A convert from Anglicanism myself, I find the emphasis on Newman’s conversion beautiful and profound. A conversion feast sets aside a day for contemplation on this experience for its own sake, and this seems meet and right.

Conversion, as we all know, means a death of the self. This is true whether the converted has been an atheist, or has simply been brought to the end of a road and told to keep going. For everyone who comes to the door, the price of admission is assent to the proposition that until you are through the door, you have not, at the very least, begun to be your truest, wholest self. You have to admit the possibility that up to that point, everything you have done and been is as nothing to you in the fact of what awaits you on the other side. Even if you have believed, you confess your unbelief. You own your blindness, even if you have seen trees walking.

And you do not do it once. In my experience, you do it again and again and again, daily, hourly, trying and trying to lay your life down and let it be bought for a price, for reasons you grant that you may never understand.

Blessed John Henry Newman, patron of conversion in my household, knows how it goes:

Somehow I am necessary for His purposes, as necessary in my place as an Archangel in his—if, indeed, I fail, He can raise another as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work. I am a link in a chain . . . He has not created me for naught . . . He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me—still He knows what He is about.

From the same blog, a last glimpse of the Pope as night falls on Britain: “Eagle-eyed Pope fans spot Benedict walking up and down in front of the building, rosary beads in hand before retiring for the night.”

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The arrests were made at 0545 BST at addresses in London after counter-terrorism officers received intelligence of a potential threat.
The five men have been taken to a central London police station.
Officers are continuing searches at premises connected to the raids. The men are not British nationals.

[. . .]

The five were arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism under the Terrorism Act 2000.
The five men are 26, 27, 36, 40 and 50 years old. They were arrested in an armed operation at business premises where searches are continuing.

Residential premises in north and east London are also being searched. Officers have not found any hazardous items.
It is not clear whether the investigations relate to a plot against the Pope himself or an element of the visit.

Read more . . .

More at the Mail.

There are some who now seek to exclude religious belief from public discourse, to privatize it or even to paint it as a threat to equality and liberty. Yet religion is in fact a guarantee of authentic liberty and respect, leading us to look upon every person as a brother or sister. — Pope Benedict XVI at Bellahouston Park

A Catholic friend in England remarked that she had to stop following news of the papal visit on Twitter: even in that truncated form of communication, the anti-Catholic rhetoric was too much.

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To be sure, there were the crowds lining the streets in Edinburgh. There was, as William Doino has said, the triumph of the Mass in Glasgow. But while all this was going on, as well as in the run-up to it, there were the people who sat at their computers and typed out responses to the BBC’s “Have Your Say” feature for September 16.

“What does the Pope’s visit mean to you?” the Beeb asked its online audience.

“Absolutely nothing,” said a lot of people.

And, “Sorry, who is he? What does he do?”

And, “A further waste of MY/OUR money in times of supposed hardship, and the spread of something I personally would eradicate.”

Eradicate? Just stamp it out? The whole Catholic Church? The way you’d eradicate ringworm?

This would be troubling rhetoric from one commenter, however anonymous. But of course we all know it’s not just one commenter. At least, we presume it’s not just one sad person in a basement someplace, pressing post over and over and over again, coming up with endless variations on old fool in silly hat, spread of AIDS in Africa, discrimination against half of world population, homophobe, paedophile, criminal, face of evil. Disgusted, nauseated, livid, wouldn’t open the blinds if he passed by my house. Roman Catholicism has nothing to contribute to the modern world. A seedy little man with distinctly malign views.

I had to peel my eyes off the screen at last. There is something mesmerizing in these comments, after all: the multiplicity of ways in which it’s possible to say I hate this man seems endless. Again, it’s not a surprise. It’s really very drearily not a surprise. And yet I wonder, who are these people?

I don’t mean, who are they individually? Individually, I can imagine them. It’s the culture I can’t quite wrap my head around, at least not on the basis of the combox sample. It’s a sample which does not appear to include any people who actually plan, or even want, to attend the papal events. It’s a sample vacant of any input from, say, the recording secretary of the Anglican Society of Mary, just back from a pilgrimage to Walsingham. It’s a sample stunningly lacking in the perspectives of people with something to do besides foam at the keyboard.

How many of them are there out there? How many of them would sympathize with the foamers if they had time and internet access, and how many would not? From this geographical remove and through the lens of the internet, it’s impossible to gauge what, exactly, the standards of cultural sanity are in Great Britain, though plenty of people will step up to tell you that those standards are multicultural, tolerant, and areligiously moral in nature, the areligious morality being a far more evolved morality than the religious one, which is why you can say with impunity, under cover of anonymity, anyway, that a person like Pope Benedict XVI is a total waste of space, and you begrudge him his very existence.

