Three months is entirely too long. Why have I been absent from this blog for so long? Well, for one, this summer, here in the South of France but just about everywhere, has been a foretaste of the Place we Do Not Want to Go To. It has left many people, especially agèd crocks like yours truly, enervated, drained, and concentrating merely on survival.
Secondly, I’ve been working on a new theological project. Which seems like pretty good cheek for a retired professor of poetry and other literature: I am rushing in where even saintly giants like Josef Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar trod only with great care. And it means that most of my thoughts on Heaven and Earth (and vice versa) have been scribbled into notebooks or typed on computer notes filed under “Theolimag”. And finally, I’ve been made to realise that blogs, man, are so over – if you want to be taken seriously, Substack is the only way. Well, I love my Substacking friends, but I find this easier, perhaps because I’m used to it, so here we are, back in the autumn and breathing again on a cool and sunny day in Southwest France, and ready to go on muttering into the void.
So what shall we talk about first? Well, Pope Leo is coming to France, and 600,000 people have signed up to attend his Mass in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. In a country where often, among the educated, a cheerful slightly scornful atheism seems to be the order of the day, this has surprised quite a few. So perhaps the rumours of youth flocking to churches are not entirely false? The French are the more pleased that Leo is coming because they remember the deliberate snub they received from his predecessor Pope Francis. And the present Pope, moreover, is one of the very very few international leaders currently respected for their integrity (someone recently said that he and Mark Carney of Canada are about the only two left). At his inaugural Mass in front of St Peter’s, I was delighted to see largely displayed the portrait of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Genazzano that also stands by my bedside. (See above.) She is a very potent defence against folly – a thing much needed in this day when even intelligence is departing for an artifical shore....
A little more privately, I am discovering – by way of a young adopted man distantly related – how extraordinarily difficult a condition bipolarity is. Quite unlike the image I’d always had of it, of people cheerfully incurring a mountain of debts one week and imprisoned in unending suicidal gloom the next. No: the upside being mainly living in a home-made version of reality where you are adult, intelligent, not too badly off, paying the mortgage on an air-conditioned house and owning a car or two, when in real reality you are on indefinite sick leave, out of a job, left by your spouse, living on a tiny benefit, having exhausted your anguished parents’ life savings, and clueless as to how to handle any of that. And the downside? Well, your spouse left you after she had found you in the bathtub with water turning red around your wrists one day.
OK: there’s the wounded traveller by the roadside. You’re in a passing car. What do you do? (Comments, as always, welcome.)
Image: Our Lady of Good Counsel, in the Shrine Basilica at Genazzano, Italy. History: "On April 25, 1467, a miraculous event took place: an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared on a wall of the church, which was still under construction. It was later recognized by two Albanian pilgrims as the same image venerated in Shkodër, Albania, which had disappeared from the place where it had been venerated.
The event caused great amazement and attracted thousands of faithful. Miracles and graces were reported, and thanks to the donations that poured in, the construction of the church and the Augustinian convent was completed. "
(Vatican News Service)
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