"Twice on Thursdays"

I was dipping into the Pooh stories last evening, and noticed several little things which made me think of GKC. Something about "twice on Thursdays", and how the opposite of an "introduction" is a "contradiction". And how Owl could spell "Tuesday" and many other things. Ahem.

Anyway, today May 27 is the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury. No, not the "Late have I loved thee" Augustine, the former heretic whose mother was Monica and who prayed and wept for YEARS until he converted - he's Augustine of Hippo. This Augustine was sent to England... There's a famous quote, which some find strangely insulting, though of course it isn't, or rather it is insulting, but not in the way one thinks. It's very curious. If anything, the laugh is on Father Brown (or rather on Chesterton), but then he was smarter than his interlocutor:

"As I say, if you're English, you ought really to be on my side against these Dagos, anyhow. Oh, I'm not one of those who talk tosh about Anglo-Saxons; but there is such a third as history. You can always claim that America got her civilization from England."

"Also, to temper our pride," said Father Brown? "we must always admit that England got her civilization from Dagos."

Again there glowed in the other's mind the exasperated sense that his interlocutor was fencing with him, and fencing on the wrong side, in some secret and evasive way; and he curtly professed a failure to comprehend.

"Well, there was a Dago, or possibly a Wop, called Julius Caesar," said Father Brown; "he was afterwards killed in a stabbing match; you know these Dagos always use knives. And there was another one called Augustine, who brought Christianity to our little island; and really, I don't think we should have had much civilization without those two."
[GKC "The Scandal of Father Brown"]

Some perhaps will think this is not appropriate - but then they have missed the point. It's not really that America is founded upon English culture - she is founded upon Rome, in both senses of the term. And that may be even more insulting, but then perhaps we also need to temper our pride.

Which is always a good thing to do. Remember how GKC responded to the famous question, "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach":

If I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven.
[GKC The Common Man]

I strongly urge you to read this essay - read it frequently. It is worth seeking. (If one of our readers happens to be able to cite the electronic location for it, please do so.) Here is just a little more for you to ponder, perhaps the richest nugget in the lode:

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself. Now in the general clouding of clear and abstract standards, there is a real tendency today for a young man (and even possibly a young woman) to fall back on that personal test, simply for lack of any trustworthy impersonal test. No standard being sufficiently secure for the self to be moulded to suit it, all standards may be moulded to suit the self. But the self as a self is a very small thing and something very like an accident. Hence arises a new kind of narrowness; which exists especially in those who boast of breadth. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all. There is produced also a sort of subconscious ossification; which hardens the mind not only against the traditions of the past, but even against the surprises of the future.
[ibid.]

Please read this again, and learn it:

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test.

We could, if we had time, make a wonderful study of how Chesterton ponders the matter of pride - and of humility. People talk - especially the media people talk - about today's modern science, which seems to be one big ego trip of people patting each other on the back - when they are not patting themselves. It is actually a clear sign that whatever it is, it is not science. Science is humility in the face of the universe. It is making truth the test, and not one's personality. But I don't have time to do it today. Perhaps some candidate in one of the Roman colleges, or some little liberal-arts school, will take up the challenge to explore all of GKC and sort out his studies on pride and on humility. And lest you think my point is only aimed at the sciences, it applies a fortiori to the arts. Let us not forget how GKC illuminated the unutterably splendid link between fairy-story and the One True Story:

the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat - exaltavit humiles.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:253]

That Latin quote is from the Magnificat, the great song of Mary which is sung every evening by the Church united in prayer. It means, "He has lifted up the lowly." [Lk 1:52] That of course applies to all of us, scientist or artist - providing we are willing to make truth the test and not our selves.

I wish I had time to pursue this more today, but I have other tasks to accomplish - yet before I leave, I must remind you about Saturday, May 29, which marks the 136th anniversary of the birth of our Uncle Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Please celebrate it properly, in a fitting Chestertonian manner, and remember that "we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them." [Orth CW1:268]

Martin Gardner, RIP

The New York Times reports that Martin Gardner died Saturday evening at the age of 95.

Mr. Gardner was the author of numerous prefaces or forewords for Chesterton re-printed editions, as well editor of my favorite edition of Innocence of Father Brown.

A great mind, a popularizer of mathematics, and a wonderful Chestertonian.

Happy Pentecost!

Happy birthday, Christians!

Spiritus Dominus replevit orbem terrarum, alleuia:
et hoc quod continet omnia, scientiam habet vocis,
alleuia, alleluia, alleluia.
[Sap 1:7]

Only time for a quick note today... It burst upon me as I was reading today's Introit that a certain word appears in the introits for both Easter and Pentecost...

And no I do NOT mean "alleluia".

It is scientia, the Latin for "knowledge". I know we're not talking about lab coats and test tubes, or integrated circuits and software here, but it sure is a pleasing thought to be reminded of Science and Engineering while we also think of Art and Literature and Philosophy... it is the same God Who inspires all such gifts - there are indeed MANY gifts, but the Same Spirit.

Let us rejoice, with voice and pen and keyboard, with Art and Science, and give Him thanks:

Thou on those who evermore
Thee confess and Thee adore
in Thy sevenfold gifts descend.
Give them comfort when they die,
Give them life with Thee on high,
Give them joys which never end. Amen. Alleluia.
[from the Sequence of Pentecost]

Ninth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

Today is the last day of the Great Novena - it seems to have flown by, as the whole of Paschaltide has flown by. But, as I pointed out a few days ago, every Sunday of our lives is a "Sunday after Pentecost" - we live in the world which has been enlightened by the Holy Spirit, Who continually reminds us of everything that Jesus told us.