That a person can think, and can voice the thought, that another human being, however vile to the thinker, is a waste of space is disturbing. That other people are so ready to elaborate on that theme is chilling, even in the rare Scottish sunshine. Equally chilling, though, I suppose, is how easily the internet comes to stand in for the real world.

That notwithstanding, some related links:

Damian Thompson: Glasgow Mass a Spiritual Triumph. Liturgical Triumph Not So Much.

Papal-Mass Composer Also Excoriated in Combox

Meanwhile, Patrick Ward, blogging at the official papal-visit site, foresees a peaceful day in London, even as the Guardian collects the usual ersatz miracles.

Live-Blogging at The Catholic Herald

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Though the new posters have yet to appear, and the ASA has declined to comment on what it hasn’t yet seen staring it in the face all over London, the UK-based Antonio Federici has said that it “wished to comment on and question, using satire and gentle humour, the relevance and hypocrisy of religion and the attitudes of the church to social issues.”

Listen to us! Social commentary brought to you by your ice cream! Apparently Antonio Federici can hold, simultaneously, both this official position and the one in which they claim that “the idea of conception represented the development of their ice cream,” and that religious imagery merely suggests the company’s “strong feeling towards its product,” and really, anyone who objects to anything about this ought to try thinking metaphorically once in a while and not go getting all knicker-twisted. It’s ice cream.

But it’s not just any ice cream. This ice cream is relevant, yet hypocritical. Plus it’s all a bit of lighthearted fun. In which, of course, the Pope and his cavalcade must be forced to take part, for the good of society, in a satirical yet gently humourous kind of way.

Just, you know, FYI.

via Radio Derb

A prosaic turn of mind hasn’t stopped me, however, from thinking about poetry. Poetry-as-aural-experience is a fact of life in my house, so I’m hardly disposed to say that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m an avid reader-aloud of poetry, especially to my children, and I’ll tell anyone willing to listen (again, my children, who really have no choice) that it’s our ears primarily, not our eyes, which remember poems.

So far, so good, right? But here’s what I wonder about Billy Collins: how much of his poetry is the kind of thing our ears not only receive, but remember? How many of his lines return unbidden into the mind once we’ve finished listening to them? Wordsworth wrote, “The music in my heart I bore/Long after it was heard no more.” I’m not prepared right this second to die for the idea that this, and nothing else, is what defines poetry, but—well, how much Billy Collins do you bear in your heart, long after he’s stopped talking?

Actually, I know how I’d answer that question. I can recite one Billy Collins line off the top of my head: “And here is your lanyard.” Make of that what you will.

Before five hundred people write in to repeat for me all their favorite Billy Collins passages, committed to heart as people used commonly to commit sacred scripture, let me qualify what I just said. It’s not that you can’t memorize Billy Collins’s poetry if you want to. In fact, if you’ve got it on CD and listen to it a lot, I would imagine that you have in fact memorized a good bit more than I have. I would argue, however, that this isn’t exactly the same thing as memorizing poetry written to appeal to the ear via the traditional aural devices of rhyme and meter. You may be able to call up passages, even whole poems, at will. But I’m not sure that this act of remembering is the same act by which we recall poetry.

Let me give you an example. Billy Collins has, in England, a children’s-poet counterpart named Michael Rosen. Now, as for me and my house, we are tremendous fans of Michael Rosen. Among other things, he has written an excellent book on Shakespeare for children, but the reason my children love him is that, in about 2000 or 2001, while we were living in Cambridge, we happened to check out from the library an audiobook of his poems, entitled Just Wait Till I’m Older Than You.

I think we may very possibly still owe overdue fines on this tape. We listened to it, and we listened to it, and we listened to it, and then we listened to it some more. When we left England in 2003, I was almost tempted to check it out again and drop it into a packing box by premeditated mistake. As it turned out, I didn’t have to, because as a family we have most of it committed to memory anyway and can recite entire poems off the top of our collective head.

The thing is, though, that this isn’t really like reciting poetry. I’m not sure what these poems look like on the page, but they don’t seem to be rhymed or metered (though to be fair, many poets read right through their line endings, and you don’t know that poems rhyme unless you chance to read them). These poems play on the ear like stories—hilariously funny stories, which is really why we remember them, but stories. In short, they might as well be prose. They’d lose nothing by being written in paragraphs, not stanzas. When we recite bits of them aloud, we sound more like people repeating their favorite lines from a Monty Python sketch than people participating in the great oral tradition of poetry:

“The car’s moving!”

“I know the car’s moving!”

“Look at the peaches!”

“Never mind the peaches!”

See what I mean? For those of us who know the whole story, these are funny lines. For the rest of you—well, I’ll have to tell you the story sometime. And here is your lanyard.

