Book Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma - A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

As we put the Thanksgiving holiday weekend to bed, I'm finishing up my latest blog post -- and by late, I mean very late: I haven't posted to this blog in a long, long time. It is fitting, though, that the subject is one that involves food and being thankful for the gift of life and creation -- both of which are provided to us by a loving God.


Finished reading Michael Pollan's great food book some time ago -- with a little help from the Holy Spirit.* Was talking to my friend Erick Bell about it just this past weekend as we were helping him move. 

Pollan's book is a fascinating exercise in tracing four typified meals from their very beginnings to their consumption by the author and his family. Pollan -- a professor at the University of California, Berkley -- looks at three (one of which has a variant which becomes the second meal type) different types of meals: the Industrial, the Pastoral, and the Personal.

The Industrial Meal

The first, Industrial, begins with the realization that over the last 40 years, Corn has been in ascendancy in terms of the percentage of our calories which are derived in some part from it. Corn now exists in an astonishing percentage of the industrial food products we Americans consume. When it is not in the form of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) -- a mass-produced, industrialized and cheap form of sweetener now present in practically everything in the supermarket -- it is being fed to the industrially mass-produced protein sources (beef, pork, poultry and now, unbelievably, industrially-raised fish). This is apparently a very bad thing.

For example, Pollan points out that cattle are not naturally equipped to digest corn meal. In fact, it makes them sick. Nonetheless, a diet of corn also very quickly adds mass to the beef cattle that are fed in concentrated industrial Commercial Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFOs) where they are packed into lots and fed a diet of corn and antibiotics.

The antibiotics are in part to keep the cattle alive long enough to be slaughtered, as the corn that they're fed literally makes them sick.

Pollan's industrial meal follows the mutation and asexual reproduction of corn plants from the central highlands of Mexico (some 6,000 years ago) to an Iowa farm where corn is big (agri)-business and finally (where else?) to a fast-food meal of McDonald's chicken nuggets consumed in a convertible rolling down the highway.

Pastoral - Big Organic Meal

Next up is the Supermarket Pastoral meal where big organic and natural foods chains market "Organic" with a capital "O". Make that a "capital-ist 'O'", because far from the vision of some hippies hanging out in a commune in Northern California or Vermont or someplace, Organic has indeed become big-business. A look inside my refrigerator betrays the truth of this observation, where my milk comes from Horizon dairy and my eggs from Eggland's Free-Range eggs. (Otherwise, I'm not all that devoted to organic food. I'd like to be, but with four kids to feed, clothe and educate,  my own "capital" leaves something to be desired.)

Pollan investigates the $11 Billion-dollar (2002 figures, probably more now) Organic Food business and what he finds is a mixed bag: yes, the food is mostly well-grown and produced in healthy operations. But corporate food interests being what they are, there is a certain amount of advertising mythos that must needs be applied to prevent the reality that this too is an industrial process. Pollan remarks,

"Organic" on the label conjures up a rich narrative, even if it is the consumer who fills in most of the details, supplying the hero (American Family Farmer), the villain (Agribusinessman), and the literary genre, which I've come to think of as Supermarket Pastoral. By now we know better than to believe this too simple story, but not much better, and the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief." (OD, p. 137)

One of the best things that this book did for me, was to remove the Madison Avenue marketing curtain of pastoral mythos from the food sales business in supermarkets. By that I mean that Pollan points out that there is an active effort on the part of the supermarkets to pretend that the food they sell is from the archetypal "American Farm". You see this in the decorations in the supermarket and the packaging of the industrially-produced food that they sell -- the images of red barns and hay bales, as if the food comes from some bucolic paradise where a farmer in a straw hat and his happy cows frolic and gambol across green pastures. 

Pollan made me realize for the first time that these pastoral images by which we're sold the food are complete bunk. The food doesn't come from farms, it comes from factories. There are no bucolic farmers or happy cows. No cartoonish roosters or even any iconic red barns. Instead our food comes from factories, where the animals that become the food are often abused in hellish conditions and live their sorry, short and pain-filled lives deprived of sunlight and even air.  There's no "Farmer John", there's no red barn. There are metal buildings stretching to the horizon. There are stench-emanating CAFO feedlots where the beef or pork constantly stand in seas of their own liquified filth. 

The Organic food business may have slightly improved on this nightmare, but probably not as much as you might think (or hope). Pollan notes the organic slight of hand marketing where organic dairies may claim that their dairy stock "have access to the outdoors", but in reality that may mean there is simply an opening in their concrete and metal warehouse where they might catch a glimpse or earth and sky. Or, they might have actual access to grass free patch of hardscape that is nothing like the idyllic pasture that you and I imagine when we think of farming.

Certainly makes one wonder what they're really buying at Whole Foods, doesn't it? Could be that what you're really purchasing is not much more than an illusion, in the form of a really sophisticated version of the supermarket's pastoral myth.