The gospel today is that strange teaser from St. John, about how the "whole world couldn't contain the books" about all the things Jesus did while He was here. I forgot to change "world" to "cosmos", since that of course is the Greek word, and I think a bit more suitable to our Space Age lives. That line is a lot like the famous phrase from Michael Ende's great Never-Ending Story: "That is another story, and will be told another time." Providing we do not throw out our own chapter of the Story, we shall get to hear the rest of it when we move on to the "next chapter". It is this grand sense of Story produced by Chesterton and Tolkien and Sayers (not to exclude others, but these three have written more about the thing than others have, at least to my knowledge) which ought to excite us ion our daily lives. We tend to forget that the stories we read are just the exciting parts of what are most likely lives just as dull as ours are, and even the story of our Lord has that mysterious 18-year period where we know nothing except that Jesus was "the Carpenter's Son". It is, however, the kind of thing that Chesterton helps us grasp, with quips like these:

We must certainly be in a novel; What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters.
[GKC quoted in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 63]

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
[GKC Heretics CW1:66]

So we are minor characters... but ones about whom the Author has taken "such trouble"? Hm. How does this relate to our topic of prayer?

Well, this is very interesting. As in so many cases, it ties into both my scientific studies, and to the highest of all technologies, which is the technology of the human body - as well as into the Arts (as we shall see in just a moment) and also to the Sacred Scriptures: specifically to one of those grand letters from St. Paul. It is of course, even more delightfully, sealed and stamped with the most elegant of all possible seals, that of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul points out. So let us proceed.

I shall start with the Art. In my little book about Subsidiarity, I quote a line from the composer Robert Schumann:

If we were all determined to play the first violin, we should never have a complete orchestra. Therefore respect every musician in his proper place.
[quoted in Music: a Book of Quotations 42]

My analogy is akin to his: our roles as children of God may be considered in the same way as the many instruments of the orchestra. There are a whole lot of violins, and lesser numbers of violin-like things - and then a remarkably few others which have very strange sounds (like the oboe) or very loud sounds (like the trumpet). Some only play a very limited range of notes (like the chimes) or only one that has to be adjusted before use (the tympani) or no note at all (the cymbals or the snare-drum). And yet, every one is needed - maybe not all the time, but they have to be there at the right time! It's a marvel.

The analogy would be even more glorious if I transposed it to the pipe organ, but there are not as many people who will recognize the parallels... so I shall save that for another day. Except to tell you this: any given pipe in the organ is responsible for exactly one note. Also, the pipe requires two things: the authorization of the Organist, and a bountiful supply of Wind... what more fitting analogy could one seek on the Eve of Pentecost, when the Spirit was heard as a great Wind?

So, let us now proceed to the second portion of the analogy: the tech one, which is derived from a very observant statement in St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians:

For as the body is one and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body: So also is Christ. [1 Cor 12:12]

This is the origin of what I have called "mystical histology". Histology is the branch of biology which studies the makeup of the various organs of the body (human as well as animal), be it at a larger scale of "tissues" or the smaller scale of cells. The Pauline analogy addresses the various gifts and powers of a person - his role, not only in the spiritual, but even in the mundane realm - and shows that these gifts are as varied and distinct - and yet cooperative and necessary - as are the varied "members" (tissues, or cells) of the body. Yes. Now, I grant you that St. Paul didn't study biology; certainly he didn't have a microscope, and likely he never did a dissection. But his insight was accurate, and it applies to more than just the "Mystical Body" of Christ, the Church, or to the human body. It even applies to things like sports teams, social organizations, corporations, even governments - since it is linked to the very tech idea of Subsidiarity, and to those words of our Lord about how we are the branches on His vine. But I must not get off the track here, since I am saying all this for a reason.

And this is the reason: the fact that there are a variety of gifts (all given by the Holy Spirit) and a variety of roles, as distinct from one another as the bones are from the blood - or from a muscle or from the cornea of the eye - this fact of variety implies that there are varieties of prayer life as well. Obviously, everyone can and will participate in certain public forms of prayer: the Mass, the Divine Office, a burial service, a group recitation of the Rosary. But when it comes to personal prayer, or the prayer of small groups, then there will be a multitude of prayer-forms, paralleling the multitude of praying members.

Let me give a very poor analogy. The erythrocyte, or red blood cell, can readily be seen to analogize the holy priesthood, since it is celibate (it has no nucleus and cannot divide), it has no fixed home (it travels through the bloodstream) and it spends its life bringing the gift of fresh air to the rest of the body. (I think you can grasp what that might be.) Any given cell is constantly returning to the heart and lungs, again and again - its very special duties set up a most definite rhythm, and hence the priestly duty to daily recite the Divine Office makes sense: in the daily recitation of the Psalms, the priest makes a continual return to the Source of the Spirit and to that Beating Heart which impels him on his journey... but this is just a poetic glimpse.

