a little lenten prayer

ACT OF REPARATION

O Lord, my God and Saviour, who, as Thou didst endure for our salvation the outrages of those who crucified Thee, who now deignest to bear with those who by careless or unworthy Communions approach and touch Thee, not discerning Thee, and endurest all irreverences rather than withhold Thy sacred Presence from our Altars: I bewail these indignities, and most earnestly desire to prevent, to the utmost of my power, whatever thus still grieves Thee. I beseech Thee, accept this sorrow and this desire as the only offering I can make in reparation of so great dishonor. O Lord, increase my faith, and preserve me from the least profanation of this adorable Mystery, and kindle in me and in the hearts of all Thy people, especially of all who celebrate or assist in its ministration, such reverence and devotion that Thy most holy name may more and more be honored and glorified in this Sacrament of love. Amen.

why i love eliot

people have asked me lately why eliot is "personal." i thought about it, and i think i have at least somewhat been able to solidify my reasons. one of his main themes is the peculiar dilemma of modern suffering as a result of the desacralisation of love and the replacing of love with lust. yet he recognizes, too, the beauty and redemption that can come from this suffering. the violated, muted nightingale is given an eternal song through her metamorphosis. tragedy can be beautiful, and art can relieve the tragedy. and also, for eliot, his art both leads to and records the capability of art to lead to spiritual salvation and redemption.
people complain of him being "difficult," but i would say that the waste land, at least (which in comparison to his whole corpus is as brideshead revisited to the rest of evelyn waugh's novels) merely exemplifies the difficulty of all poetry. all good poetry is that difficult, although we often do not realize it. i think with other poetry, we can have a sort of arrogance in assuming we fully understand both the artist's intent and the full possibility and layers of meaning contained in the poem. more traditional poetry,i think, often is only illusorily more accessible. i think it is all as difficult as eliot, although not all as difficult as pound. (WINK)
some of the things eliot says are, indeed, pompous and ridiculous. but much more of what he says is beautiful and profound and really necessary as an antidote to modernity and the post-modern project of solipsism, relativism, subjectivism, and atheism. which is why contemporary academia hates eliot. and as i recently said, i am a twig from eliot's branch, a fact i discovered, not decided. so i will champion him and the modernists' project as long as i am able, because it is fundamental to the nature of literature, to the nature of the word itself.

My True Love, or, Admiring Dead Poetical Critics

"Tradition is a matter of much wider significance [than reptition]. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense ... a a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, bt of its presence ... a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional ... the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past.


What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality ... [the] process of depersonalization.
One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express: and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse."

-"Tradition and the Individual Talent"