Why Communion for the Divorced and Re-married is a Doctrinal Issue

I suppose lots of people have already written good basic pieces on this argument, but since I keep running into people saying, "All that we're suggesting is a change in practice: allow those who aren't married in the church to receive communion under certain circumstances. We're not suggesting any change in doctrine!" I thought I would go ahead and write my own brief piece on why this is pretty clearly a doctrinal matter.

1) It is a matter of doctrine (derived directly from the New Testament) that we must not receive the Eucharist when we are in a state of grave sin:

1385 To respond to this invitation we must prepare ourselves for so great and so holy a moment. St. Paul urges us to examine our conscience: "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself." [1 Cor 11:27-29] Anyone conscious of a grave sin must receive the sacrament of Reconciliation before coming to communion. [from the Catechism]

2) Having sex with someone you are not married to is a grave sin.

3) The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is indissoluble. It lasts as long as both spouses are alive. From the catechism:

1664 Unity, indissolubility, and openness to fertility are essential to marriage. Polygamy is incompatible with the unity of marriage; divorce separates what God has joined together; the refusal of fertility turns married life away from its "supreme gift," the child (GS 50 § 1).

1665 The remarriage of persons divorced from a living, lawful spouse contravenes the plan and law of God as taught by Christ. They are not separated from the Church, but they cannot receive Eucharistic communion. They will lead Christian lives especially by educating their children in the faith.

This was clearly seen as a tough teaching the moment it came out of Jesus's mouth.

9
"I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery.” [His] disciples said to him, “If that is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” [Matthew 19:9-10]

4) In the eyes of the Catholic Church, therefore, someone who gets married, divorces, and then goes through a civil or Protestant marriage ceremony with a second person is still considered to be married to the first spouse. An annulment process might find reasons to believe that first marriage was not valid, in which case a new (in the eyes of the Church, a first) marriage can be entered into. But first marriages are assumed valid until proven otherwise.

5) Thus, someone who has divorced and remarried is seen by the Church as being in an adulterous relationship.

6) If someone in that situation went to confession, confessed having sex with someone to whom he was not validly married, and had a firm intention of refraining from sex with his "second wife", he would be completely free to receive communion. (If he failed in his attention and went back to having sex with his second wife, he would be unable to receive communion again unless he again confessed with an intention of refraining.)

7) If a couple which is, in the eyes of the Church, not married, intends to continue living together in an active sexual relationship as if they were married, they are in the eyes of the Church in a state of grave sin.

8) If they are in a state of grave sin, they may not receive the Eucharist: see 1) above.

Given all of that, to say that a divorced and remarried couple (unless they have decided to live together celibately) may receive communion necessarily means that you disagree with one of the following teachings of the Church:

- That someone in grave sin may not receive the Eucharist
- That having sex outside of marriage is a grave sin
- That marriage is indissoluble

Thus, there is no room for "only a change in practice" here. Any change in practice would either imply a change in doctrine, or would mean advising people to do what Paul describes as itself being a grave sin: receiving the Eucharist unworthily.

Stage Managing, for fun and profit

Whether or not you're a theater junkie or a Hamilon buff, this WSJ article about the demands of stage managing a show like Hamilton is just fascinating.

As the nation’s founding fathers strut and fret upon the stage of Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre, Jason Bassett plays an unseen role, perched on a snug triangular wooden platform about 10 feet above them.

While the cast of the smash-hit hip-hop musical “Hamilton” weaves through fast-paced raps and intricate wordplay, he follows them word for word, calling the show’s 856 lighting cues and 40 set cues with rapid-fire, split-second timing.

But overseeing the spectacle is just part of Mr. Bassett’s job as the musical’s production stage manager. Working six days a week, often 12 hours a day, he is responsible—with the help of two assistants—for managing the show’s behind-the-scenes aspects. That also includes organizing rehearsals, coordinating between creative and technical crews and solving problems, such as how to replace an ensemble member mid-show.

...

The nearly three-hour show brings particular challenges. In addition to two large turntables built into the set’s floor, which Mr. Bassett said involved “countless hours” of work to make level, the production includes 50 pieces of music and an ensemble that is onstage for most of the show.

...

Did you study to become a stage manager? 

I completely fell into it. I went to a couple of years of acting school, decided I wasn’t interesting in doing that, and then a friend asked if I wanted to stage manage a tiny production he was doing in Los Angeles. It was this little extra thing that I started doing to earn some extra cash.

But I was making it up. Unless you work at a [big] show like this, you’re the only stage manager and so there’s no real way to know unless you work for somebody else who knows how to do it.

This makes me sentimental. Once upon a time, I was a professional stage manager in Los Angeles. It was a long time ago, a brief shining moment in time...

Okay, not all that shining, and very, very brief -- one show, really, in Beverly Hills, for which I was paid an actual pittance, and some assistant stage manager credits while I was a intern whose pay was cut off halfway through the season because my $100/week hadn't been authorized at the highest level of budgetary authority. (That $100 formed a significant part of our own budget at the time.) And then, there was the crab cakes incident, which clarified for me that theater was not going to be my career.

(An aside: I am one of those people who can never remember to whom I've told a story, but an intensive search of the blog archives seems to indicate, to my astonishment, that I've never written about the pivotal moment in my theatrical history. If you've heard this one before, bear with me.)

So, I was stage managing this Christmas show (excuse me; "holiday" show), and it was nearing the end of its run. I'd stepped in as stage manager as an emergency sub, and was the only crew member during the run. Essentially, I called the show to myself, as I ran lights and sound, and the actors set their own props (union rules didn't apply in a venue this small, I guess). One of the fellows involved with the show was getting ready to direct a show in February, and he said he'd call me about stage managing it.

So he called in January. I was five months pregnant, and Darwin and I were just starting to grapple with the financial implications of losing my meager income when baby was born, so I was ready to jump at any job. Stage managing was hard, physically and mentally. The late nights and the demands of the work didn't always square with being pregnant, but we needed the money badly.  The director, having dinner at a restaurant, chatted about the show, and his vision of the show, and this and that, and all I wanted to hear about was the money. At last. The show paid some barely acceptable amount per the two weeks of performance. But there were also eight weeks of rehearsal.

"How much does it pay per rehearsal?" I asked.

"Oh, honey, this is 99-seat Equity," the director said. "You have do it for the love of it." He turned away from the phone and spoke to his dinner partner. "Are those crab cakes? Pass me the crab cakes."

It was at that moment that I realized that I didn't have the love for it, the hunger it takes to make it in theater. I wasn't prepared to work like a dog for free, for the love of it, when I already felt like a dog gestating a baby, for the love of it. I declined the position as politely as I could, and haven't worked professionally since.

Darwin, in reading the WSJ article, said, "Well, anyway, I'm glad you don't work twelve hours a day, six days a week."

"Excuse me," said I, stay-at-home mother of six children. "If you want to be all careerist about it."

Added bonus: after some Googling around, we finally were able to bring to light our Money Make-Over article in the L.A. Times, written a few months after the crab cakes conversation. We'd been disgusted week after week by the wealthy people featured in this column, who just didn't know how to manage their finances and still pay for the second house and the stables, while we lived with a $25-a-week food budget, so we wrote in and said, "Manage this." They decided, for whatever reason, to profile us. Shortly before the interview, Darwin had gotten a raise after steering at the wall by quitting, but we still didn't make enough for the LA Times to find us respectable. (For a week after the article ran in the paper, I found myself, at eight months pregnant, suddenly fielding a wave of phone calls from concerned LA Times readers who wanted to tell me personally what a mistake we'd made in marrying young, in getting pregnant, in me not working, in being poor-ish, etc. ) The financial planner clearly thought we were naive kids without a clue, but I think that maybe the years have vindicated the confidence our 23-year-old selves had in our prospects.

Living in Sin

In a National Catholic Reporter piece which seemed to sum up the building progressive frustration and anger at the direction of the synod as it neared its end, Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese wrote:

The problem is that conservatives do not see divorce and remarriage as simply one sin, which can be confessed and forgiven. They see it as a continuing sin each time the couple has sex. Since they will not stop having sex, they cannot go to Communion. There is no willingness to accept the first marriage as irrevocably broken and destroyed, which would allow the parties to move on with their lives.

