for a brief second seem to know

... it will be sufficient if I say that the first time I saw him writing, and saw the writing that came as he wrote, I had that thrill and tremble of the heart that otherwise I can only remember having had when first I touched her [Mary's] body or saw her hair coming down.... or when I first heard the plainchant of the Church (as they sang it at Louvain in the Abbey of Mont Cesar) or when I first entered the Church of San Clemente in Rome or first saw the North Transept of Chartres from the little alley between the houses... there are many occasions when, in a manner of speaking, you seem to pierce the cloud of unknowing and for a brief second seem to know even as God knows - sometimes, when you are drawing the human body, even the turn of a shoulder or the firmness of a waist, it seems to shine with the radiance of righteousness.

Eric Gill, Autobiography

to make a cell of good living

And if I might attempt to state in one paragraph the work which I have chiefly tried to do in my own life, it is this: to make a cell of good living in the chaos of our world.... But what I hope above all things is that I have done something towards re-integrating bed and board, the small farm and the workshop, the home and the school, earth and heaven.

- Eric Gill, Autobiography

Armenian Washing of the Feet

The ankle's happy, and the little collective of the toe.
The foot is very glad to be in communion with the hand.

- Dennis Silk

Part of the problem is that our temples have become more or
less public spaces. We are far from the disciplina arcana and
a sense that the mysteries are enacted exclusively by and for
'the faithful'. We even embrace the wholly counter-intuitive
notion that our liturgy is an evangelistic tool, "hey everyone,
come and look at us as we worship!" I think that to many early
Christians the idea that we should welcome folks - as opposed to
'the faithful' - welcome folks to 'share' in our worship, especially
our eucharistic worship, would be like inviting folks into the
conjugal bedroom. For them, the mysteries were something fundamentally
and deeply intimate, personal, exclusive to 'the faithful' - and not
even catechumens and penitents could get in. But now liturgy is public
and our temples more or less public and we are pressured into having
a 'welcoming attitude' - and yet we bridle at the mores of the sub -
and post - Christian world we are stuck with 'welcoming' so earnestly...
Sigh.

Sacrifice; slaughter

The other recent war article, not yet publicly delivered, deals with two
perfectly allowable metaphors that have decomposed into polluting
clichés — Sacrifice and Slaughter. True, there is an element of
sacrifice in joining the forces — sacrifice of time and prospects, of
youth and health, but a sacrificial victim is put to death, and no
soldier wants or expects simply to be put to death. And from the
commander’s point of view the loss of troops is a matter of expenditure,
not sacrifice. Similarly with slaughter, the business of a
slaughterhouse is to be efficient, hygienic, and total: there are no
prisoners, no wounded, no survivors, no wooden cross, no letters of
sympathy, no Memorial Day. In the context of war writing, most talk of
sacrifice is prate, most talk of slaughter is rant. This will be an
unpopular statement, but it needs to be made. David Jones touches
legitimately on both metaphors but eschews both clichés.

Bill Blisset, Seventy Years With David Jones

[Bill Blisset reminiscences in Seventy Years With David Jones in the Spring 2010 edition of Flashpoint Magazine - http://www.flashpointmag.com/]

The woes of the Church came up again. It had seemed bad enough years ago when the Caldey Benedictines were dispersed over some scandal (completely unsuspected by DJ), but now! The enemy seems to have taken all the places of power. There was some old bishop who said recently, about the liturgical upheaval, that he had been waiting all his life for it. ‘The bloody old hypocrite! All these years our acts of worship were nothing but play-acting, mummery, bowing and scraping.’ He continued: ‘I was talking about this to a priest a few months ago. I said, you fall in love with a girl, visit her often, kiss her, tell her many times and in many ways that you love her; then you visit her less and less often, give her an occasional peck, tell her that she has your esteem. “What has that to do with it?” asked the priest. It has everything to do with it: it means that what you do in religion, as in love, is the sign of what you are.’

David usually goes to the half-past eight Mass as being the least deformed, but two Sundays ago he had gone to the eleven o’clock, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, and it consisted of the priest poking around with bits of paper until suddenly the words of Consecration were spoken. ‘And then he had the cheek, in the middle of these blasphemies, to preach a bloody sermon on the meaning of the Transfiguration!’

This was vehemently spoken, then David signed and said, ‘Why must all experiments in liturgy be compulsory? Why must they replace the Mass that was known and loved and set up an unbridgeable discontinuity? Why must every one of the new experiments be so thin and truncated and incapable of making any lasting impression?’

He remembers years ago seeing Dom Gregory Dix, whose Shape of the Liturgy he thinks a great work of the spirit. There was some sort of Anglo-Catholic Congress, and a very ancient liturgy was to be celebrated. John Betjeman couldn’t use his ticket, and so David went with Penelope, hoping he wouldn’t be exposed and expelled. He remembers, as I do, Dom Gregory’s stillness and concentration; they did not meet then or ever.

Rather to my surprise, DJ disclosed that he knew the books of both Frazer and Jessie L. Weston before he knew or had heard of The Waste Land.[2] He met T.S. Eliot in the later ?20s when he came to know some literary people, and discovered the poetry of Eliot and Hopkins concurrently. The full, not the abridged Frazer is the thing to read: most of the good of it is in the notes and documentation. (This matches what he said about Spengler some years ago.) He recognized the comparative slightness and tendentiousness of Jessie L. Weston from the beginning, as well as her ‘poetic suggestiveness’.

Francois Mauriac -

Sin is the writer's element; the passions of the heart are the bread and wine he savours daily. (Literature and Sin)

This could be said of the priest, too.

Here is something, perhaps from the same text, but I cannot remember when I jotted it down thirty years ago or so...

... what the world calls happiness is often a trial without reward, a sterile sufferance, a shining but deserted isle ruled by satiety: a fatal affliction...

Ezra Pound: Canzoni: of Incense

The censer sways
And glowing coals some art have
To free what frankincense before held fast
Till all the summer of the eastern farms
Doth dim the sense, and dream up through the light,
As memory, by new-born love corrected
With savour such as only new-love knoweth -
Through swift dim ways the hidden pasts recalleth.

The Reckoning

The Reckoning

My life dates from the day of my father's death
When I lay weeping and it was not for him.
Now I am to continue this degenerescence
Until I enter his dream.

There is nothing a drink cannot settle at forty
Or money at fifty, the cure of all is death.
But all lovers can remember a moment\
When they were not alone.

C. H. Sisson