Hamlet’s Ghost Inside Chris O’Leary

Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins like this: A terrible crime lies hidden. Brother has secretly killed brother, and the killer has gotten away with it. Life in Denmark continues, as if nothing evil has happened. The murderer has inherited the crown, and insists that things proceed happily as before. Everyone conforms; even the widow queen agrees to marry the secret murderer.

Everyone conforms, that is, except young Hamlet. He languishes in grief. And the murdered man’s ghost doesn’t conform, either. He haunts the cold Danish nights.

In other words, some interior force of nature rebels at the patina of normalcy. It won’t allow such a terrible injustice to remain hidden. A crime like this cannot pass un-reckoned into forgetfulness and oblivion. So the ghost’s weary footsteps shake the earth, drawing young Hamlet into the hidden mystery of what actually happened.

Hamlet perceives the ghost of his murdered father and hears his demand for justice.

But is it real? Can the young man trust his midnight vision? How can he prove to himself that the ghost speaks true? This force from beyond the shaky peace of day-to-day life has confirmed something that the prince vaguely suspected. But how to make sense of it? What really happened?

The drama of the play then unfolds, and the royal family convulses through a confused agony of reckoning.

—

At 35 years of age, Chris O’Leary had fond childhood memories of Father Leroy Valentine. Two-and-a-half decades earlier, Father Valentine had made the young Chris feel special, paid attention to him, gave him fun things to do–when Chris’ father was distracted making partner at his law firm.

But something was rotten in the Denmark of Chris’ grown-up soul. He had anxiety about living in his hometown of St. Louis, but he couldn’t move away for good, either. He had zig-zagged through his twenties, never quite settling down and developing his career.

In March of 2002, after the Boston Globe uncovered the decades’-long sex-abuse cover-up in the Archdiocese of Boston, the New York Times ran an article on the subject. The article mentioned Father Leroy Valentine of St. Louis. Father groomed his victims by paying special attention to them when their dads were absent. He started with wrestling and proceeded to sodomy. (The article also mentioned that Valentine denied having done anything wrong.)

Chris saw the article, reprinted in a St. Louis paper. He wondered, ‘Might Father V have abused me, and I can’t clearly remember? But he’s one of my favorite people on earth! How could he have done that?’

Chris called the Archdiocese of St. Louis. The new auxiliary bishop, Timothy Dolan, called him back. Chris’ old friend. Father Dolan had lived in the parish rectory with Father Valentine, when Chris was finishing elementary school.

“Bishop Dolan, maybe Father V molested me? I have memories of wrestling moves that touched my privates, and of being on Father V’s couch…”

“No way, Chris! I know Father Valentine–have known him since seminary. He could never do anything like what they say he did.”

So Chris thought: Ok, that’s that. Cross that one off the list of possible reasons why I can’t think straight, or remain calm with my wife and kids, or get along with my older boss. My memories, thank God, do not mean that I was molested by my favorite priest. Phew. Maybe I have Asperger’s or adult ADHD.

Case closed? No. The Hamlet’s ghost within Chris would not–could not–tolerate a heinous crime passing into forgetfulness and oblivion.

Chris had a panic attack at his daughter’s first confession. Then at his son’s first confession a couple years later. Then he saw an altar boy in a cassock and surplice–like he himself had worn, serving for Father V years earlier–and Chris had a psychological meltdown worthy of Prince Hamlet himself.

Twelve years had passed since Chris’ conversation with Bishop Dolan. By relentless investigation, Chris discovered that the bishop had received two other phone calls from victims of Leroy Valentine that same month, March, 2002.

The Archdiocese knew that Valentine was guilty. They just didn’t tell Chris. A force of nature inside Chris told Chris, over the course of a decade of agony.

—

Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes. (Hamlet, Act I, scene 2.)

Gulag Dispatch #3: Re-opening and Pure Pain

We last gathered for Sunday Mass on March 15.

Since then, the teenagers have had growth spurts and gotten taller. The babies have fleshed-out and gotten beefier. Men have grown beards, shaved them, and grown them again. Some young people have graduated from school via Zoom.