I think this shows pretty well the way in which progressive Catholics seem to think about marriage, and why they think it should be no big deal to change Church practice in regards to couples in marriages which the Church does not consider valid receiving communion. In this reading, any sin involved in the break up of a marriage is a one time event. You should be able to repent of this sin, and then move on with your life and seek another, happier relationship. Of course, the problem with this view is that it assumes something contrary to Catholic teaching: that marriage is dissoluble. If instead we assume what the Church teaches, that marriage is a lasting bond which cannot be broken except by death, then living as a spouse with someone you're not married to is not a one time sin which you can repent of and then have blessed, it's an ongoing moral problem. Reese comments on this view, and any hope of Catholic parishes reaching out to those who are divorced, with bitter sarcasm:

Meanwhile, bishops are talking about pastoral outreach to divorced and remarried Catholics that does not include Communion. They are using words like “accompany,” “listen,” and “welcome.” This has been caricatured as “You are welcome to come into our house, but you can’t eat dinner with us.”

And how do you “accompany” people you believe are in such serious sin that they cannot go to Communion? What does “listen” mean if you have already decided that you will not change your mind no matter what you hear?

In any case, this is better than referring to such couples as “living in sin.” Perhaps the progressives believe that bishops will be changed by such ministry, while conservatives hope to give couples absolution on their death beds.

The phrase "living in sin" has a somewhat prudish, old fashioned cast to it at this point in our cultural and linguistic history, so I'm not surprised to hear Fr. Reese poo poo it so vociferously. And yet, it's actually a good term for capturing the moral ambiguities which seem to so easily confuse the modern mind.

For all that we moderns say that we believe in the "gray areas" and reject a black and white view of moral absolutes, a great many people these days seem to absolutely reject the idea of sin and virtue being mixed in our lives. A week or two ago I found myself in an argument with another Catholic about precisely these issues of divorce and remarriage and he presented the following argument:

Right, so the jerk who leaves his crippled and practically newlywed wife and child but maybe chooses to remain single afterwards is "not an adulterer", but the man who marries her, adopts her child, raises a loving family together with her for SIXTY-EIGHT YEARS *is* an "adulterer"? Sorry, I don't have an imagination big enough for that.

The fact is, there are a lot of people in our current society who are living in relationships which are not what the Church would view as valid marriages (they were married before and their prior marriage has not been ruled invalid, they are living together without having gone through a marriage ceremony, they are Catholics who got married in a non-Catholic ceremony without a dispensation, etc.) and yet who seem to all appearances to care about each other, to be raising children together, to be happy because of the relationship which the Church labels as sinful.

How can we account for that?

Because in this world of ours, sin and virtue often get mixed up. People do things that are wrong, and those wrong things get mixed up with things that are right. The fact that starting a relationship was wrong doesn't mean that those people never help each other, never love each other, never raise children together. Indeed, people often do all those things.

I remember being struck by this some years back when MrsDarwin and I watched the movie Walk The Line about singer Johnny Cash. In the movie, Cash treats his wife (with whom he had four children) badly: abusing drugs and alcohol, cheating on her, etc. He eventually abandons her for singer June Carter, with whom he'd been having an affair while both of them were married to other people. Watching this as a happily and newly married couple, it was pretty hard not to loathe the characters, and yet Cash and Carter (who divorced their spouses and married each other) went on to be together for 35 years, raise a child together, and loved and helped each other through many hard times (admittedly a lot of them self inflicted via substance abuse, etc.)

Was that an adulterous relationship or a loving relationship? Who's to say it wasn't both?

Just as we humans have a natural capacity for sinning, for choosing our own will over God's, we also have a natural capacity for loving, for taking care of and helping others. It's not surprising that even in a relationship which should not have happened, which is sinful in nature, we often also find ways to love and help each other.  And if your primary family relationship is a sinful one, this means that ending the sin means possibly losing the main relationship which gives happiness and stability to your life.

When we live in sin, with sin, around sin, it becomes entangled with a lot of the good in our lives. That's one of the reasons we should try so hard not to get into these situations in the first place, because after going far down that path there will be good as well as evil that will be disrupted if we try to end our sin.

This is also why the strange modern dualism -- the idea that if something is actually wrong it must be absolutely evil and repulsive in all its aspects, and on the flip side that if something is not utterly repulsive, if it seems to have good aspects or redeeming qualities, it must not be wrong -- is so problematic and ultimately morally incoherent: because virtually all sin ends up mixed with portions of apparent goodness. Instead people tell themselves that sin is something only done by "bad people", that goose stepping Nazi on the television, not by "nice people" like you and me. But, of course, sin is something that all of us "nice people" are quite capable of doing. That's why Jesus came preaching a gospel of repentance, not a gospel of "don't worry you're already a really great person and I sure hope God and the Church are good enough to deserve you."

Update: On Sharing Communion

I'm not sure exactly how this happened, by almost all of my post the other day about the "boy shares communion with his divorced parents" post got trimmed off. I've gone and added it back on to the original post but since the post is now several days in the past here's an update with my commentary that got cut. If it was there when you originally read it and got trimmed since, I'm sorry for the repetition:

The boy's action itself, I would assume, was fairly unstudied. A seven year old can pick up some pretty strong opinions on religious issues due to hearing about them from parents and other figures of authority, but while young age sometimes creates a willingness to act dramatically when adults would not do so, someone that age isn't likely to have the forethought to put together his own plan of liturgical protest. So I would assume that the origin of this was something along the lines of the boy having been told repeatedly that the priest wouldn't give his parents communion because they were married outside the Church, and so he decided to take things into his own hands. However, the fact that things went down this way suggests some incredibly bad formation of this child. His parents' exclusion from communion was clearly presented to him as an injustice in need of solution. It's not a surprise that a seven year old boy would try to right and injustice when he thought it was in his hands to do so, but this means that the Church's teachings about marriage here were presented to him completely wrong -- probably a result of his parents and/or others themselves not at all agreeing with Church teaching. Further, that this boy thought it was okay to break a consecrated host in half and give it to others shows that there was a huge lack in training about the reverence due to the Eucharist. One thing that was very successfully conveyed to us as kids in preparation for First Communion was the importance to treating the host with reverence: You don't take it back to your pew. You don't break it or do anything to it that would cause crumbs to break off. If you receive it in the hand, you put it straight into your mouth. The idea of breaking up and re-distributing a host outrages everything I learned at that very young age. That a bishop related the story with the boy held up as an example, and that others were deeply moved by it, seems to me to suggest all sorts of things wrong with how children are being prepared to receive Our Lord in the Eucharist.

Shadle's piece takes a more intellectual tack, one which although it is based on the idea that we should observe the wisdom of "the little children" is not actually much like how children think. While he doesn't actually make an argument that it is wrong for the Church to say that those living in unconfessed mortal sin should not receive communion, he argues that what the boy senses is that our communion is incomplete when not everyone is united in receiving it.

This strikes me as a problematic understanding.

What, after all, is the Eucharist? In the mass we participate in the unbloody sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and we experience the real presence of Christ, coming to us in the Eucharist. This is why there is real benefit in being present at mass, or present before the Eucharist, even when we are not receiving. Even if I am not able to receive communion because I haven't observed the fast or because of consciousness of sin, going to mass puts me in the presence of Christ. Similarly, going to Eucharistic adoration puts me in the presence of Christ even though it is not a time for receiving the Eucharist.

The communion which we experience in receiving the Eucharist is primarily a communion with God through receiving His body and blood. It is not primarily a communion with those around us in the church or the world. When I receive the Eucharist, my communion is not incomplete because others are not at that particular mass, receiving at that particular time. Nor is it incomplete because some people are in a state of disunion with the Body of Christ because of sin or because they do not recognize the Church or recognize Christ as necessary for their salvation.