How about the laity? But there we see so many possible things - let us not try to construct an analogy. Let us simply note that there is stability of another kind, while there is also growth - for any given cell, its task is to achieve its proper role in the body - you might just try it for yourself. St. Paul hints at it when he talks about the eye versus the hand, or the foot, and the other, somewhat veiled statement about the "less honorable" members... it may be a bit squeamish to explore the whole of the analogy, and it takes a strong sense of reverence for the mystery of the body - but it is worth the effort.

Ahem - but Doctor - What does that have to do with prayer?

The point here is simply that there are bound to be different kinds of personal prayer, just as there are different kinds of persons. The thing that is common to all is the necessity of prayer, and the understanding that the prayer itself is bound for one-and-the-same destination. I will try another analogy. It's not that you write your letter with a quill on parchment, and I write mine with a laser printer on standard copier paper - or that I misspell every fifth word, and yours is elegant in diction and tender in emotion - or that I write mine sitting at my desk in the busy afternoon and you write yours in a desperate hour while the world sleeps. We will both drop them into the same mailbox, and they are both addressed to the same Destination.

But there is one other truth to the matter of prayer - one other thing which every member of the Body must have in common - one other attribute I wish to conclude by mentioning. And that is this:

We ought to pray often - not just because Jesus told us, or because it gives glory to God, or is our only hope of obtaining what we need and cannot possibly get otherwise. But because it is the way in which we practice for what we shall do in heaven.

Oh - you never thought of that, did you?

Just what do we do in heaven? Did you ever think? I can pretty much guarantee we don't flop around with harps - there's far too much to do. No, it's not like I have had a revelation or hacked into God's systems (hee hee) - it's just straightforward reasoning, but I don't have time to go into all of it. One of the things that is clear, of course, is that the messy forms of communication that we use here on earth will all be transcended. We've all seen fantasies where a person "mind-reads" another - that's a little of what it would be like. Since heaven is about truth, and about true and total union with God, we'll likewise be united with each other. We'll have all eternity to explore God, and we'll be in constant contact with each other in the delights we discover - but here's the best part of all: we won't be sitting on clouds, stumbling over words to describe things! We won't have to backtrack to explain things to each other. We'll all know whatever we need to grasp the thoughts and delights of the others who are there too. Don't get frantic about (let us say) understanding automata theory, or quantum mechanics - or the ontology of grace, or the dynamics of a dramatic plot or other such literary technical stuff. You'll have it INFUSED. Furthermore, you will share in those things we don't usually talk about as "communication" except when we mean "poetry" or something of that sort: the warm love of a mother, the honor of a soldier, the excitement of a child, the thrill of the martyr's love, the unspeakable mystery which is the priest's during the consecration... But we shall have all this, since in heaven the barriers of this cosmos that bar our souls from each other are abolished. In heaven we shall be able to commune - that is shall PRAY as we ought.

This is not really a theological principle, but a mathematical one. It might (as GKC says, for the pleasure of pedantry) be called the Celestial Transitive Property of Prayer. If, in the Beatific Vision, I am in direct and total intimate contact with God, and you are also, then (by the CTPP) you and I must likewise be in direct and total intimate contact with each other. There is nothing scandalous about it - we are no longer bound by earth, nor could we do, or want to do, anything other than God's Holy Will... so it is clear that something in the Celestial System will enable this form of communication. It's quite clear, even though I have very little formal theology to go on, that we must somehow "see" in God what His will is for us, and so we share in an intimacy that is not possible on earth. One more item must be added to this silly little hypothesis of mine. Or two. Such intimacy must be fruitful, for no gift is given without a reason. What is the fruit? What is the reason? Simple: we share our persons and our personal perceptions of God with each other in order to glorify God. The other item concerns the angels. What are they doing? Obviously, they share in the same communication, and thereby also glorify God. It's what they sang - remember, we've already gotten TWO chunks of angelic communication on record: the one which starts "Glory to God in the highest", and the other which says "Holy, holy, holy... heaven and earth are full of His glory."

So Doc you really think Heaven is like this?

Well - no. but parts must be true, as far as it goes. Actually I think it will be far better than any of us can imagine - but it must be orderly, and it must be "in the form of" communication - which means it ahs the form of prayer. So if we expect to spend eternity doing it, I think it wise that we practice prayer here and now.

My best wishes for a grand Pentecost - and do try to spend some time in prayer, not only today, but often. It's what our Lord wants us to do.

Eighth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

I glanced, very briefly, at yesterday's post, and found that I had neglected a major point in my discussion on "repetition". I don't mean to quarrel - no - the issue is a very interesting one, and I do see a very large issue here - both in the sense that our Lord was warning us about "praying as the pagans" as well as in the sense that we must be steadfast in prayer, even while we are asking over and over again for the same thing.

But there is a far larger issue - one which I wonder about, since I am a computer scientist, and deal with words (and with repetitions) in very unusual ways. You might say that I get to see the "plumbing", the "basement" of such things - but then as Mark Weaver likes to say, "Somebody has to do the hard jobs". It's this sort of pondering which makes me speculate like this:

If a certain Protestant opposes my use of (for example) the Rosary because "we must avoid repetition in prayer", am I therefore permitted to pray the Our Father (the Lord's Prayer) only once in my entire life?

Would it be "repetition" to say it once a year, or week, or day?

And would it be "repetition" if we used just SOME of the same words?

Just where is the limit?

Well... not being a theologian, I cannot deal with that issue directly. But there are some interesting things I've learned from my own field, and from my Chestertonian style of poking around in other fields.

