"Bells & Smells"

I don't post too much about religion or politics here, mostly because they are not my area of expertise and because others so often say it better. But this defense of old fashioned Catholic rituals and customs from Dappled things strikes me as exactly right.

"But it's a false dichotomy to say one must choose between the external trappings of religion and the interior stuff that has eternal significance. There's no reason in the world why one can't have both, and Catholicism has traditionally kept them both together. To be unimpressed by a triple tiara certainly does not make one a bad Catholic, but I wonder whether zealously opposing all these little grace notes in the religious score might not. To my mind, at any rate, all these things speak of the magnanimity and exuberance of a religious spirit that spills out into the world in all sorts of unlikely and delightful ways. They knock us out of the prosaic and linear existence of everyday life and remind us that old-fashioned religion, in addition to being good, saving, and true, is also charming, merry, and even whimsical. A woman in white veils and orange blossoms would be ludicrous walking down the aisle of Wal-Mart, but there is something right about her walking so attired down the aisle of the church in a wedding. Perhaps not every bride will choose to exercise that option, but only a grinch would want to deprive her of that choice.

"And this is what I think drives the progressive hacking away at all that is quaint and definitely non-prosaic in our religious customs: not just plodding utilitarianism, but a spirit of grinchiness. The Calvinists and their Catholic cousins, the Jansenists, pioneered that spirit in Christianity, and the sober rationalists of the Englightenment did the same for secular society. Purge away everything but the non-essential and you may indeed retain Christian truth, but you will have made the practice of it into something much grimmer than it has to be. Chesterton's Rolling English Road [ "the rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road"] illustrates that insight wonderfully, and Hopkins' Pied Beauty does the same.

"So, take the tiara or leave it, bring your cocker spaniel to be blessed or leave it at home, but think twice before you write it all off as distraction and poofery."