This doesn't mean that our union with Christ is perfect in our reception of the Eucharist. Our union is imperfect because of attachments to sin, because of imperfect faith, because we are not in the beatific vision which can come only after this world. And yet these imperfections do not defeat the Eucharist and Christ's real presence to us in it. Christ's presence is not made less because some people are living in sin or living in unbelief. If the Eucharist is incomplete until everyone can receive, then it will always be incomplete. Until the end of this world there will always be people who are in sin or who are not in the faith. If their absence defeats Christ than Christ is defeated.

In a sense this line of thinking is similar to the idea that unless we believe that every soul will one day be united with God in heaven, then Christ's work of salvation is defeated. But although Christ's grace makes it possible for us to be saved, it is not rendered imperfect when some souls refuse to accept that freely offered salvation. Heaven will not be incomplete because not every human soul is in it, because heaven is complete in God.

Two Hundred Miles

A bit over a year ago, we had a re-org at work. One person working for me got laid off, and two others who had been with another related team were added to mine. I got a new boss and a lot less oversight and a larger team, though a bit more responsibility. Overall, it was a good, if difficult, transition. The new team fit together very well, in part because all three ladies now working for me were training for the city's marathon or half marathon in the fall. Since I was the non-runner on the team, they immediately set about converting me.

I'm one of these people who is always meaning to be more fit, but who seldom devotes the necessary time to make a lot of progress. For a couple years, I'd put some work into strength training (and in the process lowered my cholesterol and my weight a little) but we'd moved and become busy and I let it drop. The last time I'd run a race had been a 5k that I ran when I was perhaps eight or nine. (My uncle was an organizer and I heard there was a participation medal for being the youngest runner, but my six months younger cousin signed up too and beat me in that category.) When they started telling me to join them in the half marathon I took a look at the amount of training required to do it and quickly decided I didn't have time. But I did start running, and I ran a 10k last November.

This year the guilt trip worked. One of the women on the team had run the half marathon last year at fifteen weeks pregnant, and before heading out on maternity leave she signed up for the 2015 race when she would be six months postpartum. It was a little hard to respond, in the face of that, that I didn't have time to train for a race. So I signed up, and a week ago I ran 13.1 miles in temperatures hovering around freezing.

I'm enough of a writer that when I have some new experience I immediately start thinking about what I should write about it, yet so far running has eluded my pen. I keep feeling as if I should have some insight into what it's been like to develop this ability, but there's something very non-verbal about the minutes and then hours following the white line on the asphalt which marks the shoulder of our country roads. My body ran. My mind would get restless. I quickly took to listening to books on my iphone while running so that my mind wouldn't spend the whole time trying to come up with rationales for cutting that day's run short.

You can run maybe 5-6 miles on sidewalks here in town without repeating yourself, but if you want to go further, stretches of your run have to be out on the road. There's not much traffic, but what there is tends to be moving fast, so I try to be on the left side of the road. It's less disconcerting when you can see the car coming before it passes you.

Perhaps the most difficult part of the last 14 month process of becoming a runner was getting up to where I could reliably run 3-4 miles without dropping down to a walk at any point. There must be some part of your body which has to reformulate itself. At first, I'd go a mile or two and then breathing would become hard. I'd be gasping for breath and then have to drop down to a walk. Going slower helped a little, but more than that the process simply involved getting my body used to the idea. I'd try to run a quarter mile further each time. As I passed four it seemed to work a little better. Then I could increase by a half mile each week. In the end, I made my goal last year: I ran the 6.2 miles of a 10k without ever dropping out of a run.

I suppose some people run in the winter around here, using treadmills indoors or risking slips on ice, but I don't. In the spring I started running again in a desultory sort of way. I hadn't completely backslid. I could run three miles at a moderate pace (about nine and a half minutes per mile) without dropping out of a run, but going further than that took work -- work that I wasn't able to make myself do until I ran out of time and had to put myself on a training schedule so I wouldn't disgrace myself on the half marathon.

With fourteen weeks to go, in mid July I googled around until I found a training program I thought I could do: run four days a week. Two short runs (3-4 miles), one long run (started at 3.5 and worked up to a final long run of 12 miles) and one slow recovery run the day after the long run (another 2-3 miles.) I put together a spreadsheet and assigned every run to a day. If I had to miss a run, I moved it to another day.

There's something about tracking an activity. I'd been having difficulty finding time to run even once a week reliably. Once I started my self-directed program I knocked out my four runs a week reliably for two months. I hit the rocks when we went on a week long road trip. I skipped short runs, and did a ten miler on hills which left me with sore knees that never really went away. Worried I'd injured my knees, I pulled back on the training for the last month and ran a lot less miles, but I kept up a few practice runs a week and did my longest practice run at twelve miles.

So I ran my 13.1 miles. It was cold before we got moving. It was hot while we ran. It was cold again once I stopped moving. Other times I'd had the feeling that I could have done more, could have gone faster, could have gone further. I had nothing left after the half marathon. I'd run it in two hours, forty-four seconds and I don't know how I could have taken off even the forty-four seconds. Throughout the last mile, I kept arguing with myself over whether my time was good enough already that I could just drop down an walk for a minute. In the end, when I checked my times, I realized that the last mile was the fastest I'd run. I don't know how.

The runners I know at work -- there seem to be a lot of them -- have all been asking me if I'll do it again next year. "Now you know you can do it, and next time you can make a better time!" I'm not sure if I'll do it again. In some ways, I enjoyed discovering that I could do this. But writing a novel and training for a marathon are both major time commitments, and I'm not sure I can impose both of those on the family at once again.

You hear a lot about how exercise makes you feel great. In moderation it does, but as the miles pile up it seems that everyone gets hurt one way or another. Maybe not seriously hurt, but a gathering of runners in the company cafeteria sounds a bit like a gathering of senior citizens: "How was your knee this weekend?" "Well, I'm feeling it, but I'm still moving. I take the stairs slowly. How's your hip?" "It's hurting, but I can take it. Did you hear about Emily's shin splints?"

The week after the marathon I had my team in San Francisco for a conference. We had a car drop us off at the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge and then ran back to our hotel. Since they'd got me into it, it seemed like a good team building event to close out the running season.

Several of us were still sore from the race, hoping not to turn aches into injuries, so we took it slow. However, it added 8.2 miles to the total. I added those and the race into my training spreadsheet and see that since mid July I've run a total of 201.76 miles. That's a ways.

Upstairs

I'd not wanted to get out of bed, but at 1:30 I couldn't take the wailing in the attic anymore, and I went up to see the cat. She is boarding with us temporarily in the bedroom up there, right over my head, because she fights with the two permanent cats, and to keep the peace, we have to keep her shut in there or all hell breaks loose. But she gets lonely, and she cries, and she was being particularly fractious tonight.

I went up, with a bad will, and I nudged the door open and squeezed in so she wouldn't escape. She'd eaten all her dry food, so I poured her a little more, and I brushed her while she ate. She likes being brushed, which is good, because she's a hairy one. I sat on a little table in the room and talked to her a bit, and I looked around the room. It was a servant's bedroom, in the old days, an L-shaped room under the roof with a low window in a gable and a large window facing east and a high window in a corner that lets natural light into the upstairs hall. The 1929 renovations didn't make it to the attic, so the doorway still has Victorian rosettes on the corner, and the windows have removable screens that hook onto the frame. The walls are blue and the trim is cream and the ceiling is white. White, with little hairline cracks, and up near the high inside window, wide cracks opening up where a patch of ceiling swells out and wide into a bulge.

I stared up at the bulge, and after a moment was able to place the feeling rising up in me as a wave of hysteria. I have seen a bulge in a ceiling, developing slowing in one of the downstairs rooms I'm in every day. Weeks go by without my setting foot in the attic. How long has the ceiling been bulging? Will it collapse this time? The attic ceiling did collapse before, not in this room but in the big ballroom. Before we lived here, the whole ceiling of the ballroom caved in, and had to be rebuilt, and the room was wallpapered. Had the bedroom ceiling been strengthened then? Are we going to have to have yet another ceiling rebuilt, after the library ceiling nearly collapsed two years ago? And that on top of this year's house quota of painting, and the slate roof, and the shoring up of the back porch, and resurfacing the crumbling driveway. And this added to the cracked, stained ceiling in the back bedroom, and the bubbling, crumbling plaster in the kids' bathroom, and the eroding front porch, and the one toilet that won't stop running, and the one toilet that won't fill up...