There are really three points I wish to make. Two of them come from something I told you the other day: in automata theory, which is the mathematics which governs all language and the theoretical producers of linguistic patterns - a study which includes all existing as well as all future computers as a trivial case - there is a very simple formula, A*, which we call "A-star". I won't try to teach you the fundamentals of automata theory here, though it would be fun if we could, maybe just five or six lectures would do it... Ahem! But this formula is simply the symbol to represent all possible "strings" of characters. Taking the set A to be the usual ASCII characters you see on your computer, A* contains every e-mail, every blogg-posting, every comment, the text from every web site - it contains the Bible and every other book - as well as every version of every book, pristine or full of typos. It contains all of Chesterton's writing (yes, even the stuff he tore up and threw out before it was printed!) and every word or phrase or sentence which can be written or spoken or typed or represented using ASCII, whether it be meaningful or nonsense, holy or silly, good or evil...

How? Simply because this A* contains every possible pattern of characters drawn from our starting set - in our current case, the ASCII characters you are presently staring at. This is possible simply because of two very simple reasons.

The first reason is because the starting set is FINITE. We usually call that set the "alphabet", though in ASCII we have the space and punctuation and digits and other things besides both upper-case and lower-case letters.

Now, I want you to think about this. (No I am NOT making an "anti-protestant" argument. I am pointing out something very splendid about the gift we call language.) Our ASCII characters are really just the usual English letters, together with some punctuation. Those English letters are just the old Roman letters, with J and W thrown in to help out, and a distinction made between U and V. If you go to Roma, you will be able to read inscriptions which are over 2000 years old - even if you don't know Latin, you will at least be spell out the words. And those Roman letters are just an adoption of the Greek alphabet - we call it "alphabet" from the Greek "Alpha, Beta" you know. If I had time, I'd explain about how G used to be third, and how Z got demoted from the seventh place and other fun things - or how those Greek letters came from an older Phoenician - or some Semitic characters... But this is not a history lesson. The point here is that this scheme of writing, unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, the ideograms of China, or certain other schemes, is a scheme which represents a certain vocal sound (they call this a phoneme) with a certain symbol. And one more thing - one VERY critical thing: there are ONLY JUST SO MANY OF THESE. Maybe about 40 or so in English.

All right. You get that? Our speech, and our writing, are founded upon a FINITE collection, either sounds we make with our mouths, or shapes we write (or type) - just this many, and no more. Now, we need to consider the second reason.

The second reason is because the length of the pattern (the "string" of characters) we compose from that starting set is also FINITE! I know, I've been told many times that I write lengthy postings. When I see you can purchase a terabyte-size disk drive (that means a trillion characters, or 1,000,000,000,000) for less than a hundred dollars, why should we worry about another few hundred words? The typical photograph takes up between 2 and 3 million, just for comparison, and the longest of my writings so far during the Great Novena is about 20,000. So there. Ahem! I could point out that the novels of (NAME of FAMOUS AUTHOR OMITTED) are lengthy too. But the point is not that these are lengthy... I remember Tolkien's comment in his introduction to the trilogy where he said the one complaint he got is that his work was TOO SHORT. Amazing! The point is that they are FINITE. They do come to an end. You buy the book, or download the web page - and there it is. Sure, I know near the bottom it may say those most dramatic of all possible words, "To Be Continued" - but I want you to hear how GKC puts it:

Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our next." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:341]

Now, this phrase happens to appear elsewhere in GKC's writing, and it forms a major link in the larger study, the study of Story writ large, which he takes up in The Everlasting Man. (Yet I didn't mean to foretell this by mentioning Tolkien; you're just seeing the master structure put there, not by me, but by the Author. And no I do NOT mean Chesterton.) Here is the other quote, which will reveal a little of the point I have been babbling about:

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, "to be continued in our next." If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right. But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. he can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards if he chooses.
[GKC Heretics CW1:143-4]

The point, you see, is that the prayer when it is just a finite string, be it written or verbal, is just that. Something has to repeat, since there are only so many letters to arrange, and only so many words: I expect one could find prayers to Ra or Apollo which are strangely similar to ones spoken to Jesus. (Chesterton examines the ubiquity of the externals of religion in (e.g.) Orthodoxy CW1:333, but I have no time to go into that today.) The point is not the "simple" repetition which may occur, intended or not, in the verbal forms. Nor is it the point of recapitulating a theme - that wonderful technique in music, about which nearly every single detail I have above stated must also apply, providing you transpose (hee hee) into the new idiom.

The point is that we are the baby in his mother's arms, murmuring the same simple things. We don't speak God's language - when He gave us the Our Father, He Himself "transposed" a little for us, into a key even a novice can handle - but you are forgetting what we have been told. You see, we've only mentioned two parts of the picture. There's one more thing... there is a trinity here too. There is not only the finite alphabet, and the finite sentence. There is a third something - and it is in essence infinite, and though it may be so far beyond our senses as to appear not merely finite, but empty, in reality it is the great mystery which permits the others to operate.

Are you BARKING MAD, Doctor? What on earth are you jabbering on about?