The Grass-fed Meal: Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm

Joel Salatin is a farmer of a different breed. His operation, far from the mono-culture of the industrial farm factory, resembles nothing so much as the myth that the supermarkets try to sell us with their images of smiling cows and red barns and hay bales.

Salatin, of whom I first read about in Smithsonian Magazine about a decade ago, eschews the industrial model of farming and is famous for his battling of federal regulations and regulators. He wrote a book a few years ago entitled "Everything I Want to Do is Illegal". Salatin has spent his life perfecting his Virginia farm operation and it's beyond-organic natural system.

For example, Salatin has a system of holistic farming that utilizes the inputs and outputs of all of his varied stock of cattle and chickens and so forth. He knows exactly how long to allow the cattle to graze the pastures filled with clover and grass, and how long to delay introducing his chickens to those same fields to harvest the larvae before they hatch and become flies. Here's Pollan on Salatin and his fellow "grass farmers":

"Grass farmers grow animals -- for meat, eggs, milk, and wool -- but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat. 'To be even more accurate,' Joel has said, 'we should call ourselves sun farmers. The grass is just the way we capture the solar energy.'" (OD, p. 188)

Here's another point that I hadn't really realized until reading The Omnivore's Dilemma: that our food chain and the environment is really a system for the conversion of solar energy into organic matter and, ultimately, human beings. All of the energy we consume on earth -- yes, even the food energy -- is a storage system that is designed to store energy from the Sun. The sun's rays deliver energy which plants synthesize through photo-synthesis and animals eat to convert to flesh, and we then harvest to build our own selves.

Now, perhaps this something that is radically obvious to others. But it wasn't to me. Far from being (merely?) the source of heat and light, our sun is in fact the primary source for all energy and the plants and animals we consume (and thus convert to our own energy-burning bodies) and for us as well. For me as a Catholic, there's a certain symmetrical beauty to this system to extends beyond the electro-chemical mechanics of it all and points us to God and His providence. 

Pollan actually spends some days or weeks living and working with Salatin on his farm, and ultimately even helps to slaughter a chicken. (Salatin is a big believer in the necessity of pulling back the curtains of the abattoir which are purposely hidden from us by the food industry, and letting individuals see and even participate in the slaughter of the food we consume.) 

Salatin (and Pollan, his erstwhile student) bemoan the waste that follows from our current industrial food production system, arguing that Salatin's holistic practices are actually more productive and less wasteful than the industrial systems which rely on hydrocarbons to create, package and ship food across the globe to the point of their ultimate consumption. This, Salatin argues, is the true inefficiency and cannot be sustained except in a system where oil is artifically cheap and plentiful. In a world where energy is no longer is no longer cheap or plentiful, the ultimate considerations are obvious and scary.

"Why did we ever turn away from this free lunch (a' la Salatin's closed cycle of sustainable farming) in favor of a biologically ruinous meal based on corn? Why in the world did Americans every take ruminants (grass eating livestock) off the grass? And how could it come to pass that a fast-food burger produced from corn and fossil fuel actually cost less than burger produced from grass and sunlight?" (OD, p. 199)

You might think -- but would be wrong -- that Joel Salatin's beyond-organic 100-acre farm is less productive than its industrial competition. But that conclusion is not borne out by the facts. According to Pollan, Polyface Farm's 100 acres produce the following astonishing output each year:

• 30,000 dozen eggs
• 12,000 broiler chickens
• 800 stewing hens
• 25,000 pounds of beef
• 50,000 pounds of pork
• 800 turkeys
• 500 rabbits

 As you might suspect, the quality of the food produced is extremely high. Polyface Farms markets their produce and eggs to high-end gourmet restaurants on the Eastern seaboard. Their eggs, for example, are particularly prized by gourmet chefs for their unusually robust flavor and color.  Salatin's unusual yield and beyond-organic practices might have anyone asking, why indeed have we abandoned this form of multi-culture farming for the mono-cultures based on petroleum and factory farming?

The Hunter-Gatherer Meal

I've managed to get this far without explaining the title of Michael Pollan's book. The "omnivore's dilemma" is this: what shall we eat? It's based on the realization that as omnivore's we can eat practically anything and everything. 

Think of it this way: the sparrow doesn't have to decide whether he'd like a nice salad or a big steak for dinner. His dinner is the same one he ate yesterday, and the day before yesterday and every day. Similarly, the cow doesn't have to decide what to eat today (although once she's sent to the CAFO that feed may change radically). She's eating grass. Today, yesterday and tomorrow.

We're not like that, obviously. Tonight at my house we're having Tyson chicken. Last night we ate tacos with ground beef, lettuce, tomatoes and onions and topped with cheddar cheese. Tomorrow it may be left-over turkey and dressing.

The fourth and final meal in Pollan's book is one that is probably the oldest, culturally-speaking: a meal that he hunts and gathers himself. After all, for nearly all of human history man has relied on his own wiles and tools to kill and eat animals, the development of agriculture coming relatively late in human anthropology. In this case it turns out to be roasted wild-boar and mushrooms -- both of which are gathered near his Northern California home. But as you might guess, a Berkeley college professor is not necessarily a big hunter. 