I stared at the bulge, and I rocked back and forth a bit on the little table. After a time I got up and inspected the rest of the room. The ceiling didn't seem like it was going to fall on me tonight, anyway. And nothing seemed wrong in the hall. In the ballroom, I stood in the doorway and observed the uneven texture of the papered ceiling before gravitating to a thin brown line I'd never noticed up there before. In an angle of the wall, the new blue paper had been torn away, revealing a floral paper so ancient as to lose its ugliness. The many muntins of the window across from me were a grid of desiccated paint over desiccated wood in strange contrast to the gleaming victorian woodwork around it, the whole structure held closed three stories above the driveway by a hook and eye. Underneath, the vintage linoleum rippled from old water damage. The yellow light of the bare bulb was harsh at 2 am, and I wondered if any of the the neighbors were up and wondering about the sudden light at the top of the house. I wondered if the girls underneath me were frightened by unusual steps above their heads.

I flipped off the light switch set in the bannister at the top of the curving stair, and stepped carefully in the dark. Everyone slept undisturbed. I went back to bed to say Hail Marys and ignore the renewed crying of the cat.

Sharing Communion: Sometimes the Little Children are Wrong

Matthew Shadle writes at Catholic Moral Theology about an anecdote reportedly discussed at the currently-ongoing synod of bishops on the family.

At a plenary session of the Synod of Bishops on Thursday, Fr. Manuel Dorantes recounted the following remarkable story (also here), first told by a bishop in one of the synod’s two Spanish-language discussion groups. According to the bishop, he was celebrating a first communion Mass at a parish in his diocese, and a boy, upon receiving the Host, instead of consuming it broke it into two and gave a piece each to his two parents. His parents were civilly remarried after a divorce and therefore unable to receive communion. At least according to one reporter, some participants at the synod broke into tears on hearing the story.

In a simple way, this boy’s intuition was a sensus fidei—a sense of the faith. He experienced his parents’ inability to fully participate in the Eucharist as a loss, and sensed that his own first participation in the Eucharist—although a joyous occasion—was incomplete without the participation of his parents. In his own way he understood that we are all called to a communion in which the sin that alienates us from one another and from God is overcome. The story illustrates the tragic situations that have made the question of how the church pastorally cares for the divorced and remarried such a central issue at the synod.

But an anonymous blogger at Rorate Caeli—the traditionalist Catholic blog that has been a persistent critic of Pope Francis and the proceedings of both this and last year’s synods—is having none of it. The incident was a “sacrilege,” the Host “treated either as a hostage to emotions or at best as a glorified cracker.” The bishops at the synod who were moved by the story have “truly lost all sense of shame.” Of course, the blogger is concerned that the Host may have been consumed unworthily by the two parents.

The boy, though, is too young to have an ecclesiastical agenda, and as far as we know the gesture was spontaneous. And the boy’s intuition is entirely consistent with the church’s current practice concerning the divorced and remarried. Those of us who—through God’s grace—are able to receive communion should long to welcome those who are excluded from the table, and should experience our own communion in the Body of Christ as in some way incomplete as long as they are alienated from that Body. It is this longing that leads us to encourage our brothers and sisters to repentance and metanoia.

I don't often find myself on the side of Rorate Caeli these days, but I find myself much more in agreement with that assessment of this incident than with Shadle's. Indeed, my reaction to this anecdote is very, very negative, and so I wanted to try to think through why that is and why I think that Shadle's argument here is wrong.

The boy's action itself, I would assume, was fairly unstudied. A seven year old can pick up some pretty strong opinions on religious issues due to hearing about them from parents and other figures of authority, but while young age sometimes creates a willingness to act dramatically when adults would not do so, someone that age isn't likely to have the forethought to put together his own plan of liturgical protest. So I would assume that the origin of this was something along the lines of the boy having been told repeatedly that the priest wouldn't give his parents communion because they were married outside the Church, and so he decided to take things into his own hands. However, the fact that things went down this way suggests some incredibly bad formation of this child. His parents' exclusion from communion was clearly presented to him as an injustice in need of solution. It's not a surprise that a seven year old boy would try to right and injustice when he thought it was in his hands to do so, but this means that the Church's teachings about marriage here were presented to him completely wrong -- probably a result of his parents and/or others themselves not at all agreeing with Church teaching. Further, that this boy thought it was okay to break a consecrated host in half and give it to others shows that there was a huge lack in training about the reverence due to the Eucharist. One thing that was very successfully conveyed to us as kids in preparation for First Communion was the importance to treating the host with reverence: You don't take it back to your pew. You don't break it or do anything to it that would cause crumbs to break off. If you receive it in the hand, you put it straight into your mouth. The idea of breaking up and re-distributing a host outrages everything I learned at that very young age. That a bishop related the story with the boy held up as an example, and that others were deeply moved by it, seems to me to suggest all sorts of things wrong with how children are being prepared to receive Our Lord in the Eucharist.

Shadle's piece takes a more intellectual tack, one which although it is based on the idea that we should observe the wisdom of "the little children" is not actually much like how children think. While he doesn't actually make an argument that it is wrong for the Church to say that those living in unconfessed mortal sin should not receive communion, he argues that what the boy senses is that our communion is incomplete when not everyone is united in receiving it.

This strikes me as a problematic understanding.

What, after all, is the Eucharist? In the mass we participate in the unbloody sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and we experience the real presence of Christ, coming to us in the Eucharist. This is why there is real benefit in being present at mass, or present before the Eucharist, even when we are not receiving. Even if I am not able to receive communion because I haven't observed the fast or because of consciousness of sin, going to mass puts me in the presence of Christ. Similarly, going to Eucharistic adoration puts me in the presence of Christ even though it is not a time for receiving the Eucharist.

The communion which we experience in receiving the Eucharist is primarily a communion with God through receiving His body and blood. It is not primarily a communion with those around us in the church or the world. When I receive the Eucharist, my communion is not incomplete because others are not at that particular mass, receiving at that particular time. Nor is it incomplete because some people are in a state of disunion with the Body of Christ because of sin or because they do not recognize the Church or recognize Christ as necessary for their salvation.

This doesn't mean that our union with Christ is perfect in our reception of the Eucharist. Our union is imperfect because of attachments to sin, because of imperfect faith, because we are not in the beatific vision which can come only after this world. And yet these imperfections do not defeat the Eucharist and Christ's real presence to us in it. Christ's presence is not made less because some people are living in sin or living in unbelief. If the Eucharist is incomplete until everyone can receive, then it will always be incomplete. Until the end of this world there will always be people who are in sin or who are not in the faith. If their absence defeats Christ than Christ is defeated.

In a sense this line of thinking is similar to the idea that unless we believe that every soul will one day be united with God in heaven, then Christ's work of salvation is defeated. But although Christ's grace makes it possible for us to be saved, it is not rendered imperfect when some souls refuse to accept that freely offered salvation. Heaven will not be incomplete because not every human soul is in it, because heaven is complete in God.

Blast from the Past: Your Humble Correspondent

In honor of the feast of St. Isaac Jogues, this post from five years ago, in which I was again single-parenting because we'd just moved to Ohio and the kids and I were living at my dad's house in Cincinnati while Darwin worked in Columbus.

Your humble correspondent

Lookit me, posting on my own blog!

Believe me when I say I've missed you. I have composed numerous rants and half-posts in my fertile little brain, only to find that my current internet connection doesn't always deign to let me log in and post. And time is of the essence --I'm not exactly living the single mother lifestyle, since I have my dad and brother to help me out in the house during the week when Darwin is in Columbus, but there are many duties that now fall to my lot which consume a great deal of time and energy. Blah, blah, blah --who isn't overwhelmed? I keep reminding myself that statistically, I'm one of the most fortunate people in the world, in history. Most of my daily inconveniences are of the petty variety. I prayed that I could realize that there were worse fates than having one's son spill lemonade all over himself and the floor right before a road trip, and lo and behold, it turned out to be the feast day of St. Issac Jogues.