Oh... it's just the usual Chestertonian paradox of a thing being "too big to be noticed" ["The Three Tools of Death" in The Innocence of Father Brown] It often happens, so you need not feel dull. It's quite easy, like forgetting the identity of the free monoid. Ahem, sorry, that's the closest tech thing I can come to expressing the idea... but wait. Here's a better line, from a very wonderful Chestertonian text:

"Oh dear, all those words again," thought Milo as he climbed into the wagon with Tock and the cabinet members. "How are you going to make it move? It doesn't have a -"
"Be very quiet," advised the Duke. "It goes without saying."
[Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth near the end of chapter six]

If we are speaking, there is a necessary silence.

If we are writing, there is a necessary blank page.

If we are typing, there must be - er - let us say - sufficient empty memory.

And if we are praying, there is Our Gift, Who makes it possible for us to begin the communication. In this context, the Holy Spirit might be grasped as the "medium" of prayer, the Divine Network, the Mystic Page, the Holy Silence... No, I didn't invent this idea. I read it up in a letter from St. Paul:

Likewise, the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity. For, we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit himself asketh for us with unspeakable groanings.
[Romans 8;26]

Hence, even a little child repeating the same simple sounds with love (another name for the Holy Spirit) may be praying in a far richer manner than anyone but God can know...

Our point, then, is not so much to dwell on the mere mechanics of the words, though we should be concerned with propriety and with beauty. If we are going to a wedding banquet we ought to be properly dressed. [see Mt 22:11-14] And hence we begin to understand the point we heard about previously, about having the right intention. It is just as possible to babble on as the pagans by a non-repeating, non-traditional extemporaneous prayer as it is to be in deep communion with God through the repetition of simple phrases... But at this point we shall stop, and consider the subsequent point tomorrow.

Seventh day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

Today, the Thursday within the Great Novena, I wish to speak about a prayer very important to me - yet something which may cause a bit of bother to some Christians who are not Catholic. I mean the Rosary. Before we begin, I wish to show something which you might not expect. There is a line in one of the more famous Father Brown stories, a line which was always very suggestive to me, and which became even more powerful once I had parsed it further. Have you ever wondered about it? Check it out:

[The General said,] "I don't see why you should come to me about it. I ought to tell you I'm a strong Protestant."
"I'm very fond of strong Protestants," said Father Brown. "I came to you because I was sure you would tell the truth.
[GKC "The Chief Mourner of Marne" in The Secret Of Father Brown

Do you understand what Father Brown really means here? Here is how I have interpreted it, and how I (for lack of any other evidence) hope to proceed today:

To Father Brown, a "strong Protestant" means that he is strong in Christian faith - that he loves Jesus. Hence he desires truth - and will strive to tell it.

So if you are a "strong Protestant", I hope you will grasp my points here. You may be a bit surprised, because you will hear how a modern high-tech computer scientist looks at this ancient devotion - not in a lot of detail, but enough to be suggestive. I will also bring in some various points GKC makes, not so much to bolster the argument, since I don't really wish to MAKE an argument, but to set forth what it is I do - er - what those who say the rosary are doing, and why they do it.

The first thing to understand is that we are NOT worshipping Mary. That's forbidden. Protestants and Catholics might not number the commandments the same, but nobody who understands the rosary thinks he is "worshipping" Mary. He never says anything more to her than God ordered an angel to say [Lk 1:28], or inspired Elizabeth to say [Lk 1:42] - or (in the second half of the prayer) anything more than St. Paul repeatedly said to the Thessalonians [2Thes3:1] or the Ephesians [Eph 3:13] or the Hebrews [Heb 13:18] or the Romans [Rom 15:30] - that is "pray for me, pray for us". (If necessary we can discuss the phrase "Mother of God" - but then that phrase has always been a sticking point for some people. Another time for that.)

Next, the issue of repetition. We've already seen instances from both the Old Testament (Ps 135 has 27 repeats of "for His mercy endureth forever") and New Testament (Mt 26:39,42,44 where Jesus prays with the exact same words three times) how authentic prayer can be repeated - but - to the amazement of many, including many Catholics, when the rosary is said correctly, there is only an apparent, and not an actual repetition!

Ah... you have never heard this before?

Well... rather than taking examples from computing, let's try this. Have you ever heard of the musical form called a "passacaglia"? That is "a species of chaconne, a slow dance on a ground-bass in triple rhythm."[Elson's Music Dictionary 195] A ground-bass is "a bass line consisting of a few simple notes, intended as a theme, on which, at each repetition, a new melody is constructed." [Ibid.] That - yes - that is what the Rosary is. The series of an Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and a Glory Be - that is the "ground-bass". On this "simple theme" we build a "new melody" based on one or another of the 20 "mysteries" - that is, major episodes in the Birth, Preaching-Life, Passion, or Resurrection-Life of our Lord Jesus Christ. Yes, the Rosary is simply a method (Greek hodos=way) of studying the life of JESUS.

(Now you see why I quoted that line about Strong Protestants...)

I'm not going pursue this topic at length, since the Rosary, like the Mass, is the kind of thing that can turn into two or three fat volumes. Just to give you a hint or two of the matters which can arise:

There is the amazing discovery I made during my doctoral residency, when I was at a little church with a another tech Catholic friend. There was a public recitation of the Rosary, but to our surprise at one of the decades, the leader changed into another language (one of the central European tongues, I never did learn which, maybe Slavic). We had recently attended a lecture about the various forms of parallel processors in computer science - and the incredible encounter of a group of people speaking to one another in two different languages was most instructive - it gives some very strong hints about the nature of heaven, about the nature of prayer, and indeed the nature of spiritual communication - and many other things - it was the whole Pentecost thing all over again! No, there was no "mystic" experience - it was all there, visible (or rather I should say audible, hee hee) but the intellectual intensity was amazing.