But Pollan figures that it's a classic cop out to object to hunting just because he doesn't want to kill. After all, if you eat meat you're participating in killing for food. Moreover, the killing of your own food is very likely to involve much less pain and cruelty to be inflicted on the animal than causing a given hog to endure the factory farming and CAFO process.  Pollan's experience in learning to hunt and kill his own food is thought provoking and interesting. 

Pollan also delves into the world of mushroom hunters -- a secretive sub-culture that regards mushrooms and their hunting grounds as jealously as any bass fisherman or deer hunter protects his hunting grounds. 

To finish out his hunter-gatherer meal, Pollan dives for abalone, gathers fava beans and arugula from his own garden, and picks cherries from a local cherry tree. He bakes bread made from wild yeast captured from the breeze (who knew the air contains yeast?) and provided chamomile tea gathered from Beverly Hills and wine from a friend with a vineyard.

The end result is a delicious-sounding perfect meal full of warmth and friendship, and leaves the reader wishing he'd been invited. And, as he notes,"Scarcely an ingredient in it had ever worn a label or bar code or price tag...."

*POSTSCRIPT: One of the reasons that I've taken so long to review this book is that in the midst of reading it, I lost the damn thing. There was therefore an unintentional interregnum of several weeks or maybe even months in which I wasn't reading due to its being lost. 

Friends of mine know that I am involved in our local Perpetual Adoration program at the chapel located in St. John Medical Center in Tulsa, where the Blessed Sacrament (Jesus' real presence and body, blood, soul and divinity are contained within a consecrated host) is continually exposed for worship 24/7/364 days a year. 

I mention this because at one point I had nearly despaired of ever finding again my copy of Pollan's book, and late one night I was doing my weekly adoration shift at the chapel when my mind wandered to my lost book and its fate. I found myself thinking, "What if the book were back there on the shelf in the chapel? Wouldn't that be a great thing? What if I cast a glance back there to the bookshelf, and my eyes came to rest on the book? Wouldn't that be cool?"

So, while thinking those thoughts I looked back to the shelf. Unfortunately, my eyesight is not what it used to be, and in the dimly-lit chapel, I really couldn't make out the titles on the spines of the books that were there. 

That's when the thought occurred to me: "Maybe I should wander back there and just look to see what's on the shelf." "Wouldn't it be cool, if I could just wander back there and spot my missing book?" "How neat would that be?"

You can guess what happened next. Yep; believe it or not, that's exactly how and where I found my missing book. You can't tell me that the Holy Spirit wasn't operating there in that chapel that night -- right there in the presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. 

(Thanks, Lord!)

 

The World is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon

William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Came across this Wordsworth poem -- actually a friend mentioned it to me as we were driving down the street and I Googled it on my smart-phone. (How's that for irony?)

But as so often happens, the thing perfectly described my situation -- and the situation that I've found myself operating in for the past several months now. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

As we leave behind bright October and enter grey November, my thoughts are directed toward the changing of the seasons in both the geographical sense and the allegorical. I observed my forty-seventh birthday last weekend with a hike in the woods. Now don't get me wrong -- I love the woods and I love hiking. (I even have some pretty cool videos I took with my cellphone of Cam and Maddie and Abby playing in a mountain-top pond.) See here:




But there's a certain attenuated sadness -- not depression, not even really unhappiness -- that wreathes my thoughts as we head down into the bottom of the year. There's a sweetness to my sorrow, a sort of melancholy that I find myself not running from but embracing instead and occasionally even stealing glances at from my mind's eye.

Maybe it's just middle-age. Maybe it's regret for the things I haven't accomplished yet. Maybe it's the season. Hell, maybe it's just plain old exhaustion. I don't know.

Anyone have a cure for the malaise of middle age?

FBC

Ron Paul Inteview with Time Magazine

Saw this 9/17/2009 interview with Congressman Ron Paul -- the unsuccessful 2008 Republican presidential candidate.