Meanwhile, there was one other book—an actual book, this time, not a tape—which I was sorely tempted to check out on a permanent and illicit basis from the public library of Cambridgeshire. Now that I think of it, we probably still owe fines on this one, too. It was a book of poetry for children, by a Cornishman named Charles Causley, and it was as irresistible to me as it was to my children.

There was, and is, a pleasure on an entirely different level from “recalling the funny bits” in saying aloud a poem which begins, “Here’s Reverend Rundle/His gear in a bundle,” or

Good morning, Mr. Croco-doco-dile,
And how are you today?
I like to see you croco-smoco-smile
In your croco-woco-way.

These poems were often funny; they were often lyrical and even—and this is unusual in children’s poetry—haunting. They were wonderful to read aloud and to hear, not only because what they had to say was funny, or lyrical, or haunting, but in their music, in the very pleasure they took in their own sound.

This is a quality, incidentally, not confined to Causley’s poetry for children. In fact, as the Charles Causley Society’s website points out,

It is difficult to decide which of Causley’s poems can be classified as “children’s poems” since many of them contain several layers of experience.

It’s no slur against Causley’s reputation to say that my children can understand a poem like this or this as readily as they understand the “children’s” poems. And though Causley didn’t make a name for himself via recordings and animations, you can hear him read “Timothy Winters” and a selection of other poems at The Poetry Archive.

So . . . it may look as if I’d forgotten your original question, Joe, but I haven’t. No, I don’t think Billy Collins is killing poetry. But when I stand him up beside poets for whom the idea of an oral tradition of poetry means more than just “intelligible stuff you say out loud”—poets who write memorable music as well as accessible and repeatable lines—it seems to me that we don’ t have to settle for mere life-support, either.

School administrators take pride in their record of frequently firing
teachers they consider to be underperforming. Unions are embraced with the same warmth accorded “self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best effort,” to quote the school’s website.

Students, almost all poor, wear uniforms and are subject to disciplinary procedures redolent of military school. One local school district official was horrified to learn that a girl was forced to clean the boys’ restroom as punishment.

The school serves a low-income population, yet its students routinely post some of the highest standardized-test scores in the state.

Among the thousands of public schools in California, only four middle schools and three high schools score higher. None of them serves mostly underprivileged children.

At American Indian, the largest ethnic group is Asian, followed by Latinos and African Americans. Some of the schools’ critics contend that high-scoring Asian Americans are driving the test scores, but blacks and Latinos do roughly as well–in fact, better on some tests.

Is this a miracle story? Is the charter’s success as simple as the triumph of discipline and common sense over basketweaving? The school’s critics claim that American Indian’s high test scores result from active recruitment of high achievers and, in the words of the local
teachers’-union president, “getting rid of kids who won’t” perform well.

And then there’s the matter of the mother who withdrew her son, concluding that the school was “evil.” She had proposed to keep her son at home to watch the presidential inauguration in January, to which the school’s principal responded with the threat of extra homework as
punishment and, more objectively disturbingly, of rescinding a recommendation to a private high school.

It’s clear, at any rate, that when this school administration says “zero tolerance” for attendance or behavioral infractions, they aren’t kidding. And not-kidding produces results. It’s possible to argue about the means, and about the value of the end of high test scores, but the results are undeniably there.

Hymns are listed alphabetically; click on any title for words, audio clips, histories and author bios.

Guess I know what I’ll be doing this morning. Actually, what I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop myself doing is mentally adding the words “in the bathtub” to each hymn title. It’s an entertaining game, though a bit of a threat to any sense of churchgoing gravitas, and I recommend it with caution.

“Cleanse Me” . . . in the bathtub.
“He Hideth My Soul” . . . in the bathtub.
“There Is a Fountain” . . . in the bathtub.
“What Child Is This” . . . in the bathtub?

Bad, bad, bad.

But the hymn site is interesting.

The recently released study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points out that the birthrate for unmarried women has risen to 40 percent and is highest among Hispanic women–climbing 20 percent between 2002 and 2006. While this data is worth noting and signals a need for policymakers and advocates to reexamine our family-centered policies, we shouldn’t present single motherhood as a problem in itself.

It’s always nice, too, to see Corinne Maier–remember her? 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Kids? That Corinne Maier–weighing in on single motherhood.

It’s no coincidence that celebrity tabloids devote more ink to stars who give birth or adopt than to those who marry or remake their lives.

The child is thus the center of everything — perhaps too much so.

The situation makes one think of the famous line by the French writer Andre Gide in 1897: “Families, I hate you.” Would its modern version be “Kids are hell”?

Yeah . . . that’s exactly what I thought of . . .