Then there is the idea I hinted at the other day, which so many people know from experience: they hear a song on the radio or their personal music player, and into their minds comes the feeling, the emotion, the whole experience of where they were when they first heard that song. The feeling is likely to be totally disjoint from the music, from the lyrics, from the "setting" intended by the rock group - but the thing happens. This might be called a "little mystery" of your own life, and you re-live it when you hear the tune. Now, there weren't no rock groups in Judea during the reign of Caesar Augustus or Tiberius - so we can't use them to "feel" - but we can come close with the rosary.

The Catholic calls this form of mental work "meditation". There is a bit of confusion about this word, since it is used by another... er, well, I can't say "philosophy" there, and "religion" isn't quite right either. The word "meditation" is used, let us say, by another "view or way of life": for them "meditation" is as distinct from Catholic meditation as darkness is distinct from light. The Catholic meditates with his intellect not only enabled, but running at full throttle, wide open, all circuits active and engaged - it is Reason trying to incarnate the memory. (For the other view/way, "meditation" is an abandonment of reason, a disabling and emptying and suppression of the intellect - but we are not writing about that here.) I must point this out because someone may get confused by the appearance of the same word. But then people get confused about Chesterton's own comments, or with technical terms, and so forth. It's why the Scholastics were always careful to define and distinguish.

One of the most amazing things for a Chestertonian to explore is the application of his writings to the various mysteries. I've not yet made a complete collection, but since Chesterton was extremely interested in the life of Jesus, one can hardly help running into Chestertonian thoughts as one proceeds through the Liturgical Cycle of the mysteries of Christ's life...

I should warn you - some of them are quite profound. If once you read "The God in the Cave" from GKC's The Everlasting Man you will never say the Third Joyful mystery, or go to midnight Mass - or even think of Christmas - in quite the same way. It has a very strong and enduring power, well worth your time reading, and re-reading. I can hardly tell you why this is so (though I might speculate on it). Chesterton does not reveal unusual truths, as (for example) Father Ricciotti does in his wonderful part-archaeology/part-theology text, The Life of Christ. Chesterton merely gives you a new way of looking at something you always knew - he finds an angle from which to view those familiar scenes and you see things you never saw before.

So I will give you just a few examples so you can get a hint of what I mean. Yes, I've intentionally left some empty - you will either have to wait until I have more time, or else try to fill them in for yourself. And you may find far better quotes than I have - this is just a beginning. Certainly TEM has a good deal of material since its entire second half is "On the Man Called Christ".

Joyful:

First: the Annunciation

Second: the Visitation
There is the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat - exaltavit humiles.

Third: the Nativity
A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.
[GKC TEM CW2:301]

Fourth: the Presentation

Fifth: the Finding in the Temple

Luminous:

First: the Baptism in the Jordan

Second: the Wedding at Cana
If there is one incident in the record which affects me personally as grandly and gloriously human, it is the incident of giving wine for the wedding-feast. That is really human in the sense in which a whole crowd of prigs, having the appearance of human beings, can hardly be described as human. It rises superior to all superior persons. It is as human as Herrick and as democratic as Dickens. But even in that story there is something else that has that note of things not fully explained; and in a way here very relevant. I mean the first hesitation, not on any ground touching the nature of the miracle, but on that of the propriety of working any miracles at all, at least at that stage, "my time is not yet come." What did that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or purpose in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in. And if we leave out that solitary strategic plan, we not only leave out the point of the story, but the story.
[GKC TEM CW2:336-7]

Third: the Proclamation of the Kingdom

Fourth: the Transfiguration
It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life - other things superficially, but this always in our depths. "It is good for us to be here - it is good for us to be here," repeating itself eternally.
[GKC letter to Frances, quoted in Ward Gilbert Keith Chesterton 110]

Fifth: the Institution of the Eucharist
They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seemed quite unnaturally joyful
about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. [TEM CW2:295-6]

As to Transubstantiation, it is less easy to talk currently about that; but I
would gently suggest that, to most ordinary outsiders with any common sense, there would be a considerable practical difference between Jehovah pervading the universe and Jesus Christ coming into the room.
[GKC The Thing CW3:180


Sorrowful:

First: the Agony in the Garden

At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans on the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive that is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ. Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the tradition is not so unreasonable as some may suppose. But whether or not it is historically right, it is not artistically wrong. The instinct, if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct. One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is its almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branch of an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural that it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument. Even the
shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the living olive might well have a legend like that of the aspen; as if it had grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divine vision of death. A child from one of the villages said to me, in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers. I for one could not ask for a finer or more defiant statement of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew; credo quia impossibile.
[GKC The New Jerusalem CW20:353]

