Brief break from blogging

Should anybody happen upon this page, do not be surprised if the last post is some days old, a week, or even older. For the next fortnight I will be very busy with other things.
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American music

Somebody commenting on an earlier post drew my attention to this, so I thought I'd have a go at embedding a video here.

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The Faith of a Ten-Year-Old

Last week’s “Faith evening” (see here for the one before) was about the Good Shepherd. The initial talk by a diocesan director of catechetics (as I think she is - could be wrong on the exact job description) was very good indeed, quite making up for the lack of Redemptorists in the (post)modern parish mission. Still, I wouldn’t expect any less: she used to be a religion teacher at my wife’s school, where her absence is sorely missed. Then there was a hymn, a coffee break, and it was time to “share our faith experiences” with the rest of our table. The first session was about our images of God, this second session was about our personal faith journey (the emphasis is still very much on “us”). The assumption seemed to be that we were Catholics by accident of birth and socialization -- something that might have been true in Belgium thirty years ago, but surely not at any time since? (And of course, not in England since 1535!)

So here’s stage one of my "personal faith journey".

The religious education of children is based almost entirely on stories that are hard to distinguish from children’s stories: the Fall, the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark, the testing of Abraham, Jacob and Esau’s birthright, Joseph’s captivity, Moses in the bullrushes, the Walls of Jericho, David and Goliath, the Infancy narratives, Christ’s parables. When I was about nine or ten I was given a book of “Norse Myths and Legends”, and something of a crisis of faith ensued. The stories of the ancient Norsemen were much more exciting than the stories to be found in most children’s bibles. If religion was going to be a set of archetypal stories to people my imagination with, I’d much rather have the Norse myths (I’d guess this view is pretty widespread among my contemporaries). I don’t recall ever talking to anybody about this at the time, and I was conscious of not wanting to shock my parents, and also of not wanting to be open to persuasion by others until I’d thought it through for myself.

This last Saturday I was teaching my second confirmation class, and asked the children who they would go to if they had questions about their Faith. Several said their parents, one said a teacher (a particular teacher, and one I’d reckon is a good choice: the day before the Feast of St Francis she showed her class of 8 year-olds Brother Sun, Sister Moon), one said “I’d think about it quietly and see what answer came to me” (a ten-year-old illuminist?), and two said “I’d look it up in a book” (quick! get those boys catechisms!).

My own attitude at that age was a combination of the illuminist and the bookish. During Mass I prayed for faith (because I still loved Jesus, even if ancient pagans had better stories), and I read the Bible: an (Anglican) uncle had given me a Good News Bible as a First Communion present. In so far as I can consciously tell, what more than anything kept me believing in the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, was biblical texts like Leviticus 14:33-53, or Deuteronomy 20:2-9. This is plainly a God not so much into stories and more into people’s actual lives (something that can’t really be said about the gods of the Norse pantheon). Perhaps I was turning into a historian even then, but I’ve never understood why Leviticus and Deuteronomy have the reputation of being dry reading.
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The Hidden Bible

This (or something like it) was the title of a book about apocryphal scriptures that I noticed in Sterling Books yesterday. Is it not a little like entitling an anthology of legislative bills that failed to pass into law The Hidden Statute Book? Or have I missed something?
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The uncut book

The first time I came across a book in which the pages were uncut (and seriously, all of them) was in my first term as an undergraduate. Exploring the otherwise empty college library one evening, I came upon an 80-year-old volume of Cotton Mather's sermons that seemed to have been there for decades without anybody ever reading it. I cut the first quire, more for the experience of doing so than to read the actual sermons. What I did read didn't encourage me to continue, but it means that the name "Cotton Mather" takes me back to that autumn evening in the library, the scent of old books and wood polish, a chill breeze and the sound of rustling leaves coming through the tiny opening in the sash windows, with drizzle falling on the windowpanes.

And it's just happened again: clicking on links from one blog to another to another, like a squirrel jumping from branch to branch in a forest, I happened upon the nut, or nugget, that Cotton Mather wrote a six-volume encyclopaedic biblical commentary, the Biblia Americana, that has never been published, but will be one day soon.

All very scholarly no doubt, but I'm too busy revelling in nostalgia to care about that one way or the other.
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Lunchtime in Brussels

For the past weeks, indeed pretty much full-time since the end of February (except when preparing and travelling for conferences, or to family functions, or on holiday for two weeks in July), I've been working day and night to translate a book about the sixteenth-century translator Dirck Coornhert. I might say more about Coornhert another time, as he's a fascinating character. The book, alas, is about his religious disputations rather than his translations, so it meant getting to grips with imputed righteousness and forensic justification (he wasn't a fan of either), not to mention the formal technicalities of 16th-century debate ("After your opponent's counter-statement you will have a limit of two days for rebuttal.").

The translation itself was pretty much finished at 3 a.m. yesterday (Thursday) morning. There is still revision, some tinkering with footnotes, and other minor inconveniences to be seen to, but the laborious work of breaking in the language in is finally done. The rest is grooming.

So today I took the day off. This morning I met a former colleague for coffee, in a beautiful, art nouveau café by the name of A La Mort Subite ("sudden death" being the name of a once-popular card game, and only derivatively from that a macabre name for a café), and we chatted until it was time for him to get to a lunch appointment.

He asked me along, as an unscheduled addition to the lunch party: himself, his wife, and two of his wife's colleagues. He and I are English, his wife is Czech, and her colleagues are both French-speaking Belgians. There was no single language all of us spoke well enough to converse in freely, but between English and French we managed. Of the five of us, four spoke English to a conversational level, three French, two Czech, and two Dutch (to list only those that I am aware of), so there were several overlapping languages, even though we only needed two of them. This is the sort of thing that has happened to me again and again here, and never anywhere else. It's one of the reasons I like Brussels so much. It's not much of a place to visit, but it's a fascinating place to live.

A few years ago we were at a Chinese New Year function where my oldest son, who speaks English and Dutch, was playing with two boys of about the same age: one spoke Chinese and Dutch, the other Chinese and English; so all three could converse, but never all three together.
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Miracle of Amsterdam

Just put a new post about the Miracle of Amsterdam, on my other blog, which some of the readers of this one might find interesting. It's also the first time I've embedded a youtube video in a post - and I'm still astonished at how easy it was. Modern technology is a wonderful thing.
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Simultaneity

Or should that be some other word? Whatever you call it, there appears to be Transatlantic consensus that young people today don't know the Our Father.

Perhaps religious education in Belgium is not as bad as I think. All the kids in my confirmation class learnt the Our Father at school!
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