Since my email isn't always doing it for me, I've tried to turn to more traditional forms of correspondence --to whit, the letter. However, I've, run into the singular problem that no one sells stationery in Ohio. I seem to recall that in Texas you could walk into Target or Staples or any store of that I'll and find yourself in the midst of plenty of lovely writing paper and fine writing implements, delightful to the senses. In Ohio I've found no stationery so far, but everyone wants to sell me journals, scads of them. From which I can only deduce that the good citizens of Ohio want to write, but only about themselves? I'm making another foray tomorrow, to a Barnes and Noble in an expensive part of Columbus. Eons ago, when I worked at a Barnes and Noble in L.A., we used to be heavily stocked with stationery. If I strike out there, I'll just resort to snitching my dad's printer paper, I guess.

I used to be a great letter writer back in the day. By "great" I mean "prolific", not "talented". Darwin and I used to send each other tomes of agonized love, rich with all the cliches of the genre. I believe I fancied myself a great stylist. Upon sorting out our closet preparatory to the move, I found a box (a shoe box!) full of this old correspondence. As I paged through his letters and mine, I felt a sensation akin to that of the unfortunates subjected to the Total Perspective Vortex. Passages that once seemed so eloquent and incendiary now paraded with all the grace of a herd of hormonal elephants . The most engaging bits were the parts I tossed off as stupid filler: minutiae about family life or the weather or work. The most fascinating letter of all was one Darwin sent me from Greece, simply describing the place and his travels there. And I burned with shame to recall that at the time I'd sulked because I thought he didn't write enough about ME.

I've got a long way to go before I can even compete in the humility stakes with the big dogs like St. Isaac Jogues, but I guess it's a consolation that at least I still have a whole hand to write with. As I keep telling myself, things could definitely be worse.

My week in review

As I pried my eyes open this morning, I first poked gingerly at the matted blood in my hair and the neat little lump underneath. Then, as I rolled over and wrested the blankets away from the two interlopers in my bed, another presence in the room swam into focus: the dead mouse on the floor, an annual October tribute from the cat. And I thought: any of these things could have, and indeed, have happened while Darwin is at home, and anyway, even if he was here, he'd be at work now anyway.

The lump is nothing extraordinary. Following best practices for curly hair, after my shower yesterday morning I flipped my head upside down and scrunched anti-frizz stuff into it, and then I came up and made startling, stunning contact with the corner of the medicine cabinet door, left open. I thought it best to remain for a while in a quasi-fetal position, cradling my head and assessing whether I was going to pass out, and when it turned out I wasn't, I realized that I was bleeding all over my hand.  One of the girls obligingly ran me up some ibuprofen and water while I took to my bed and stanched the blood with a wad of toilet paper. On the plus side, my hair looked great for the rest of the day if you didn't look too closely at the clots on the top of head.

But I was slow all day, a week of single parenthood catching up with me. Part of my problem is little sleep. I scrape wallpaper at night like a madwoman, and around midnight I talk to Darwin on the west coast, who is running three hours earlier than me. Then I feel at loose ends. On the first night he was gone, I decided to watch a movie by myself -- something I don't generally do; I'd always rather watch with people. But there I was, and Netflix was streaming The Wings of the Dove. You remember that one? Helena Bonham Carter? I didn't remember it, which is why the full-frontal sex scene at the end caught me completely off-guard, leaving me to contemplate HBC's consummate acting skill and total lack of assets elsewhere. On the literary side, I'm going to the library today to check out The Wings of the Dove, as I am convinced that Miramax took some liberties with Henry James's novel.

The next night, I went for something I thought I did remember, Madame Bovary with Mia Wasikowska. I've liked Mia Wasikowska ever since she played Jane Eyre, and I thought, "Okay, I didn't like Madame Bovary's character when I read the book almost twenty years ago, but costumes! Setting!  Mia!" Hmph. Madame Bovary is even more frustrating than I found her when I was 17. Then I just thought she was shallow; now that I'm married and have a household of my own, I see her moping about her own superiority while doing absolutely nothing, and I want to yell, "Read a book! Write something! Create something! If you think there's no culture in your provincial town, bring some to it!" But Madame Bovary is too self-centered to evangelize for her vision of culture. She takes and takes and expects no consequences, and in a particularly modern move, racks up so much debt buying stuff on credit that she'd rather kill herself than see her finery repossessed. If it were simply a story about debt, she'd just be pathetic, but she feels neglected by her doctor husband, who has to work, and she scratches that itch on the side with two different lovers, who both use her the same way she uses them. Plenty of sex here too, but blah, adultery.

After that I thought maybe it was time to stop watching movies. So I took to going to bed with Alexander Hamilton (plenty of historical precedent there) and have found myself carried along by Ron Chernow's fine writing, while receiving an education on the Federalist Papers and how important it was for the nation to assume the states' debts after the ratification of the Constitution. And then of course there's Hamilton, the musical, which is running through my head on an endless loop. In a rather unsuitable bit of musicality, I sing King George's song as a lullaby to William.



Speaking of William, age almost 22 months, he and I had a conversation this morning.

W: Mom! Mom! Mamamama!

Me: Oh, do you remember the mouse on the floor this morning?

W: No. (thoughtfully) No. (excited) No! No! No!

Me: I swept up the mouse, like this, and I carried it downstairs, and I threw it out the back door.

W: (laughs) No! (points to his crib) That is... no...

Me: Do you see Jack's sock in your crib?

W: No.

Me: No?

W: No, no, no, no, no... no... yes. Jack's sock.

Me: What is Jack's sock doing in your crib.

W: (long eloquent string of babble)

Me: What are you saying, Billy?

W: ...No.

It might be time to find some adult conversation, but I feel so dragged out what with children talking to me and my aching head that I fell asleep on the phone with Darwin last night.  I have even taking to drinking coffee, which is always an extreme measure for me.

Darwin is back at 2:00 this morning, and stays for two days before he flies out for another week. Blah, single parenthood.

The Great War, Vol 1, Chapter 14-1

It took a little while for me to get rolling on this segment. As I was working on it I realized that the last Jozef section went up in January. If you want to go refresh your mind on old sections, use the table of contents page. However, during the last five days while on a business trip I was able to average a thousand words a day and it's done. Incidentally, the novel as a whole now weights in at a little over 186,000 words. I have another business trip next week, so my goal is to stick to a similar schedule and have the next installment up by next Friday night.

Veszprém, Austria-Hungary. September 17th, 1914. The morning light was still of the luminous, diffuse type just before the sun cleared the horizon as the training squadron clattered up Var Street onto Castle Hill. The sound of a hundred and fifty iron shod horses trotting up a cobbled street between stone buildings was nearly deafening as it echoed and re-echoed. A few people looked out as they passed. A woman waved a handkerchief to the hussars from a window of Madame Kalmar’s establishment. Heads of troopers, Jozef among them, turned to watch her. But the sound of cavalry units riding up through the old town to the castle was too common now to draw any great attention from the town’s civilians.

“Hussars! Stay in line and keep your spacing even!” Sergeant Major Szabo shouted in a voice that carried right down the column of horsemen.

During training a partially reversed hierarchy applied, and the officers-in-training lived in constant fear of the moments when the sergeants stepped in to provide commands they themselves should have given. The sergeants were not actually in command of the cadets, that would have been an unthinkable violation of the distinctions of rank and structure which allowed the Imperial Army, in all its glorious and multi-lingual complexity, to function. But Jozef knew that assessments of the cadets’ performance flowed unofficially but steadily from the sergeants to Rittmeister Koell who commanded the training squadron and from him to the oberstleutnant in command of the reserve regiment as a whole.

Jozef took the sergeant’s words as the reprimand which they were meant to be and snapped his gaze back to the road and his zug. He barked orders to his the men, bringing them into precise order. The commands in Hungarian came naturally now, though he still found more general conversation in the language halting. The hussars edged their horses more precisely into line, and the squadron rode under the archway into the castle in parade ground order, backs straight, chins up, horses stepping precisely in line, no sign of the tiredness which Jozef felt after spending his few hours of sleep trying to find comfort on the lumpy ground cushioned only by his thin bedroll.