Nightmares about the Coming Facist State

Wichita Kansas: early Sunday morning, August 8, 2009 -- I woke up in our hotel room this morning a little before 5:30 a.m. and couldn't make it back to sleep. We've been attending the Midwest Catholic Family Conference -- an annual event in Wichita that draws Catholic speakers and families from all over the world. Great event, very positive. It's exciting to hear these apologists and speakers whose names and stories I've only read about up to now. But one speaker's story has particularly affected me: Immaculee Ilibigaza -- a survivor of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Immaculee hid in a bathroom with 7 other women for weeks, while another tribe was hunting for people like her to hack them to death with machetes. At one point, a mob of 300 people entered the house where she was hidden, and despite searching the small house for 2 hours, Immaculee and the others were miraculously preserved through prayer God and spared the machete-wielding crowd. Immaculee wrote about the harrowing experience in a book entitled "Left to Tell". Although her story is an uplifting one -- full of the power of grace and forgiveness -- it has kicked off the realization within me that what happened in Rwanda *could* happen here. For westerners, the horrors that occurred in 1994 -- when Rwanda was suddenly cast into a maelstrom of violent killing and tribal genocide is nearly inexplicable. We cannot imagine that anything could cause people to suddenly rise up and begin hacking their neighbors to death as quickly as if someone threw a light switch turning otherwise normal people into raging savages bent on an orgy of murder. Actually, I guess we can imagine that -- we hear of violent murders on a daily basis, now that I think of it. No -- it's not that some people went berserk; it's that half of an entire nation did so at a moment's notice. That's the unbelievable part of this tragic story. Part of the impact of Immaculee's story on me personally has to do with the setting. It was here in Wichita several years ago that some black men abducted two couples at gunpoint and forced them to commit various sexually degrading acts, before murdering them all. I can't help but think of this horrible incident whenever I think about Wichita. Man's capacity for atrocity apparently knows no limit. (Another troubling aspect of this horrific event was the fact that the mainstream national media gave this -- like so many other black-on-white crimes -- almost no coverage, so those who do not live in the area are very likely never to have heard of this shocking crime, unlike the Rwandan genocide of course.) Anyway, so Immaculee's story has got me thinking about the ease and the quickness with which this country could descend into the same kind of ethnic and political violence. As the national debate - to the extent there even is one - continues over President Obama's alleged "healthcare reform" (read: "slide into Facism") we move ever deeper into a national morass in which the rabidly anti-life U.S. government will be able to decide who gets medical treatment and when. I recently gave an interview (really just a soundbite) to a local news station in opposition to the healthcare reform proposals, arguing that it is extremely scary to contemplate giving the U.S. government the power over who lives and dies. This will amount to the government deciding who gets catastrophic medical care, and alternatively who is instead merely giving palliative care to ease their slide into death. Healthcare administered by the same "warm and fuzzy" bureaucrats that run the IRS, if you will. Fortunately, there is a sizeable group of Americans who see the implications of handing over the routine power of life and death to this anti-Life government of radical 60's leftists. These people have been turning out to give their congressman and senators an earful in their districts -- where they are allowed to speak to their Capitol Hill masters, that is. (Some congressional office holders have moved to prevent public speaking at their appearances back home in their districts.) In other places, groups of thuggish union members and community organizations like the corrupt to the core SEIU and ACORN have actually threatened and intimidated people from speaking out at these meetings. Elsewhere, others have likened these people to the Brownshirts -- Nazi-orchestrated civilians which were used to silence dissent in pre-war Germany. Seems to me that ACORN and the SEIU fit the brownshirt description nicely. Being here in Wichita brings up better memories as well, though. Wichita was for a long time the home of Rich Mullins -- one of a very short list of men who have had a profound impact on my life and faith. Last evening after the family conference shut down, we drove over to Friends University where Rich attended and got his music degree, and nearby Newman University, whose St. Joseph Square is featured in Mullins' song, "Peace: A Communion Song from St. Joseph's Square." One of the many things that Rich said that has stuck with me, was that governments are inherently anti-life, and we should not be surprised to realize this. At one point, Rich thanked God for Richard Nixon, because he said, Nixon made it impossible for us to think that governments would ever be anything but anti-Christian and anti-life. "Democracy is not bad politics," Rich further explained. "It's just bad math." "It's the mistake that believing that a thousand corrupt minds are better than one corrupt mind." I don't think there are very many if any people out there in America today who imagine that this country could descend into the same bloody violence as what occurred in Rwanda in 1994. Surely, I must be nearly alone in fearing this. Some conservatives recognize the dangers that the Obama administration poses to our very lives, but overall the American people remain fat and happy. (I'm reminded of the line from the movie Animal House in which the dean tells the college student "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.") If that's not a perfect description for Americans in general, it's close, nonetheless. But still -- this is the stuff of nightmares that keep me from sleep, these days. God help us.

