of the nave:

Note the contrast between the restored and dirty marble.

Plaque memorializing Peguy's pilgrimage here.

The cathedral is beautiful, a huge interior space with incredible stained glass.  Because of the dirty marble and cloudy day light, the church was darker than I expected it would be.  I still was awed, and sat there for three hours, said my chaplet and then just gaped, drinking it in.

I then did the tour of the place. There are these amazing wooden relief statues on the choir screen, figures in late medieval garb, carved in the 16th century, also being restored:

Restorer at work.

 And these are the famous flying buttresses:

I lit two candles at Chartres, the first to Ste. Therese here,

And another before ND de Cartres, her statue being on that pillar on the left there.

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On My Last Day In Paris..

I caved and did the trite, expected, touristy thing, and finally walked out along the Seine to the Eiffel Tower with Brady, this Australian guy I'd met:  

Note that my contrarian bona fides, while now grossly sullied, are nevertheless still somewhat intact:  I never did make it to the Arc de Triomphe or the Champs-Elysees.  Nor have I ever fallen in with that bovine hoard endlessly trampling the Louvre.  I also absolutely refuse to ever visit Versailles.

I am a pilgrim, no tourist, see.



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Photo Essay: Le Basilique de St. Denis

One of the patrons and thematic figureheads gracing this blog (see the sidebar) is St. Denis, or Dionysius the Areopagite, patron Saint of France and by legend the first bishop of Paris and (pseudo) father of the Church. His shrine is in the north of Paris, and is also the burial crypt of the kings of France.

The Headless Bishop.

Legend has it that St. Denis was executed during the persecutions of Nero, being beheaded by axe. After his head rolled from his shoulders, St. Denis is said to have stood up, scooped his head up, and walked about two kilometers from Montmartre ("hill of the martyr," now the site of the basilica of Sacre Coeur and one of the best parks and most romantic neighborhoods in Paris) to the site of the present basilica dedicated by his name.

This is the awesome figurine of St. Denis I picked up at the basilica for 10 euro..

Here are some of the shots taken there, this past week:

This Austrian girl Marianne who became my travel buddy this past week.

Hirsute.

St. Anthony of Padua

Marianne at the cafe opposite the basilica

And the candle.

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La Place de la République: Paris in the Mist..

I walked through la Place de la Republique the other evening, and they had strung these hoses that sprayed mist all along the length of the plaza.  The entire place was wreathed in mist, making for a really incredible atmosphere.  There's a large statute that looks a lot like the Statue of Liberty, representing the Republic, there, that is quite impressive.

I took some photos:

Back to Paris..

So, after a "leaky filling" and root canal and five weeks interrupting my earlier sojourn, I am yet once again in Europe.  I arrived last week, where I spent one night rough out at Charles de Gaulle..

You can walk out one of the side entrances, where airport employees go to smoke,

where's this hidden nook where you can pitch your bivy alongside the wall of the airport tramway,

and nobody will know you are there..

where there's this here view to enjoy as you drift off to sleep..

I came into Paris the next day, and have been staying at a hostel here since. I've been having good fun, and have seen many of the tourist sights I've been snobbishly skipping every time I've passed through Paris the past couple decades.  I'm based in the China town here, and have found one of the best Vietnamese restaurants I've ever eaten around the block.

Tomorrow, I begin walking toward Chartres. More images and such to come.

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Photographic Essay: Notre Dame de Paris

I've been to Notre Dame several times this past week, to mass there twice. It is everything you could hope it to be, an absolutely ethereally diaphanous eruption of lyrically flowing stone suffused in ambient light.

Here are some pictures I've taken of it, inside and out:

And, of course, the candle.

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Photographic Essay: Mom's Induction Into the Servites

So, two weekends ago, on Saturday September 14th, my Mom was inducted into the Secular Order of the Servants of Mary, the Lay Order of the Servites. The Servites, for those of you not quite up to snuff in things Catholic, are one of the five original great medieval mendicant (begging) orders, being the least famous of the five..

Those orders (in order of foundation, just to give some historical context, a sense of the momentousness of the occasion) :

1.) the Carmelites (whose monks according to legend first collected upon Mount Carmel in the Holy Land in the aftermath of Elijah's famous theophany there circa 970 B.C. , but who were ultimately expelled from Carmel in the aftermath of the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land in the 7th Century, whence these immigrants eventually came to establish monasteries throughout Europe, where they were canonically organized between 1206-1214) and, 

2.) the Franciscans who were founded in 1209 and then 

3.) my very own Dominicans, who were founded in 1215, and then,

 - drumroll -

4.) the Servites who were founded in 1233, followed only by the 

5.) poor benighted Augustinians in 1244, whose unfortunate lot it was and shall ever be to claim Martin Luther, the Ur-Protestant, as one of their own (but whose rule, that of Saint Augustine, upon which they are founded, is however even older than that of Saint Benedict himself) ..

The only reason the Servites are not as celebrated as the other four original 13th century mendicant orders is perhaps due to the fact that they were founded by seven co-founders, the most famous of whom is Saint Peregrine, who while being a very worthy fellow, is not quite as charismatically famous as Saints Francis, Dominic, Augustine, or the prophet Elijah (not mentioning other luminaries of Carmel  such as SS. Theresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux - whom I am now making a novena to, and will be visiting again upon her feast day this coming week - or John of the Cross, etc., etc..)