Oberstleutnant Zingler, who despite being over sixty himself and commanding a reserve regiment made up primarily of hussars whose girth and stamina were more suited to the hunting lodge than the front lines, yearned for the glories of battle which had been denied him during a forty-year career which had begun just after the disastrous Austro-Prussian War and stretched through the unsatisfyingly long peace up until this present moment. In the interest of building a less aged regiment which might eventually be posted to the front, Zingler had ordered that the cadets conduct overnight field exercises weekly.

Rittmeister Koell, who commanded the training squadron, was rather more typical of the reserve officers in the units headquartered in the picturesque stone fortress which was situated at the highest point in Veszprém, giving it a view out over forest slopes to the spa towns that lined Lake Balaton. Though a great believer in drill and precision, and able to carry off any feat of horsemanship while keeping his back ramrod straight and his shako at the correctly jaunty angle, Koell did not see any reason why turning the cadets into proper officers should interfere with his ability to eat breakfast in his favorite coffee house, spend the hour after dinner drinking slivovitz and smoking cigars over a game of chess at his club, and repose in the arms of his mistress at night. It was not in his character to disobey the oberstleutnant’s request, so instead he arranged the field exercises to interfere with his routine as little as possible. Every Wednesday, after he had taken dinner at a restaurant and played his game of chess at the club, the squadron assembled in the gathering darkness. They rode a short way north, into the lightly wooded hills, and then the cadets and troopers were ordered to make camp in field fashion: no tents, each man heating his own condensed coffee or rations over his own little fire should he feel the need to enhance the outdoor experience. Once the last inspections were done, Rittmeister Koell rode discretely back to the flat of Madame Deák, from whence he returned with military promptness at five-thirty in the morning to rouse the men and lead them back into the town in time for breakfast.

These proprieties to satisfy the oberstleutnant’s orders observed, the rittmeister devoted the rest of his time to that which he understood and appreciated: turning his cadets into the best horsemen that he possibly could. In this no shortcuts were tolerated, and with much soreness of back and leg, Jozef and his fellows had developed an ability in the saddle which would not have disgraced an imperial review.

The training squadron turned into the the regimental stables, the orderly rows of horsemen going through the huge doors four at a time. The long, cavernous stone building with its aisles of wooden stalls housed the regiment’s nine hundred riding horses. A second building, lower down on Castle Hill, held the larger draft horses and their carts, which, should the regiment be deployed on maneuvers or to the front, would carry supplies (including the massive quantities of fodder needed to keep the horses moving) once the regiment left the railhead.

Troopers had to feed, water and groom their own horses, but the officers turned that duty over to the grooms. Within fifteen minutes of riding under the arch into the castle grounds, Jozef and the other cadets walked back the other way, freshly shaved, their uniforms brushed. They turned into one of the cafes which stood just outside the military enclave’s gates. There was not an official officers’ mess, but the two cafes served that purpose, providing not only breakfast, lunch and strong black coffee served in tiny china cups edged with gold, but a place to receive mail, newspapers, and all the elements of civilized life.

“Have you heard this?” One of the officers of the Hungarian Honved was reading to a group from a copy of the local newspaper. The Honved was the militia of the Kingdom of Hungary, a completely separate force from the joint Imperial-Royal Army, which encompassed all nationalities. The castle served as the base for a regiment of Honved infantry in addition to the two Imperial-Royal regiments: Jozef’s own reserve regiment of Hussars and another reserve regiment of light infantry.

Peter Kardos, the lone Hungarian among the Imperial-Royal cadets, joined the group. Jozef hesitated on the periphery of the Hungarian speaking group, almost exclusively Honved officers, but the reading and discussion of the news article soon surpassed his limited ability with the language. He got a cup of coffee and joined a German-speaking group where officers were arguing as the to relative importance of successes against the Serbs along the Drina and humiliations at the hands of the Russians in Poland. The Czechs formed a third knot, the linguistic separation added to by the accusations, increasingly common in the German and Hungarian-language papers, that Czech troops were at fault for the recent troubles on the Polish front, running at the first sign of danger. Off in a corner, a Croat and a Slovak officer played chess and sipped coffee, united not by language or culture but by their isolation from all others.

“Excuse me, Cadet von Revay?”

“Yes?”

The server was carrying a small silver tray with an envelope on it. “This letter was left for you, sir.”

Jozef took the letter, plain blue paper addressed in a precise hand that would have looked well in place on a map or technical diagram.

Cadet von Revay,

Since learning of our relation we have had so few chances to meet socially. Why don’t you come with me out to the family seat this weekend -- just an informal men’s gathering for some stag hunting and similar relaxations. My esteemed brother Henrik is hosting, and his women folk are all off visiting. I can promise you the best of everything and a chance to get to know us rustic members of the family.

Give Rittmeister Koell my compliments and tell him that I’d like you to leave with me at ten in the morning on Friday, to be returned by Monday evening.

Your Obedient Servant and Loving Uncle,
Baron Istvan Revay, Major

Jozef asked the waiter to bring him paper and pen and summoned up all his grammar school exercises -- “you have been invited to the country estate of a nobleman, express your thanks and acceptance in terms proper to a gentleman” -- to compose a suitable yet jaunty reply. After an hour and a number of sheets of paper, he was satisfied that he had produced a letter which looked as if it had been dashed off casually in five minutes by someone of effortless good breeding. He folded the sheet precisely, addressed it, and wadded the failed attempts into a tight ball.

“Give this to Baron Revay when he comes in,” he told the server when the man next brought him a fresh cup of coffee, taking care to light a cigarette with great casualness as he gave the instruction.

An invitation to the family seat to hunt stag with his uncles: at last he would begin to take his father’s position in society, and without the constant hovering and interference of his mother. Would his uncles think that he was like his father? He must see that they did.

[continue reading]

Seven-ish Quick Takes

It's the seventh anniversary of Seven Quick Takes (which is not hosted at Jennifer Fulwiler's blog anymore, but I'm linking to her anyway), so in honor of the occasion, I'm tossing together all the quasi-posts I have sitting in draft.

1. I read Frankenstein several months ago when Enbrethiliel hosted her read-along, and although I found it compelling in many ways, I do have to concur with the raised eyebrow over at Yard Sale of the Mind:

OK: The monster not only is animated from dead people and cows and stuff, but he’s a athletic freak and a genius – because? There’s no healing involved in a creature pieced together like that, so that he’s ready to rumble right off the old animation table, not wracked by pain or failing apart or anything? In a couple years, he acquires a fluency and grace of language equal to that of a remarkably precocious 18 year old English woman? Note that I’m not mentioning anything related to the relatively primitive state of science in 1800 here, just more basic stuff. And some cottagers live adjacent to a 8′ tall Peeping Tom for a year, and just sort of miss it? Never once wonder about that lean-to right there? On notice the eyeball peaking in the room?  But hey, it’s still pretty good.

Let's not overlook the fact that in addition to creating and then abandoning his monster, Victor Frankenstein was a coward and a real prick to those who loved him.

Also, I think we can all agree that speculative fiction of many varieties can demand moral engagement from the reader by presenting new and strange dilemmas, but sometimes readers get so caught up in the novelty (OMG? What if machines have feelings?) that they forget their actual moral obligations to the real people around them.

2.

I thought that I was going to have a revision of Stillwater completed by this weekend, but it isn't going to happen, and I keep putting off writing an explanation to the people I promised to send it to because my excuse is that I'm stripping wallpaper from the princess room. Stripping wallpaper sounds like a fake excuse, like scrubbing one's grout or washing one's hair, and yet it is a big messy labor-intensive project, even if most of it peels right off the walls in long satisfying strips. (I have no idea how old this paper is, but much of the glue has dried up nicely.) Where it holds, however, it holds fast. It takes a resolute arm and a patient grip to scrape it off the wall, but it's the sort of detail work I enjoy. And the soundtrack to Hamilton, absolutely unconducive to writing, is perfect for finicky non-creative work like de-papering.