So SSAD: the Triumph of Homosexual Propaganda

Got a couple of Twitter posts in the past two days that were promoting a local "Gay Pride" festival. (I prefer the term/acronym SSAD -- Same Sex Attraction Disorder to "gay".) The first of the posts was passed on by a perfectly nice young lady who often promotes local festivals, events, etc. around Tulsa. At first, I was a little taken aback -- you get to know people on a limited basis and probably don't know them as well as you think. (I know, I know -- it's the internet, what should I expect?) I would have liked to ignore it, but I just couldn't. So I sent the young lady a direct message (for those of you who don't "Twitter", a direct message goes only to the recipient sort of like a regular text message) expressing my disappointment, and then un-followed her future public posts. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a neutral reply back thanking me for the feedback, via direct message. (The young lady in question is nothing if not polite, and she should be commended for showing such obvious class and grace.) But no discussion of the subject matter. I suspect that she sees "Gay Pride" like most secularists as a civil rights matter. The next day I received more notices of the homosexual pride festival from other sources -- one of which was happily inviting people to visit the YWCA booth at the Gay Pride (yuck) festival. Think about that for a sec -- the YWCA, the Young Women's Christian Association is apparently promoting a festival which glorifies an objectively sinful behavior. These are the depths to which we've already sunk. Why should this be? Much of it is the triumph of secularism over religious belief, and secularism seems to be a fruit of the poisonous tree of relativism. The late great Pope John Paul II decried this philosophy in his landmark encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), when he noted the threat that relativism poses to our society and culture at large.) Relativists are able to believe contradictory mutually exclusive propositions (both "A" and "Not A") simultaneously, without so much as a blink. Where people have lost the common sense understanding that there is such a thing as objective truth, the whole culture is at risk. But it also seems to me that this has to do with a generational difference in the way homosexuality is viewed in society at large. The current generation -- a product of years of skillful and insidious propagandizing through the media -- has accepted that homosexuality is merely an acceptable alternative lifestyle, and not an objectively immoral or sinful (they seem to have little concept of the latter) behavior. That a whole generation could view something so objectively sinful as "normal" is testament to the success of 40 years of gay propaganda. But it's also proof that we have failed to publicly oppose it and speak out when confronted by it. Too often, we just "let it go" and silently cluck to ourselves. But what to do about it? I would suggest that we Catholics and Christians and even other non-Christian religions must necessarily push back. We must not be silent in the face of such things, but step out in courage to calmly and peacefully point out that such behavior is objectively wrong. We have to call attention to the fact that homosexuality is unnatural and a perversion which should draw pity, not pride. We cannot be silent. Lives are lost and a generation is the process of losing their very souls. At multiple apparitions in the 20th century, beginning with Fatima in 1917, the Virgin Mary has testified that more souls would be lost to sexual impurity (of which homosexuality is but one form, of course) than anything else. The Progressives rely on intimidating Christians into silence. Don't let them do it, for we remain silent we are betraying Christ. Speak up and speak out against these sins.

"The Greatest Mistake of My Life" - Dr. Bernard Nathanson

The last surviving founding member of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League), recants his involvement and frankly admits lying to the American people and the judiciary about when life begins.

Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy!

I Am A Craft Brewer from I Am A Craft Brewer on Vimeo.

Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy! -- Benjamin Franklin

My latest favorite craft brew: Choc Beer's Pietro Piegari - an American Amber ale, brewed in Krebs, OK. http://chocbeer.com/choc_beer.html?#/beer/

Great stuff. Got six in my fridge as I speak, and I'm looking forward to this afternoon.

FBC

Pass the Salt: Fr. Jenkins arresting priests at Notre Dame

Twitter invented in 1935?

Robot-Notificator - 1935 August issue of Modern Mechanics: http://infomarketingblog.com/images/twitter-robot.jpg Here's a video explanation of Twitter. It's fairly good, but ignores the professional aspect of Twitter, wherein people (or lawyers, take your pick) post links to articles and issues that are of interest to their narrow fields. There are a number of consumer law / bankruptcy law Twitterers, and also law marketing Twitterers that I follow, in addition to friends' personal posts. I actually have two separate Twitter accounts (three, if you count the Tulsa Diocese March4Life acct): BenCallicoat (my personal account) and JarboeLaw (my professional account.)

The Feminization of the Roman Catholic Church

I recently went to First Communion for Joseph B., a friend of my son Campion, at the Parish of St. Pius X, here in Tulsa. (Not to be confused with the SSPX -- this is a regular diocesan parish.*) One thing that I've noticed from my Mass365 project is that the liturgy varies from parish to parish and that although the liturgy of the cathedral is pretty reliably solid, it can get pretty far afield out in the parishes.

One example was Joseph's First Communion. You would think -- I would've thought, anyway -- that a First Communion Mass would be a fairly formal affair and the rubrics of the Mass would be more or less observed. Well if this is what you would think, you would be wrong. What a mess!

Rumblings of misgiving occurred when a week before the actual event, the children being catechized were instructed by the (female) DRE that all were to receive Communion in the hand -- none of that Communion on the tongue stuff allowed.

That necessitated a trip to see the pastor, Fr. Michael Knipe, who informed Joe's dad that there was "some misunderstanding" -- that he didn't intend for this to be the case. ("There was no misunderstanding", his father told me.) A follow-up revealed that a former pastor had indeed instructed that none of the children were to receive on the tongue, but apparently the DRE or whatever, had never changed this directive. All of which begs the question: who is running the church?

