80’s Baltimore, the King, and the Babies

For a Holy-Name-of-Jesus homily (and some other enjoyables), click HERE.

For an early-bird experience of this Sunday’s homily, read on below…

For a thoroughly captivating mid-1980’s glimpse of Lady Grantham when she was still a young waitress in Fells Point, back when Mt. Vernon Square was still on the way to an Orioles game, and shimmered with cigarette ash, and driving around Baltimore could make any movie worth watching, and some scripts still coursed with drama of Hitchcockian richness, with characters that taught you things about yourself, if you are over 18, consider downloading/renting/honestly obtaining “The Bedroom Window.”

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“Where is the king?” (Matthew 2:2)

The question fell a little awkwardly on the ears of the courtiers in Jerusalem. Because these eminent foreigners, thoroughly powerful and renowned, had asked the king where the king is. Awkward.

Herod

Where do we find the king? Might be a little awkward if we showed up in Washington and asked around, with the same question. Hey, Mr. President. Hey, Senators, Congressmen, Where’s the King?

Might be more than awkward. We might find ourselves locked-up. Citizens! This is a democracy. No king here. Spend some time in this padded room thinking about it…

The wise men sought the king. They knew Herod was not he. We, too, know perfectly well that the king we seek does not do cable-news interviews on any network.

But the human soul seeks her king, and always will seek Him, until she finds Him. That fact is no less true now than it was 2013 years ago. Doesn’t matter if we human beings live under a hereditary monarchy, or a republican democracy, or as islamist theocracy, or a communist-party oligarchy, or a dictatorship of relativism. We have no real peace until we find the king and do Him homage. Until we find Him, our own souls gurgle and froth with ungoverned chaos, like a destabilized nation ripe for a coup d’état.

The wise men, as you know, did not simply ask, Where is the king? They asked, “Where is the king of the Jews?”

Makes “O Brother,

Where Art Thou” look pedestrian by comparison; genuinely Homeric; funny in every paragraph: The Great Typo Hunt.

I could not put it down. I am in love with Jeff Deck.

The only problem: Split infinitives on practically every page! Really?

The Queen’s English, paragraph 238, FOREVER!!

May we learn wisely to use the language. Latin helped her speakers to articulate themselves artfully. We Anglophones prudently choose to guard slavishly Latin’s precision.

…Priests are being murdered in Mexico again, like they were during the Terrible Triangle persecution.

May all the dead rest in peace. The times recall the novel which moved Pope Paul VI to say to its author: “Mr. Greene, some parts of your book are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.”

Here are my favorite passages from The Power and the Glory.

He was a man who was supposed to save souls. It had seemed quite simple, once, preaching at Benediction, organizing the guilds, having coffee with the elderly ladies behind barred windows, blessing new houses with a little incense, wearing black gloves…It was as easy as saving money: now it was a mystery. He was aware of his own desperate inadequacy.

Laurence Olivier as the Whisky Priest

He said after a moment’s hesitation, very distinctly: “I am a priest.”

It was like the end: there was no need to hope any longer. The ten years’ hunt was over at last. There was silence all round him. This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love: it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short.

Henry Fonda as the Whisky Priest

When he woke up it was dawn. He woke with a huge feeling of hope which suddenly and completely left him at the first sight of the prison yard. It was the morning of his death. He crouched on the floor with the empty brandy-flask in his hand trying to remember an Act of Contrition. “O God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins…crucified…worthy of Thy dreadful punishments.” He was confused, his mind was on other things: it was not the good death for which one always prayed. He caught sight of his own shadow on the cell wall; it had a look of surprise and grotesque unimportance. What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived. His parents were dead–soon he wouldn’t even be a memory-–perhaps after all he wasn’t really Hell-worthy. Tears poured down his face; he was not at the moment afraid of damnation–even the fear of pain was in the back­ground. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted–to be a saint.