3. I won't lie -- I love scraping wallpaper. It's instantly satisfying if you are the sort of person who used to pick the paint off of the picnic tables on the school playground or rub Elmer's Glue all over your hands so you could peel it off in one glorious layer (ca. 3rd grade). 

4. I scrape with such dedication because we have a guest coming at the beginning of November, and we want to have the princess room painted before then. (The princess room is where guests stay, because it's at the end of the hall and has its own bathroom. No royalty has actually ever stayed there, but there is an almost 100% likelihood that Herbert Hoover once slept in there. But would you rather stay in the Hoover room or the princess room? I rest my case.) On the home renovation front, we want to have the princess bathroom painted along with the bedroom (and if you saw the peeling paint in the shower, you'd understand), but before the room is painted, we want to have it wired for an overhead light (and if you saw how dark it is in there now with only the 20s-era pull-chain fixtures by the mirror, and only one of them working, you'd understand). Wiring requires an electrician to go in from the crawl space in the attic. The first guys we called came up, looked at the space, were very chatty about getting the work done, and then didn't even bother to send me an estimate. If you have to ask, you can't afford it? I hope not -- we can barely see in the bathrooms. We might as well be showering by candlelight.

5. A month to strip wallpaper doesn't seem like such a long time, until you factor in that Darwin is going to be traveling for business two weeks out of the month, and so I'll be running the show by myself. Every time he has to travel, I think that I'm going to be so organized and in control -- after all, without him around in the evenings, I don't have anything to distract me from working, right? And on the first day he's gone, we have dinner early and the kids go to bed on time. The second day, the schedule slips back. By the day before he gets home, we're eating pizza and going to bed at 10:00. I don't know why I imagine it would be easier to be more virtuous and efficient without him, especially as the point of marriage is mutual help. I'm not a better person when he's not here.

Unfortunately for me in a month where my husband is gone about 40% of the time, we've also picked up several activities that require me to drive people around at various times during the week. So far it's Thursday of the first full week in October, and I haven't missed anything yet (except an orthodontist appointment first thing on Monday morning, which I wrote down on the wrong calendar). But I feel like things could go into the weeds if I don't stay on top of everything. So I'm making lists to keep my schedule from overwhelming me.

Sunday: 12:15, Mass (some weeks I cantor); 3:45-5:15, religion class at church (older four; I teach 7th grade)

Monday: 11:00-12:00), film class (Eleanor and Julia; 6:30 Cub Scouts (Jack)

Tuesday: 2:30-5:00, Drama (Eleanor and Julia, maybe Isabel if they need extra people); 4:30-5:15, Ballet (Diana); 5:15-6:00, Tap (Eleanor and Isabel); 7:00-8:30 German (the whole family)

Wednesday: 11:30-12:30, lunch at the park with friends

Thursday: 10:00-12:00, piano lessons (big four, but the teacher comes to our house); 2:30-5:00, Drama (Eleanor and Julia); 5:50-7:20, Ballet and Pre-Pointe (Julia)

Friday: 2:30-3:15, Schola (whenever I scrape up the fortitude to send out the email and start directing it again); various Friday nights, youth group activities which require a large driving commitment

Saturday: Get out of my hair.

If I do not have dinner precisely timed on Tuesday, everything will implode. If we do not have a sufficient amount of lessons under our belt before we leave the house on Monday and Wednesday, education will implode. If I do not sit and down and stare at the wall for a bit after teaching religion class, I will implode. My youngest two (5 and 21 months) are not reliable about feeding themselves and need to be managed so that they do not implode. My oldest three (all females) implode every 26 days and make the house a battle ground, and if I forget where we are on the calendar, I don't head these off these cyclical meltdowns the right way to maintain peace in the house. 

6. You guys. I have wasted vast amounts of time over the past two months, time when I could have been writing or peeling wallpaper or checking Facebook, watching Key and Peele.

7. And this one.

8. And Meegan.

9. And high on potenuse.

10. And Star Wars.

11. And Les Miz.

Is US Gun Ownership Causing a Wave of Gun Deaths?

With another senseless shooting in the news, there has been a wave of news analysis stories examining the connection between the huge number of guns owned by civilians in the United States and the number of people here who die by gunfire. Some of these arguments border on the tautological. Some articles, for instance, have been at pains to point out that having access to guns increases the chances that someone will have a gun accident, commit suicide with a gun, or assault someone with a gun. Well, obviously, one would be hard put to have a gun accident, or to kill oneself or someone else using a gun, if one did not have access to a gun.

Since many of these arguments seem to center around the idea that increases in gun availability cause increases in gun deaths, I thought it would be interesting to look at historical trends in US gun deaths of various types and compare them to gun ownership rates. While I'm fairly pro-gun, what I found honestly kind of surprised me.

Let's start by looking at murder. The US, as is well known, has a fairly high murder rate compared to other developed countries. A lot of those murders are committed with guns. Here's a chart showing the murder rate (number of murders per 100,000 in population) since 1981 for gun-murders and non-gun murders.

[These are drawn from the CDC data sets here and here.]

The spike in non-gun homicides in 2001 is the result of several thousand people being murdered by means of box-cutters and airplanes.

As you can see, although there was an increase in gun deaths during the height of the crack-cocaine inspired gang wars of the late eighties and early nineties, the overall trend of both gun murders and non-gun murders is down. Non-gun murders have been falling somewhat faster than gun murders, and the percentage of murders carried out by means of a gun is relatively high at 69% in 2007, the last year the CDC has data for.

As I said, the US murder rate is fairly high compared to other wealthy countries. Here's a comparison of the US gun and non-gun homicide rates with the homicide rates of the UK and Australia. I picked these two because their data is available in English (a matter of convenience for me) and because both countries had gun bans put in place after famous mass shootings, bans which are often pointed to as examples of what the US should do. Here's a comparison of the rates:

[UK data from here. Australian data from figure 2 here.)

Since the rates are so different in scale, it's interesting to index them to the rate of a starting year and see how they've trended.

As you can see, Australia has an indexed trend much like the US (declining less than our non-gun murder rate but more than our gun murder rate) while the UK has actually seen an increase in murder rate since 1989, though it's come off its record high a bit over the last ten years. I also marked a potential inflection point on the graph which is perhaps most interesting because it doesn't mark much of a change in the murder rate. In the 1996-1997 period, both the UK and Australia responded to horrific mass shooting events by passing draconian gun control legislation and removing a lot of guns from civilian hands.

The UK had already passed its first big round of gun control in 1988, in response to the Hungerford Massacre, placing severe restrictions on semi-automatic rifles (and not just the scary looking "assault rifles" which are so often discussed here in the US.) Then in 1997, in response to the Dunblane School Shooting, the UK passed much tougher gun control legislation, virtually banning civilian possession of handguns.

Australia had a similar legal change in the same 1996-1997 period due to the Port Arthur Massacre, in which a mentally disturbed man killed 35 and wounded 23 more.

Both countries not only restricted the sale and ownership of guns, but also instituted massive collection/buy-back programs which resulted in the collection and destruction of over a hundred thousand guns in the UK and over a million in Australia. The result was a widely touted reduction in gun fatalities, as shown by this graph discussion the situation in Australia:

[Attribution: "Gun deaths over time in the US and Australia" by Volutin - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gun_deaths_over_time_in_the_US_and_Australia.png#/media/File:Gun_deaths_over_time_in_the_US_and_Australia.png]

However, what this type of analysis misses is that guns were not actually that large a source of violence in these countries to start with. The Australian government's Institute of Criminology provides some graphs that look at the percentage of murders in Australia committed using guns over the long term, and at the relative trends in gun murders and knife murders in recent decades

Percent of Australian Homicides performed using a gun

[source]

Percent of Australian Homicides using gun vs. sharp instrument

[source]

Guns have never accounted for more than about 40% of murders in Australia, and in the early '90s, shortly before the ban, they only accounted for around 20%. The UK appears to have had pretty similar trends, though I haven't been able to find data as specific. By comparison, guns account for 60% to 70% of murders in the US in any given year out of the last 35.