The Mass itself was a liturgical train-wreck, with all of the children lining up to do the readings. (I hate this practice, by the way. My understanding is that there is an indult for allowing lay persons to read -- but only in extraordinary circumstances.) The kids stumbled and mumbled through it -- including one young girl who climbed up to the podium turned a few pages and hurried away without saying anything -- and eventually the painful experience passed. The music was even more insipid than usual -- something about butterflies and God's love -- as done by an electric combo with a bass guitar and electric keyboard. I told someone later that it was like going to Mass and a country music concert broke out.

When it came time for First Communion, the candidates lined up in the back of the Church with their mothers (!) and each processed down to receive the host. As each youngster received Communion, their mother stood by next to them, then processed away without so much as a nod to Our Lord. After Mass the priest had some telling remarks, taking time to thank by name those who had instructed the children for First Communion. Tellingly, all of the five or six names he publicly thanked were female.

The only bright spot in the entire affair was that when it came time for little Joe to receive Our Lord, he did so in the traditional manner, receiving on the tongue. (Good show, Joe!)

Today my wife was telling me about some other friends of ours who attend a parish out in the hinterlands, and whose DRE (again, female, it goes almost without saying) began a talk with "I don't believe all of what the Church teaches; here's what I believe." As I like to say, there's a word for someone who believes 98% of what the Catholic Church teaches: "Protestant".

Leon Podles wrote an entire book about the feminization of the Church about a decade or so ago. (http://tinyurl.com/podles -- I've never read it, though.) Podles' jeremiad has apparently fallen on deaf ears.

Now I'm not one to bitch and moan about the state of the Church -- I'm really not. It gets old fast. And in fact, I'm full of hope as I get to know more and more of the people responsible for running and administering the church here in Tulsa. But really, something needs to be done. I'm happy to do it, I just don't know what it is. Letters to pastors? Letters to the Eastern Oklahoma Catholic? What? Any suggestions?

Ben

*Sitting there at St. Pius X Church, examining the late-60's architecture (think "church in the round") I couldn't help but wonder what Pope St. Pius X must think about this monstrosity of modernism committed in his name.

Moleskine notebooks

Anyone else but me on this list a lover of Moleskine notebooks? You remember that post below where I advertised the Amazon Kindle e-Book reader? Well the Molekine is like the anti-Kindle. They're a line of notebooks in various sizes and formats that can be used to record dates, notes, opinions, drawings -- whatever you can commit to paper with pen, pencil or crayon -- you can jot it down in your Moleskine. They've been used for years by famous artists and novelists like Ernest Hemingway. (Which reminds me -- it's been too long since I've re-read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, his famous novel-journal of his life in Paris in the Twenties.) I like the soft-cover, lined version. (See above.) How 'bout y'all? Anyone else a Moleskine fan? Go here for the Moleskine website: http://www.moleskine.com/

maggie and milly and molly and may

maggie and milly and molly and may went down to the beach (to play one day) and maggie discovered a shell that sang so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and milly befriended a stranded star whose rays five languid fingers were; and molly was chased by a horrible thing which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and may came home with a smooth round stone as small as a world and as large as alone. For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea ee cummings

Gotta Have it: Kindle2

The Amazon Kindle 2

Okay, so I'd heard about this thing on the various tech blogs and sites I'll admit to reading.

But frankly, it just didn't grab me.

Over the weekend, however, I was searching for a book and came across these videos about the Kindle.

I'm singing a different tune now. 1500 books? Download from anywhere without a computer or WiFi connection? What's not to love?

Check it out:

Say Hello to The New Kindle

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Vocations: I Love Being an Attorney

Spent the morning giving my prayer and financial talks to a Pre-Cana class at the Church of the Madalene. I really love what I do. Deo gratias.

When I was in my twenties and in college, I did a stint with U.S. Senator Don Nickle's (R-Oklahoma) office in Tulsa for a brief semester. It was an unpaid internship, and they set me to work answering phones as sort of an "ombudsman" position. (For the uninitiated, that means they gave me the work no one else in the office wanted to do.)

Fascinating variety, let me tell you. I took calls from people irate about their trash pickup (not usually something a U.S. Senator deals with) to people calling about problems dealing with their son in the military, and the usual Social Security payments, and alien abductions thrown in for good measure, and even including calls from the local Peruvian ambassador (Tulsa has an embassy, in case you didn't know.) Boring, it was not.

I remember thinking at the time, "Boy - if I were independently wealthy, this is EXACTLY what I'd like to do!" And I meant that with all sincerity. It was wonderful work and the joy of helping people (crazy or not) was such a boon. I loved every minute of it. Really.

Today, of course, I don't work for the senator. But I do work for people facing problems. I'm an attorney - a bankruptcy and consumer law attorney. People come to me with seemingly intractable problems, and I help them.

This one is facing foreclosure and thinks they might lose their home. This one is recently laid-off, and has no savings to fall back on. Those over there are about to be sued by their creditors, and don't know what to do.

All of these people come to me. And I help them. Much of the time that simply means helping them understand what they're facing and what they can do about it. What the worst-case scenario is, and why chances are it won't happen -- but that if it does, I will be there to defend them.

