Wednesday, October 8, 2014

On the Dante Trail trail: Groundhog Day

Basically, yesterday's offering with different postcard pics: Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves do Ravenna in a day, glowing.

Our tote update (no selfies, one food pic together with one of the building in which it was consumed):

Total pics: 13 - 100%

Selfies: 7 - 21% of total

Things Rod Ate: 3 - 18% of total

I probably shouldn't be prematurely dismissive. There are things to be gleaned from today's adventure that surely shed some light on what the Dante-book-to-be will contain, such as this megachurch mailer boilerplate:

A short film I saw at the Dante Museum next to his tomb speculated on how the mosaics the poet saw in Ravenna, where he lived the final years of his life and where he wrote Paradiso, may have given him visual ideas. It’s a lovely thought, and there might be something to it. They certainly give me thoughts — Dantean ones about God’s glory, and how everything in this world is a reflection of the world beyond it. And how all things can be made to work in harmony for God’s glory.

If only they could make potato chips this diaphanous and one-dimensional.

And for those of you holding on to hope that Rod will one day return to the Catholic Church, this follows:

Casella says I’m still culturally Catholic, and he’s right to a significant extent, but this trip has made me realize how deeply Orthodox the Divine Liturgy has made me over these last eight years. I felt at home in S. Vitale in a way that I did not in any of the Catholic churches we entered, except for the Baptistery in Florence — but its ceiling is covered with dazzling mosaics. The way we pray really is the way we believe. Anyway, Casella and I pray for the reunion of our churches.

Who doesn't pray for such things simple good and true if they do? Anyway, the best way to follow Rod's theological fan dance is to ensure that he keeps on writing about it, and right now the very best way to ensure that he keeps on writing about it is to make your generous tax-deductible contribution to TAC today. Just thought I'd connect those implicit dots for any takers out there.

So...today's Dante Trail trail takeaway. To me so far this pilgrimage doesn't remotely read like any sort of serious book research trip (mainly because so much time and energy has been spent food and travel blogging), and because I'm not the sort of person given to painting pants on emperors not wearing any, this leads me to think one or both of two possible things explain what I see.

First and foremost, that Rod is almost certainly doing this on his own very thin dime - if this is Wednesday, this must be Ravenna - I can almost see Mrs. Dreher counting the budget out of the cookie jar herself - and if it's his money, well by golly it's going to get spent primarily on what he wants to do most (eat; then eat some more).

Second, yep: he's going to try to wing the Dante book with just the sort of filler I first quoted above. After all, the central focus of the book is how Dante saved - whose? That's right, not yours: Rod's life.

So what you will end up getting, potential Rod's Dante book buyer, will be something much like our meta-derivative Dante Trail trail itself: a richly Dante-flavored Rod-centric soy product giving you (at hardback prices) that elusive hope that somehow reading about how Rod claims reading Dante saved him from a murky bouillabaisse of something - mono? depression? impacted colon? middle age? being loathed into deblogging by his home town? - that for the sake of economy he'll shorthand as "his life".

Because he wasn't really contemplating suicide, was he? Because that would be a sin. Remember that, you already fated to have read the Dante book some time from now.

10 comments:

  1. Casella says I’m still culturally Catholic

    I bet what he actually said was "Rod, you are still Catholic." No adverb. And I have been saying that for, oh, 7 or 8 years. I'll bet he makes the sign of the cross backward from time to time. Or if he doesn't ever, it's because he consciously thinks about it each time. Which is basically the same thing.

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    1. I'm telling y'all -- all it takes for Dreher to come back to the RCC is a pretty church. That's because the real reason he left is that too many Catholic churches in Dallas were in (to him) ugly buildings and used icky music like On Eagle's Wings -- he just had to dress it up in Scandal Rage to make it look good with the Cool Kids.

      This "still culturally Catholic" comment is the flip side of the proof of this -- the A side being what Diane and others have pointed out repeatedly regarding the same Scandal infecting Orthodoxy to at least the same extent.

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  2. What Rod fails to realize is that there is no contradiction between Byzantine Italy and Roman Catholic Italy. I mean, wait till he sees Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice -- he'll think he's in Hagia Sofia. And, if he manages to make it down to Sicily, he can view one of the most famous Byzantine pantocraters in the world, at Monreale.

    But these Byzantine monuments are NOT Orthodox-as-opposed-to-Catholic. They are Catholic, just as Italy is. Our Church, unlike Rod's, breathes with both lungs. We are both/and, not either/or.

    And Italy epitomizes this. Throughout the centuries Italy traded with the East and cross-pollinated culturally. That is why Sienese Madonnas look a lot like icons, and the glimmering mosaics in Saint Mark's have a distinctly Byzantine feel. But no Catholic I've ever known says, "Oh, that's foreign to the spirit of Italy; it's Orthodox as opposed to Catholic." We Catholics see both the Byzantine-flavored art and the more distinctly Western art as Catholic. We recognize different styles, but we don't see different religions.

    Nor should Rod. As he well knows, the Catholic Church includes Eastern Catholic churches with Eastern liturgies. It is not Catholicism that is limited ethnically, culturally, and geographically. That would be Orthodoxy. ;)

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  3. BTW...given that the mosaics at San Vitale glorify one of the most ruthless empresses in history (and oh yeah, her imperial husband, too), I find it rich that Rod considers them so spiritual or something. I mean, they are stunningly gorgeous and justly famous, but their subjects include a Monophysite empress with a pretty sketchy reputation. Just sayin'.

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  4. It's funny, I attend Divine Liturgy every Sunday, and I'm a Roman Catholic. So is my priest--yes Roman, you read that right, he's bi-ritual. In my experience, Byzantine Catholics (and the Romans who live within those ranks, a formal change in rite being unnecessary except for aspiring clerics) are a small and humble community in the USA, with very few members prone to the type of flashy Hyperdox Herman/going full native with cassock and Rasputin beard behavior one sees among the Methodists-turned-Orthodox crowd. Our fasting laws are not as extreme, err "manly" as Dreher would have it, and we're willing to put Christian unity under the Pope above ethnic differences. So I guess we're not special enough for our Divine Liturgies to really make a narcissist feel authentic.

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    1. I know others with your exact experience, cailleachbhan, and it's just totally natural. My kids go to a school where they have Latin Mass, English Mass (Novus Ordo) and go to a Byzantine Liturgy for St. Nicholas's feast day.

      I agree with people who say that the Byzantine liturgy is more mysterious and other-worldly, but to me that's just an aspect of it's beauty and it shouldn't be pitted against the Latin forms which have their own strengths.

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    2. I agree with people who say that the Byzantine liturgy is more mysterious and other-worldly, but to me that's just an aspect of it's beauty and it shouldn't be pitted against the Latin forms which have their own strengths.

      Exactly!!! In Catholicism, you don't have to choose one over the other forever and ever amen. And you certainly don't have to pit one against the other. This seems to basic to me. How could an ex-Catholic like Rod not know this?

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    3. It is beautiful. The Latin Mass is beautiful, and the Cathedral here has a lovely choral novus ordo Mass I love to go to when I can't get up in time to get to the other side of town for any of the others. And at Advent. I need Bach and Handel at Advent. The fact that I can wander into any city in the world and find a Mass and just get in line is something I can't imagine ever leaving behind. Not just because that's convenient but because that's amazing and profound! It's amazing being part of a truly universal Church.

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    4. After too long being Orthodox, I must admit that I just started craving a simple Latin crucifix on a white wall...Byzantine style, both visually and linguistically, becomes exhausting.

      Latin simplicity and succinctness is a good thing.

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