Second: the Scourging at the Pillar

Third: the Crowning with Thorns

Fourth: the Carrying of the Cross
But if ever realism could be called ruthless, and ruthlessness could be called right, it is in the rending story of insult and injustice that has been imbodied in the Stations of the Cross. Christians are enjoined to think about it; but I must confess that I simply have not the courage to write about it. It is rather too real, or realistic, for one commonly in contact with the milder modern realism. Anything so grim in every detail as that would be recognised as beating all the moderns at their own game, if only it had been on what is called the modern side. Details like the repeated failure to carry the Cross have an inhuman horror of humiliation, that would make the fortune of a modern novelist writing on concentration camps to prove there is no God, instead of writing to prove that a God so loved the world. Now, through this trailing tragedy of torture, this Procession of Protracted Death, to use the phrase of one of our cheerful modern poets, Brangwyn has stuck grimly in the main to the grim old tradition of exhaustion and defeat. He almost exaggerates, if anybody could exaggerate, the paradox of the impotence of omnipotence and the hopelessness of the hope of the world. Christ appears again and again prone as a felled tree or a fallen pillar, faceless in that His face is already turned away to nothingness and night. And yet it all works up, as it seems to me, to one central design in which Christ lifts His head, looks sharply over His shoulder, and his eyes shine with defiance and almost with fury. And that one flash of fierceness is shot back at the Women of Jerusalem weeping over Him.
GKC Way of the Cross CW3:542]

Fifth: the Crucifixion
But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour, "It is well that one man die for the people." Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had also been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honoured forever. It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducces and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.
[GKC TEM CW2:343-4

Glorious:
First: the Resurrection
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.
[GKC TEM CW2:345]

Second: the Ascension

Third: the Descent of the Holy Spirit
The general impression [GKC had of the statues in the Lateran Basilica in Rome] is that the Twelve Apostles always preferred to stand in a draught, but that they inhabited a curious country where the wind blew in all the opposite ways at once. Perhaps some such licence might be allowed to the supernatural wind of Pentecost, which was truly a wind of liberty in the sense of a wind of isolating individualism; bringing different gifts to different people; a good wind that blew nobody harm.
[GKC The Resurrection of Rome CW20:340

Fourth: the Assumption

Fifth: the Coronation

"Long years and centuries ago our fathers or the founders of our people drank, as they dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed since the strength of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the age of giants. Centuries ago already is the dark time of the second fermentation, when the wine of Catholicism turned into the vinegar of Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted; rinsed out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world. Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and the spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength of the purple vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold. Day by day and year by year we have lowered our hopes and lessened our convictions; we have grown more and more used to seeing those vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the water-floods and the last savour and suggestion of that special element fading like a stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to dilution, to dissolution, to a watering down and went on forever. But Thou hast kept the good wine until now."
[GKC TEM CW2:391]

No - I didn't goof, and misplace that last one. I put it there intentionally, since it is in keeping with the whole design of the Detective Story of the Gospels, and because GKC himself liked to speak of the "good wine poured in the inn at the end of the world." [NNH CW6:371] It's something we are looking forward to. And here is the final quote of all. It is a bit tricky to grasp - but perhaps you will see it if you meditate on it for a little...

[Clare Nicholl wrote:] We always made a great feature of our table decorations and used to compete with each other to think up new things every year. This particular Christmas the table was a concerted family effort. We made them wait in the hall while we arranged the final dramatic effect. When the door to the dining-room was opened, the room was in darkness except for the firelight. In the middle of the table was a seascape (the big looking-glass from the hall) and a ship in full sail towards a high rocky harbour (representing the cobb at Lyme). On the edge of the harbour wall was a toy lighthouse. A nightlight inside made the windows revolve so that the miniature beams shot through the darkness and lit Up the sea and the ship, its sails full set for home.
We of course expected pleasure and surprise and plenty of appreciation of our labours. What we were not prepared for was G.K.'s reaction. He came in last, being "taken into dinner" by one of us. He said no word at all, but paused in the doorway and stared and stared. And the sister whose arm was in his was stirred out of all proportion and heard herself muttering her thoughts aloud to G.K. (one of his rarest qualities was that one could literally think aloud to him without fear or self-consciousness). "It reminds me," she said, "of the Salve Regina." And G.K. said below his breath, "Yes - nobis, post hoc exsilium ostende . . ."
[in Ward, Return To Chesterton 315]

I can't leave with out some word to guide you here. The "Salve Regina" is the prayer recited at the very end of the Rosary - in English it is "Hail Holy Queen". The Latin phrase means "after this exile, show"... But here I will let you ponder it for yourself.

P.S. I say the rosary with the hope of getting closer to Jesus... and yes, I say it every day, since I'm in the Confraternity, the same which assisted the Pope by doing back-up support to Don John of Austria during the battle of Lepanto... Oh, yes. If you want to know more, go here.

Sixth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

Previously I mentioned the "Liturgy of the Hours", also called the "Divine Office" - and it is possible that some of our readers - even some of our Catholic readers - will not know anything about this wonderful public formal prayer. This "Office" is the daily prayer recited or chanted by all priests, monks, nuns, and religious orders of all kinds, and also by a growing number of laity. It is simply a formal arrangement of praying those most beautiful and ancient prayers called the Psalms - those 150 poetic entities inspired by God.