God in heaven, thank you. I love my job. Please let me continue to serve You by serving them.

I don't work for a U.S. Senator, and I can't boss around lackeys at the Library of Congress, but I *DO* get to help people.

Deo gratias, indeed.

The Passion

Holy Week - The Triduum

Finally, we arrive at the Triduum -- almost at the very foot of the Cross.

As usual I am limping into Holy Week, my soul caked with failed resolutions, splattered with the mud of my failures, and all my imperfections intact. They ride upon my shoulder mocking me and pulling at my beard (actually I jettisoned the Lenten beard about 3 weeks ago, no longer able to withstand the discomfort and embarrassment.)

And so I stand here on the brink of failure.

But little do they know, for my Savior does not share my weaknesses and imperfections. He, strong beyond strength, trudges on to Calvary in my place. He is Holy, He is Perfect, He is preparing even now to withstand the loneliness of the garden at Gethsemane. He knows what He must do, and He alone is strong enough to withstand it. He will save me. He will.

Holy Thursday

Last evening we made it to our Latin Mass parish for Maundy Thursday Mass. The church itself and the holy images of Christ on the crucifix, the saints obscured now in dark purple -- representing penance -- a reminder of how spare and joyless this world would be without the presence of God and Christ. "The world would easier survive without the sun, than without the Mass" said Padre Pio, according to our pastor. Even the holy water fonts are dry, as a reminder of the spiritual poverty we are about to face.

Holy Thursday Mass is a memorial of the Last Supper at which Christ instituted the Holy Eucharist ("My flesh is real food, my blood is real drink") hidden beneath the auspices of bread and wine. He is really and truly present on the altar -- the priest an alter Christus ("another Christ") who has been given the power to re-produce Christ's sacrifice on the altar before him.

We watched as twelve of my friends -- men every bit as holy, and because they are men, every bit as sinful as I am -- patiently waited while our good and holy priest, Fr. Peter Byrne, FSSP, humbly washed their feet in imitation of our Savior who washed the feet of the twelve disciples on that Thursday night two millennium before.

After Communion and Mass is finished, the Blessed Sacrament -- Christ's actual body, blood, soul and divinity -- solemnly processed around the interior of the church while the congregation led by the crystal voices of our women's schola, sang the Latin hymn the Tantum Ergo (Google it) to the altar of repose. Whereupon the main altar was stripped of its altar cloths and the remaining six candlesticks which mark the traditional Mass arrangement, finally the Gospel is repeated: "Diviserunt sibi vestimenta mea: et super vestem meam miserunt sortem" ("They parted my garments amongst them: and upon my vesture they cast lots.")

The rubrics of the traditional Mass say here, simply and finally: "The celebrant and sacred ministers [servers] return in silence to the sacristy."

Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Movie Review: Knowing

Knowing

Went to see the new Nicholas Cage movie, Knowing, last night -- on opening day.

That last fact is significant, because I am decidedly NOT the typical movie-goer. In fact, I'm infamous for my lack of interest in movies of the day. It is not at all unusual for me to have not seen a popular movie -- I've not seen the latest Batman movie, or any of the X-men series for instance. (In fact, nothing strikes me as more infantile than going to see a comic-book movie, but I digress.) Suffice to say, I don't care to see most movies.

But, I've been waiting with bated breath for weeks now to see Knowing. Why?

I caught the trailer a couple of weeks ago on iTunes, and immediately became hooked on the premise: a time-capsule is opened from 50 years ago, and an elementary schoolgirl's 1958 contribution to the time-capsule is unearthed which foretells disasters past, present and future. It falls to the main character of the movie, an M.I.T. professor played by Cage, to decipher the doomsday message.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon, the movie's opening day, when I pulled up the Rotten Tomatoes site to see how the flick was faring among those who'd seen it. I was chagrined to see that it had a 24% rotten-tomato rating. In a word, most who saw it hated it. "Crackpot", "bizarre", etc. were the adjectives used to describe the movie. It was compared unfavorably to M. Night Shyamalan's work. But notably -- for me, anyway -- a common complaint was that it was "religious". The reviews were almost enough to dissuade me from seeing the film. Again -- I'm not a film buff; can't stand to sit through most of them. (Invariably fall asleep whenever my kids put a Lord of the Rings DVD into the player at home.)

But, the critics used that word "religious", which for me was like my parent's telling me I wouldn't like something in a lame attempt at reverse psychology. Religious? Nicholas Cage? Really? So I took the plunge, plugged in my credit card and bought two tickets (later three, because I had to buy one for my 14 year old who wanted to see it too.)

So how was it? Unbelievably good. And remember -- this is a non-movie fan talking here -- I'd much prefer browsing the internet to seeing the usual latest Hollywood blockbuster. Full of suspense, it kept me on the edge the whole way through. Excellent -- best movie (faint praise, I suppose) I've seen in years.

But not for everyone, it seems.