We decided on April 19 that we would weep together for joy when we could finally have public Mass again. Like the Israelites, who had languished in Babylonian captivity, finally returning to Jerusalem.

After all, this Christianity thing: it really does require our coming together. For the Holy Sacrifice. Our souls get frayed at the edges without the Mass. We lose our peace, our anchor, our air.

This Sunday the long-awaited moment will come.

It will be awkward. With screening questions at the door, spacing in the pew, sanitizing like mad. The tears of joy will get the mandatory mask all wet. The normal rhythms of Sunday Mass will not sound. It will feel like religion in a doctor’s office.

But we will have Mass again. The captives will return to Zion, with Alleluias.

I won’t be there.

—

Words fail me, to describe the pain. May I borrow the plaints of William Shakespeare’s Lucrece?

 

Lucretia by Paolo Veronese

I alone must sit and pine,

Seasoning the earth with showers of silver brine,

Mingling my talk with tears, my grief with groans,

Poor wasting monuments of lasting moans.

 

O Opportunity, thou murder’st troth;

Thou foul abettor! thou notorious bawd!

Thou plantest scandal and displacest laud:

Thou ravisher, thou traitor, thou false thief,

Thy honey turns to gall, thy joy to grief!

 

When wilt thou be the humble suppliant’s friend,

And bring him where his suit may be obtain’d?

When wilt thou sort an hour great strifes to end?

Or free that soul which wretchedness hath chain’d?

Give physic to the sick, ease to the pain’d?

 

Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,

To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light,

To stamp the seal of time in aged things,

To wake the morn and sentinel the night,

To wrong the wronger till he render right,

 

Why work’st thou mischief in thy pilgrimage,

Unless thou couldst return to make amends?

One poor retiring minute in an age

Would purchase thee a thousand thousand friends…

 

Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools!

Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators!

Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools;

Debate where leisure serves with dull debaters;

To trembling clients be you mediators.

 

In vain I spurn at my confirm’d despite:

This helpless smoke of words doth me no right.

—

This is how painfully I will miss welcoming my people back to church.

I will celebrate Mass. The suspension of my priestly faculties does not deprive me of that privilege; I simply must celebrate privately.

So the sacred mysteries will unite us, even though I won’t be there to share the tears of joy, after so long an exile.

—

Pure pain comes our way sometimes. We cling to Christ, in His Church.

We need Him. And we need Her, too. We need His grace more than air. And we breathe His grace like air, at Holy Mass, in church.

Comforting Words on the Festa di Marco

In the second half of the fourth century AD, a non-Christian emperor took the throne. We Christians call him Julian the Apostate.

The new emperor took delight in the internal strife of the Church, which seethed in factions right before his eyes. He thought Christianity would destroy itself. But St. John Henry Newman notes:

In indulging such anticipations of overthrowing Christianity, Julian but displayed his own ignorance of the foundation on which it was built. It could scarcely be conceived that an unbeliever, educated among heretics, would understand the vigor and indestructibility of the true Christian spirit; and Julian fell into the error, to which in all ages men of the world are exposed, of mistaking whatever shows itself on the surface of the Apostolic Community, its prominences and irregularities, all that is extravagant, and all that is transitory, for the real moving principle and life of the system.

The thousand of silent believers, who worshiped in spirit and in truth, were obscured by the tens and twenties of the various heretical factions, whose clamorous addresses besieged the Imperial Court.

(from The Arians of the Fourth Century, Chapter 5, Section 1)

Today we keep the feast of my beloved evangelist patron. St. Mark founded the See of Alexandria, Egypt.

Three centuries later, St. Athanasius sat as one of St. Mark’s successors in office. Through the Arian controversy, the Church in Alexandria held fast to the orthodox faith, even when Pope Liberius wavered. (The pope succumbed only under threat of physical torture, not willingly.)