The Servites, though, are unique amongst the five in that their name includes that of our Blessed Mother.  They are formally known as the "Ordo Servorum Beatae Mariae Virginis," hence the "Servites."  The Franciscans, Dominicans (who gave us the rosary!) and Carmelites (of our Lady of Mount Carmel) all of course have particular devotion to her. But only the Servites are named directly after her.

I now belatedly give you, my beloved readership, some few images I took that morning.  When my Mom, Donna O.S.M. (as she is now able to style herself; Donna, who besides being named after her father, Donald, is also named after our Blessed Mother, donna being "lady" in Italian, you know?) took the scapular (that blue and red rectangular piece of cloth she has on there) of the Order.

Without any further extraneous commentary, those of you who know may perhaps appreciate these following:

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Song of the Day: John Hiatt, Welfare Music

This one's for Cousin Kristi & Uncle Bill,



And the f'n ucking United Sates (thus) Congress.

Las Letras:

She quit school when she was seventeen
Senator on TV calls her welfare queen
Used to be daddy's little girl
Now she needs help in this mean ol' world

Buys cassette tapes in the bargain bin
Loves Carlene Carter and Loretta Lynn
Tries to have fun on a Saturday night
Sunday mornin' don't shine too bright

It's that welfare music
Watch the baby dance to the welfare music
Will she ever stand a chance?

Takes two to make three but one ain't here
Still chasin' women and drinkin' beer
Says nobody understands how it feels
But that don't pay them monthly bills

Angry fat man on the radio
Wants to keep his taxes way down low
Says there oughta be a law
Angriest man you ever saw

Welfare music
Watch the baby dance to the welfare music
Will she ever stand a chance?

Baby dance circles on the floor
Round and round just like before
Baby fall down, baby get up
Baby needs a drink from a lovin' cup

And it's welfare music
Watch the baby dance to the welfare music
Will she ever stand a chance?

Welfare music
Watch the baby dance to the welfare music
Will she ever stand a chance?

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Just Merely to Triple Double Dog Emphasize the Essential Point of My Prior Post:

Each one of us is invited to recognize in the fragile human being the face of the Lord, who, in his human flesh, experienced the indifference and loneliness to which we often condemn the poorest, either in the developing nations, or in the developed societies. Each child who is unborn, but is unjustly condemned to be aborted, bears the face of Jesus Christ, bears the face of the Lord, who, even before he was born, and then as soon as he was born, experienced the rejection of the world. And also each old person and - I spoke of the child, let us also speak of the elderly, another point! And each old person, even if infirm or at the end of his days, bears the face of Christ. They cannot be discarded, as the "culture of waste" proposes! They cannot be discarded!

- Pope Francis, Colloquy with Catholic gynecologists, September 20, 2013.

Translated from the Italian here.

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Upon the Recent Hubba- Ballooo Over All Pope Francis's "Scandalous" Comments About Erotic Sin, etc. [revised]

[Written in response to all the crap like this in the media, in reaction to interviews like this, these days.]

On the hierarchy of needs sexual pleasure falls well behind prayer, love, friendship, clean air, good food, clean water, sleep, good sanitation, shelter, medical care and education. The West's current obsession with it is merely a sign of its decadence and spiritual bankruptcy. The pope is talking to us like babies- yes, you can masturbate and we will still love you. God still loves you when you wack off into someone's mouth or anus. That this is taken as big news here is hilarious.

I mean, the operative question here is - now and forever shall be - not whether God and his Church loves each of us, it's whether or not we love God and his Church. It's whether or not we love the Truth (who is a person) and one another..

The pope is a Jesuit and a Catholic priest.  The things he has been saying about sodomy are not new. It's called moral casuistry, a.k.a. Catholic moral theology. See Molina, Escobar and Suarez; John the Baptist,  John Vianney and Padre Pio. See in the Bible where it says "judge not lest you be judged" and "take the beam out of your own eye before you condemn your brother for the speck in his" and then again "love your enemy" and then "he loved me while I was still in sin, I, the foremost of sinners."

Love the sinner, not the sin. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven. Justice (being merely the consummation of mercy) is mine, says the LORD.

The pope cannot and will not declare sodomy sex, because it is not sex. That's just biological fact. And it isn't just those with same sex attraction who commit it. He cannot tell us the earth is the center of the universe in any other sense than it happens to be the center of our universe. The Roman inquisition once got itself balled up on that point, hewing incorrectly to Aristotelean and Ptolemaic scientific consensus, and the world has never let us forget it, has it?

So, this pope is saying nothing new. He isn't going to endorse the sexual revolution by abandoning Catholic anthropology. And sin is still sin - love of money, hatred of the immigrant amongst us, denial the worker of his just wage, the murder of innocents and (yes) sodomy are still - and shall forever be - sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.  These are also sins that we, the people of the de-Christianizing West, commit with abandon.

The pope is waiting for us to confess, reminding many of us who call ourselves Christian that pride, perjury, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth, avarice, murder, *as well as* hatred of the poor and sinful, are just as sinful as lust & sexual decadence is. If not more so..



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