I saw more than one person who got up and walked out before it was done. (One group of teenaged kids yelled loudly as they exited, "This movie sucks!") Why? I asked my wife the same question later. She thought it was the subject matter. I think she's onto something. The movie's not necessarily a rosy scenario, for sure. And it did involve massive death and destruction. (I know? So, what's not to like? Go figure.)

I think that some of the reaction has to do with the fact that most people just do not want to contemplate what the Church calls the Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven or Hell -- a rather different "Final Four", if you will. "Give me fluff, give me sexual intrigue, give me madcap comedy -- just don't make me face reality", society seems to say.

Sigh. Oh well, yet another example of my not fitting in with the times. But you? If you'd enjoy a stem-winding doomsday thriller, I'd highly recommend it. Good stuff.

Dedication of new chapel at Thomas Aquinas College

Oh my goodness! This is incomparably beautiful. (Post from The New Liturgical Movement blog, with pictures by Austin Welsh, a friend of mine.) Enjoy!

Monday, March 09, 2009

A Glorious Weekend on a Few Fronts at Thomas Aquinas College

by Shawn Tribe

---

We have been treated to some particularly fine examples of new church architecture in the past couple of years and this past weekend was no exception as the glorious new chapel of Thomas Aquinas College, Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, was consecrated. It is a glorious structure indeed and, I am particularly pleased to report, includes a number of stunning architectural features, including a ciborium magnum. Austin Welsh sent in these photographs of the church:

(Finishing touches were still being put in place when this photo was taken) (The papal arms of Benedict XVI) (The beautiful ciborium) (The sacristy) Do make certain to go and look at more on his Flickr Photoset which includes a number of other details and angles. The next day, as the Faithful Rebel reports:

The first Mass offered upon the newly consecrated altar after Saturday's dedication Mass was a solemn High Mass offered ... by Father John Berg, Superior General of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter. The Deacon for the Mass was Father Robert Fromageot and the Subdeacon was Father Matthew McNeely, both Fraternity priests.

His Excellency, Bishop Salvatore Cordileone, Auxiliary Bishop of San Diego, was in choir. (Photos courtesy of Tommy Duffy and The Faithful Rebel) This was not all however:

Perhaps just as remarkable was the later Mass offered on Sunday in the Ordinary Form. Bishop Cordileone was the celebrant of this Mass. Remarkably, he offered the Mass facing the altar, in Latin, with the traditional candlestick arrangement remaining from the earlier Solemn High Mass.

Sadly, no photos of this Mass have been forthcoming yet. If any reader has any, please send them in. In concluding, I must share this final wonderful picture from The Faithful Rebel:

Mass365: Another One Bites the Dust!

Aw snap! For a second time this year, my schedule and the stars conspired against me. No Mass today.

I really didn't think it would be this hard to attend Daily Mass. The trouble today was it was Monday -- the traditional day that Catholic priests take off, and as a result, fewer masses are offered on Monday than any other day, by far.

The day started off with a slow start, and by noon I had decided to take a tour of the Parent and Child Center of Tulsa -- a favorite charity of one of our partners, who had invited my wife Tracy to take part. (That was excellent, by the way. You really should support this charity, they do education on parenting to help prevent child abuse. A fine, fine organization.)

So anyway, I thought to myself -- "No problem - I'll just hit the 5:05 pm daily Mass at the cathedral." Indeed, at 5 o'clock I gathered up my Macbook and rushed out to get over there, only to find that the doors were locked. "No problem" suddenly became "big problem" as I realized my mistake -- there IS no 5:05 p.m. daily Mass on Mondays.

Even worse was that the only Mass left (the 6:30 p.m. at St. Joseph's Vietnamese Catholic Church in far East Tulsa) directly conflicted with a previous commitment I'd made to Tracy to attend a "Let's Talk" program at St. Bernard's of Clairvaux (in far south Tulsa).

Sigh, and ai-yi-yi.

Betcha East coast Catholics don't have this difficulty.

It's here: My new Macbook!

Oh lovely! Oh marvelous! Your screen is like a limpid pool of video goodness! Ms. Apple Macbook, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Wow. Just wow.

Got the Macbook yesterday afternoon and have now used it for a little less than 24 hours. In that time, I've learned to love the new multi-touch Trackpad, used the Photo Booth app to make pictures and video with Cam and Maddie, used iMovie to record and edit my first professional video (still in progress) to place as a Welcome on my professional blog (http://tulsabankruptcyandconsumerlaw.blogspot.com, if anyone's checking), and played with the "Cover Flow" method of reviewing my docs.

It is an amazing piece of technology and design. Even the packaging is so unbelievably well thought out, that you stand in awe of Apple and their accomplishments. This is the result of unflinching, unstoppable, unquenchable focus on excellence. I recently put forth a Steve Jobs (co-founder and chairman of Apple Computer) quote to the effect that he simply cannot understand why anyone would want to do anything that was not "insanely great."

Yes, indeed. It shows.