what happened this week…

…was that my friend tried to have a screening of a Mother Teresa biography. So we made up posters and put them up in the lifts here at school. On Thursday morning, we wake up and find new posters in the lift–not right next to ours, but conspicuously on the opposite side–with a Christopher Hitchens quote (from The Missionary Position) and a link to Hitchens’ documentary on Mother Teresa, Hell’s Angel.

We were upset. Someone else who we knew quite well had asked another friend if she did not feel that us Christians had an obligation to hold a student dialogue session to promote ‘critical thinking’ about the issue, and to screen Hitchens alongside whatever it was they screened. She said, ‘No,’ and her interlocutor said, ‘That’s too bad.’

Lots of stuff went wrong and there are probably fifty different things weird, like the idea that representation is the be-all, end-all of things, or the idea that we should have had a student dialogue among people who almost universally have never met Mother Teresa nor done any work with the sisters nor had any other first-hand experience of whatever it was we were supposed to ‘discuss’, or the idea that a contrary guy must be Speaking Truth to Power… and so on. But anyway. We were all sniffly and out-of-sorts, late for class, but then my friend J said something really wonderful.

We know that we were doing a good thing. The devil hates anything good, even if no one turned up, and tries to spoil it all, and tries to do so through anyone. Maybe here he is, or maybe it’s just people being fallen as usual, just as we are ourselves. We just pray and trust God and do our best and offer Him our sufferings–and keep the faith. Gladly suffer humiliation for Him, as the martyrs did as exemplars for us.

She is very often a beacon of sense.

(My completely unreligious professor’s comment on Hitchens’ titles: ‘Well, there’s an example of thinking of the title before you’ve really got anything to go on.’)

school things: catullus 76

I reread Catullus 76 today. It’s so sad. I remembered doing it in class in junior year, and it was so strange, because somehow the emotions come through despite the two thousand years or so between Catullus and me.

Then I translated it, because I love Catullus.

If there is any pleasure to a man in recalling prior

good deeds, when he thinks himself pious,

never to have violated the sacred faith, nor to have abused

the will of the gods for the deception of men,

then many things lie stored up for you in time to come, Catullus,

joys from this unpleasant love affair of yours.

For whatever it was possible for men to say well,

or do well–they were said and done by you,

all perished, though, entrusted to an ungrateful mind.

Wherefore do you now crucify yourself yet more?

Why do you not firm up your mind and bring yourself back from there,

and cease to be wretched, though the gods be unwilling?

It is difficult suddenly to put aside a long love affair;

that task is difficult, that which you ought to do any way you please.

This is your one deliverance, your complete victory;

you will do it, whether it be possible or not.

O gods, if you be merciful, or if you have ever brought

a final aid to anyone at the moment of death,

glance at me with kindness, and if I lived my life purely,

snatch this plague and pestilence from me,

which creeping like a torpor in the lowest part of my limbs

expels all pleasure from my breast.

I do not now seek that she should love me,

or, because that be impossible, that she should desire chastity:

I ask for myself to be well and for this foul sorrow to be set down from me.

O gods, grant me this for my devotion.