It is requisite for the relaxation of the mind that we make use, from time to time, of playful deeds and jokes.
- Saint Thomas Aquinas
Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.
- Aristotle
A person is said to have a sense of humor if he can "see through" things; one lacks a sense of humor if he cannot "see through" things. No one has ever laughed at a pun who did not see in the one word a twofold meaning.
Archbishop Sheen
Note: The following IS fictional. Don’t get any ideas about the person in the picture, except that he has a great sense of humor in allowing this humiliating photograph to be posted.
A Traditionalist Gone Mad
You know, there’s something wrong here. Can a person be TOO traditional? What does that mean, anyway? How can you stand being TOO something that very few people have really even heard of? Or perhaps it is the danger in being in a marginalized setting, this TOO-ness. Like you get too close to the wacko magnet or something.
Look at that picture. He’s looking at something on the computer and it finally snapped him. Perhaps it was yet another photo from a church in some Scandinavian city, where the loose ends are getting really svelte and tight. I mean, those Germanic types know how to make blasphemy really – efficiently stylish; like the BMW of bad liturgy. You know, compare that to the loose-joint, cheapy plastic Tonka-toy liturgies of many American churches nowadays, bent on bringing the Protestant Mainline Sunday school classes into the church and letting them ‘design the liturgy’.
At any rate, even though my traditionalist-gone-off-the-deep-end-friend may be seeing things as they are, he seems to have lost it a bit. He is starting to feel like there must be a remnant of The Remnant; when I tell him “There’s an empty seat” he thinks I am talking about the dubitable status of the last five (or ten) Popes. He doesn’t see the strange irony in that there is a Pius X Society and then, somewhere in the shadows, there is a Pius V Society. Was that done on purpose? He can’t have a good laugh anymore, or revel in that Hillare Belloc sensuum Catholicus: “ Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there’s always laughter and good red wine; at least I’ve always found it so, Benedicamus Domino”.
Well, actually, where does the Catholic sun doth shine? Malta? On certain bishops like little spotlights in the darkness? It certainly isn’t shining in beaurocratic offices with nameplates like: “Office of Extraordinary Ministers”. I’d like to take a permanent marker and change it: “Office of Ordinarily Extra Ministers”. It doesn’t shine on those architectural munsterpieces, churches that look like frozen tee-pees. It certainly doesn’t shine on stained glass windows that look like they were blown out of their frames and then put back together by the preschool catechism class. But it doesn’t shine either on those humorless, purse-lipped ninnies who haunt the coffee hours of the traditional masses and complain about how the congregation really shouldn’t make any sounds whatsoever, ever(even if the rubrics call for a little, quiet chant reply here and there). It doesn’t shine on neo-traddy-pharisees, and I’m afraid my friend here is heading that way. How to stop him? Take him to Malta?
I need to take him where the Catholic sun doth shine. A sun of love, and life, and hearty tradition, a place of families who can afford to be large and have the extended family to do it in peace and security. A place where the steeple rises in the middle of town, and one can hear the Angelus bells ring out and echo on the hills. A place where the priest is the Altar Christus, and the incense symbolizes prayer, and the focus is on the Lord, on His Body and Blood- and everyone knows it. A place where no one knows what the word “liturgy” means; instead, they only know the Mass as it has been for two thousand years. A place where table wine is part of lunch on a warm square, where neighbors chat and remind each other good-naturedly not to gossip. A place without the bitterness of betrayal, the bitterness of atheistic, secular, modern life. A place where women want to look like women, not prostitutes. A place where men laugh together. A place where the Lord walks freely among His own.
I guess I am hoping for heaven. But, like the Marshwiggle said in CS Lewis’ Narnia, “I will search for that sun, that Narnia, on in the dark- for it licks your "real" world hollow.” Hope is fed on faith in God’s providence, and prayer, and love: and humor.