…Anyhoo, if you’re like me, when you get stressed, you lose yourself in the speeches of William Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Like Act III, Scene 2…

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

Here’s the great Derek Jacobi doing the speech:

Coupla Shakespeare Speeches

for All Souls Day…

Just Thoughts, Righteous Feelings, Good Works

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
upon those boughs which shake against the cold.
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

(Wm. Shakespeare, sonnet 73)

Soon Mother Earth will edge into chill, even with global warming. The waning days of fall remind us that our pilgrim life flies fast. Here in the northern hemisphere, we approach the season of the Last Things.

The Word of God teaches us: the Son of Man will come in glory. At an hour we do not expect. The Judge Who sets all to rights will suddenly arrive from heaven.

St. Nikolaj Velimirovic wrote a little catechism to explain the Christian religion. He poses the question:

How should we prepare ourselves for that tremendous day, Judgment Day?

The saint’s answer:

With just thoughts, with righteous feelings, and with good works, according to the teachings of Christ and the Church, and the example of the saints.

Just thoughts, righteous feelings, good works.

Now, how do we know what thoughts are truly just, what feelings truly righteous, and what works are truly good? By studying the teachings of Christ and His Church, and the example of the saints.

Next week we keep the Solemnity of…?

All Saints day falls on its proper date because, back in Roman times, the pope consecrated a chapel in honor of all the martyrs on November 1. But it’s no co-incidence that we keep the Solemnity of all the saints at the very time of year when the trees and the air remind us that we will all die.

Because the legions of saints show us how to be ready. They teach us that everyone has his or her own individual way of readying him- or herself, by growing ever closer to Christ in the specific little life He has laid out for each of us.

Jesus Christ and His Church—that’s what all the saints have in common. The saints had just thoughts and righteous feelings, and they did good works. We can, too, just like they did—when we stay close to Christ, in His Church.

The Saint of Shakespeare’s Florence

Acts III and IV of Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well take place in Florence, Italy.  While he was writing, St. Mary Magdalen of Pazzi was living in a Carmelite convent in Florence, Italy.

Shakespeare was born two years before the saintly nun was born.  He lived on for almost nine years after she died.  In other words:  they were contemporaries.  Shakespeare began his career in the theater the same year that Mary Magdalen de Pazzi entered the convent.

The saintly nun died 409 years ago today.  She, too, wrote.   During this time of year, in the fortnight between Pentecost and Corpus Christi, in 1584, she professed her monastic vows and experienced mystical revelations.  More revelations came during the same fortnight a year later.  She wrote:

The Holy Spirit comes into the soul like a fountain, and the soul is immersed in it.  Just as two rushing rivers intermingle in such a way that the smaller loses its name, and is absorbed into the larger, so the divine Spirit acts upon the soul and absorbs it.  It is proper that the soul, which is lesser, should lose its name and surrender to the Spirit—as it will, if it turns entirely to the Spirit and is united.

In the spring of 2007, Pope Benedict XVI wrote to the Archbishop of Florence to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi’s death.  The pope wrote:

The saint represents the living love that recalls the essential mystical dimension of every Christian life…Grasping the monastery bells, she urged her sisters with the cry, “Come and love Love!”  …May her voice be heard in all the Church, spreading to every human creature the proclamation to love God.

Among Shakespeare’s characters, we find a couple intense Italian women.  For instance: Juliet, of Verona, of the house of Capulet.  While the Bard was writing about the all-consuming love of Juliet for Romeo, St. Mary Magdalen was living such a love—for God.

Hamlet (Deleted Scenes)

Recently saw a semi-competent performance of Hamlet, shortened to approximately 2.25 hours running time by extensive cutting of lines. And something dawned on me…

With each passing year, I relish all the more the two unabridged Hamlets that I possess: The Arkangel Shakespeare audio, on three CDs. And my most-prized worldly possession, my DVD of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, 1996.

I listen/watch to both at least once a year, religiously. It takes a number of sessions to get through these unabridged renditions, to be sure. Four or five late evenings to watch, six to ten drives hither and yon to listen.

Now, I do of course recognize that actually performing Hamlet on stage poses the enormous challenge: So many friggin lines. And people don’t like to sit for four hours.