Perhaps this explains why the banning of guns seems to have had no real impact at all on the already low murder rates of the UK and Australia. The UK saw a flat murder rate for thee years after its ban, then a significant increase, then a reduction back to pretty much right where it was at the time of the ban. Australia saw four years of flat murder rates, then a gradual decline fairly similar to the decline which had been occurring already before the ban. Indeed, the US murder rate dropped much more in the years after the UK and Australian gun bans than did the murder rate in the countries that actually banned guns. In 1995 the US total murder rate (gun and non-gun) was 6.7 times that of the UK and 5.4 times that of Australia. In the third year of those countries' gun bans, in 2000 their murder rates were virtually unchanged, but the US murder rate had fallen to 4.2 times that of the UK and 3.8 times that of Australia.

One of the things that doesn't get discussed much when making comparisons between the US and Australia in terms of gun policy is that the two countries were fairly different in terms of gun ownership and culture before the 1997 Australian gun ban. In the period directly after its gun ban, Australians turned in roughly 1,000,000 guns, which were destroyed by the government. Estimates are that this represented roughly one third of guns in Australia. [source] (Others are either still owned and used at gun clubs under increasingly restrictive gun laws, or have entered the "grey market" of illegal guns.) A little quick math:

In 1997 Australia had 18.5 million residents. If their estimate of 3 million total guns is correct, that represents one gun for every 6.17 people. The congressional research service estimated that in 2009 the US had 310 million guns in civilian hands, and it's possible to use ATF reports on the number of guns manufactured and imported into the US to take the estimate backwards and forwards in time. That gives me an estimated 247 million guns owned by US residents back in 1997. The US population at that time was 273 million. So the US had one gun for every 1.1 people, nearly six times as many guns on a per capita basis as Australia. This means that even pre-ban (when Australia had more guns than now and the US had less) the ratio of guns to homicides in Australia was slightly higher than in the US, and post ban it became much higher.

Now let me be clear: This does not mean that taking guns out of the hands of law abiding Australian citizens caused a murder wave. The number of murders was almost identical pre and post ban: 299 in 1995 and 308 in 1999. (I avoided 2000 when there was a small one year murder spike in Australia and 2001 when 9-11 represented a non-gun-related one year murder spike in the US.) That's what drives the apparent spike in the number of Australian homicides per 100,000 guns: the number of homicides per year remained roughly the same while the number of guns fell by a third. In the US, during the same period, the number of homicides fell (22,895 in 1995 to 17,287 in 1999) while the number of guns in civilian hands increased (236 million to 256 million).

This leads to the data than genuinely surprised me, even as a gun rights supporter. I had known that the US murder rate as a whole had been falling for the last twenty years, despite a large increase in the number of guns. While this seems like an argument against the idea that more guns equals more gun homicides, there is at least the potential counter-argument that since crime and violence is falling overall these larger social trends swamped the effect of increased gun availability. What I hadn't realized until I got into the CDC data (linked above) is that gun suicides and gun accidents have been falling as well.

The gun homicide rate is down 22% since 1986. The gun suicide rate is down 24%. The gun accident rate is down a whopping 67%. By comparison: The non-gun homicide rate is down a steep 45%. However, the non-gun suicide rate is up 8%. Let's look at all of these metrics indexed against 1986 so that we can see their relative changes more clearly.

The number of guns, and thus it seems fair to say gun availability, has increased steadily throughout this period. However, no type of gun related deaths has increased in a way that correlates with the increase in gun availability. The only trend which mirrors gun availability somewhat in recent years is non-gun suicides, but it seems near impossible to argue that the availability of guns is causing people to commit suicide using methods other than guns.

This, I think, provides a useful corrective to some of the rhetoric on gun availability and gun deaths. Clearly, gun related deaths are subject to gun availability. You can't accidentally shoot yourself with a gun if you do not have access to a gun. You can't shoot yourself or another person with a gun if you do not have a gun to shoot with. However, the number of guns in civilian hands has increased by over 50% since 1986, and during that same period the rate of accidental gun deaths has decreased by 67% while the rates of both gun homicides and gun suicides have decreased by over 20%. It's hard to make the case that the increasing number of guns in the hands of US residents is increasing the chances of gun deaths when what we actually see is that the number of guns per person is rising steadily (.78 guns per capita in 1987 to .98 guns per capita in 2007) while the rate of gun deaths is falling.  The CDC data cuts off in 2007, but FBI data on the overall homicide rate shows it falling significantly from 2008 to 2013 while the rate of gun purchases has doubled during the Obama administration versus the period before.

Does this mean that removing all guns, or virtually all guns, from our country would not reduce homicides, suicides and accidents? No. If you really could get all or nearly all guns out of the US civilian hands (a total of well over 360 million guns by now, based on ATF estimates) it would probably decrease violent deaths a bit. But even when the UK and Australia reduced gun ownership rates to levels far below what the US has had at any point in recent history, they saw virtually no impact on their total homicide rates. This probably puts change by this means well out of reach for the US. However, the rapid increase in the number of US guns has not led to an increase in the rates of homicide, suicide or even gun accidents. Indeed, the rate of all of those types of death has been dropping even as the number of guns per capita has increased. The continuing increase in the number of guns in the hands of US civilians has not led to a wave of gun deaths.

Movie Review: The Martian

Last night MrsDarwin and I took advantage of the fact that the oldest kids are now old enough to babysit the rest and went out to catch an evening showing of The Martian, based on the Andy Weir novel of the same name which I wrote about recently.

The book was a page turning joy to read, an old fashioned Science Fiction problem solver story of the near future which XKCD summed up as follows:

Apollo 13 is also a movie I very much enjoyed, indeed I think I'd rate it as a bit better than The Martian.

The book's fun is that it takes the problem of a Mars mission -- and of an astronaut accidentally left for dead trying to survive until rescue -- seriously, and spends a lot of time coming up with realistic solutions to these problems. The other thing that maintains the book is its humor. The characterization is not deep by any stretch, and for someone with a couple of years of solitude, Mark Watney does curiously little thinking about the eternal verities. However, Watney is an inveterate smartass and he is an entertaining voice to listen to even when he's just working out how to solve an engineering problem the reader might not normally have a lot of expertise in. He's cheerful and self effacing and sarcastic and you keep turning the pages to see what he'll say next. The earth-bound characters trying to make contact with him and bring him back safely are also pretty shallow characters, but they are fun -- particularly the foul-mouthed, abrasive, but ultimately right-thinking and heroic NASA PR chief Annie Montrose.

The movie scales back on the humor, in part because it scaled back quite a bit on the profanity in order to keep the rating at a PG-13, and in part because sarcasm works better in the more leisurely pace of a book than in the 141 minutes of the movie. (They also cut a lot of plot details; Watney has to solve a lot more problems in a lot more detail in the book.)

However, the movie format taketh away, but it also giveth. The writing of the movie isn't deep either, but having real flesh and blood actors playing the characters end up providing significantly more emotional depth in some scenes than you get in the book. While I enjoyed the book a lot, there were times when I found myself thinking "this is a problem solving character, not a rounded person facing these problems" and the performances by Matt Damon and the rest of the cast provide some of that emotional depth, even if it's just in the way that he looks at the Martian landscape at certain points.

I was a little disappointed in the technical aspects of the production design. Weir made huge efforts to be accurate in his portrayal of a near future Mars mission, with consideration given to how everything would be designed. The movie keeps the basically realistic plot, but it clearly cares about the details less. When it's convenient for the plot, the nearly 30 minutes round trip between sending a radio message from Mars and getting the reply vanishes and Watney and NASA type messages back and forth in near real time, but at other times the wait is maintained. Weir put a lot of thought into the Hab in which Watney lives, and which he has to repair at some key points, including the special "hab canvas" material which it is made out of and the resins which could be used to seam it. In the movie, we get what looks like plastic sheeting and duct tape to make repairs. And while one plot point involves taking weight out of a ascent vehicle to make it lighter, a lot of the sets in the movie seem to completely ignore the weight considerations which would have ruled all design aspects of stuff sent to Mars -- something the book spent a fair amount of time on.

Still, these are minor things, and the movie itself is honestly a lot of fun. Two space-suited thumbs up.