But I would like to go on record officially; I would like to proclaim to the world: If you are going to mount a Hamlet; if you are going to perform Hamlet, but Marcellus (after the crowing of the cock, and the fleeing of the ghost, in Act I, scene i) –if, in your Hamlet, Marcellus is not going to say:

Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

…If these lines are going to be skipped, in the interest of time, then I would prefer to go for a walk. Thank you very much; all the best; good luck with your production. But I had rather go for a walk than sit for a Hamlet with a lot of missing lines.

Hamlet contains two marvelous ‘mysteries,’ in the religious sense of the term.

1. None of the truly important events of the drama actually occur on-stage. And the most important plot element (the history of the genuine love between Hamlet and Ophelia) never even gets mentioned explicitly. To understand just how much they truly loved each other, one must read between the lines of their respective ravings.

2. The plot of Hamlet does not particularly matter. The plot does not satisfy, in and of itself. The plot serves as the trunk of the tree, on which hang the fruits of people saying incredibly interesting things.

At the Hamlet I recently saw, all the appropriate people lay dead on the stage at the end of the play. And we, as the audience, more or less understood why. But it was as if we had just eaten a BLT with no mayonaise. A McMuffin with no egg.

I present here a brief laundry list of lines culled in the production I saw. Tragedy of tragedies, to leave such lines unsaid!

Rumour vs. Our Heavenly Patron

From heaven the Lord looks down on the earth. (Psalm 102:20)

And what does He see? Does He see sober, quiet labor? Does He see us working for His glory, focused on Him, with love in our hearts for all our neighbors?

Or does He hear nothing but the babble of gossips? Does He hear us talking about people behind their backs, judging them on hearsay?

—

At the beginning of one of his plays, Shakespeare has ‘Rumour’ speak, as a character:

Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth.
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
…Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wav’ring multitude,
Can play upon it. But what need I thus
My well-known body to anatomize
Among my household?

We need to focus on one very important fact: The way people talk about each other on t.v. is not Christian. On the internet? God forbid–even more un-Christian still. And on talk radio.

I guarantee that when I turn on the t.v, within fifteen minutes I will hear people talking about each other in a way that is un-Christian, no matter what channel it is. It will either be fictional gossip or real-live gossip. But it will be un-Christian speech.

(And if you think I mean, ‘except EWTN,’ I do not. EWTN has self-righteous gossips, too.)

If my mind has grown accustomed to the way people talk on t.v., I will talk that way myself. And I will speak when I should not about things that I should not.

Let’s let good St. Joseph guide us. Let’s count up the number of speeches he gave, as recorded by the Holy Scriptures. O, wait. He didn’t give any speeches. Okay. Let’s count up the number of sentences he uttered, according to Holy Scripture. Oh. Zero. Okay, how about the number of words he spoke, according to the Scriptures.

[Birds chirping. Summer breeze blowing.]

Thank you, sweet St. Joseph. Please pray for us. May we share in your gift of holy silence.

Macbeth

I never knew a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth could so thoroughly enrapture a person, until the American Shakespeare Center (in Staunton, Va.) players did it to me.

They managed to produce the Platonic forms of all the characters. Macbeth: Martial, fraternal, and desperately in love with the only true confidante a man in such desperate, violent times can have, his wife. Banquo: The nobler of the two soldier-friends, but just barely. Duncan: magnanimous, not simpering. Macduff: tortured, but manly. Lady Macbeth: ravishing, graceful, and just imaginative enough to come untethered from reality.

To be honest, until I saw this ASC production, I did not adequately understand how seamless a masterpiece the play really is. Even the comic relief–the drunken porter muttering jokes to himself about souls arriving in the bad place, as he makes his way to the castle gate–serves the dramatic effect.

Not Last in my Book

The worthy American-Shakespeare-Center players made history in the Shenandoah Valley this past Friday evening (3:30 in the resolution recitation below).

The good Lord gave me the privilege of witnessing it, on opening night.

Over the course of the past 25 years, all of Shakespeare’s plays, on stage.