Now, as with the Mass, my problem is to throttle back the vast flow of thought, and try to reduce it to something manageable in this short (?) column, as well as show some connections to our Mister Chesterton. The striking thing about the Office, of course, is that like the Mass, it is totally biblical, literary, scientific - it is a grand fusion of all Art, of all Science - so that "all flesh bless his holy name forever". [Ps 144:21]

Where is the science? Ah. It's to be found in the Larger Creation Story: "And God said: Let there be lights made in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day and the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years." [Gen 1:14] While it is clear that TIME existed already, since LIGHT already existed, the creation of the Great Lights implies the ordaining of what we now call metrology - the science of measurement. As you may know, the sacred text does not use the pagan names for those Great Lights, so I shall avoid them also. But we all know that the apparent diurnal motion of our local star gives us our "day", and by division our hours, while the motion of our large natural satellite suggests what we now call a "month" which also has a division into weeks - though these are likewise groupings of days. Another apparent motion gives us the "year" but we know all this, so let us proceed.

As you may already know, there are 150 psalms. These are poetic prayers, inspired by God, and recited by pious Jews from the time of David onward. As I mentioned previously, Jesus Himself recited them - we know he quoted two even on the cross! (Ps 21 and 30) There are others hinted in various places like the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:5 vs Ps 36:11, Mt 5:8 vs Ps 23:4, Mt 5:35 vs Ps 47:3) - clearly Jesus knew the Psalms. And it is clear that the Apostles did too: it is fitting for us to note this now, during the Great Novena, since it is proven by Peter's words regarding the replacing of the Betrayer [Acts 1:20] at this very point in time between the Ascension and Pentecost - he quotes Psalm 68:26! Obviously, the Psalms were important - and they remained so as the Church grew. But sooner or later someone must have asked, there are 150 psalms - how should we use them?

There are some religious orders (the Benedictines, I am told) which recite all 150 every day - but this does take some time. Also, the Church in her wisdom realized that this extreme wealth might overwhelm people, so she arranges them to be governed like time itself, by the Great Lights. There are liturgical seasons - Advent and Christmas and Epiphany, Lent and Easter and Pentecost. (Let us defer discussion of "Ordinary Time" - like it or not, every Sunday for nearly 2000 years has been a "Sunday After Pentecost"!) But the Church also uses another tactic, which comes from the Psalms themselves:

Seven times a day I have given praise to thee... [Ps 118:164]

This idea, now perhaps around 3000 years old, gave rise to what are called the seven "canonical hours": Matins together with Lauds, Prime and Terce and Sext and None, Vespers and Compline. These, like so many other things, have been renamed - the two "cardinal" or hinge-hours are Matins or Morning Prayer, and Vespers or Evening Prayer. These are dignified with a larger ritual which includes among other things, the liturgical recitation of the Lord's Prayer (the Our Father) and the chanting of the great canticles of the Gospel - at Matins, the "Benedictus" of Zachariah, and at Vespers, the "Magnificat" of Mary.

Why do I give all this detail? Partly to acquaint you with something which is too poorly known, even though you can get the Office in English and do it yourself - it's not difficult. Partly to indicate that this technique of time-based prayer, even if reduced to the "cardinal" hours, will rapidly give you a working awareness of the Psalms, and a sense of admiration for them which is not easy to get, even if you have actually read the entire Book of Psalms. The difference is akin to the difference between reading a book about something - say hiking - and going on a hike. The Psalms are prayers, and should be prayed, not read as if they were just another bunch of literary efforts. The wise design of the Church in arranging the fixed structure of the Office is thereby revealed - by praying the Office, you will not merely learn something, but will begin to gain practice in a time-honored method of communicating with God. David and Jesus and Peter knew them - why shouldn't you?

I didn't plan to link the Office to a "literary" view of the Psalms - but it turns out that Chesterton linked them:

Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent: thus the Hebrew songs appeared turgid to Voltaire and the critics of the eighteenth century; thus the epigrams of the French Revolution appear turgid to ourselves. The reason is not that the Hebrew psalmists or the French Revolutionists were affected, but that we are not so interested in religion as the Hebrew psalmists, nor so interested in democracy as the French Revolutionists.
[GKC "Victor Hugo" in A Handful of Authors]

There is also an excellent essay from the ILN collection, from which I will give just a sample:

Some time ago half the Freethinkers in Fleet Street were defending the Bible against the Bishops. Churchmen began to expurgate the Psalms, because they are so naughty. Journalists began to read the Psalms, and to discover how good they are. It was a funny situation...

...this very notion of a presence perverting the body has not only come as natural to many pens noting the contemporary madness of the enemy, but is the real criticism of the contemporary quarrel about the Psalms. Paradoxical as it may appear, the true meaning of the language about breaking the teeth of the tyrant and eater of men is connected with the high mysticism about the body as the temple of the Holy Ghost. It is the true warning to the wicked man that he may so become, as it were, a theatre or seat of usurpation. And it is simply the sign of it that his very face becomes provocation and his very body an obstacle. All that is at war with wrong really wishes to break his teeth, as it would wish to break the portcullis of an ogre's castle. Whether we believe in demons or no, the ultimate thing to be avoided is really this incorporation with badness, this incarnation of blasphemy. Physical metaphors, and even physical acts, are very far from being irrelevant to it. And it is no mere flippancy to say that, if such a man really does not know that he is ugly, it is the first and highest spiritual duty to, tell him he is ugly. The second is to hit him in the face.
[GKC ILN Jul 28 1917 CW31:131, 134]

Perhaps it would have been better to post the whole thing somewhere, but it might get a bit complex to discuss, as it touches on a number of issues which would also need discussion, and it is the point about the Devil and the Psalms which is the critical one here. (Incidentally, the Psalm referred to is likely the one which reads "For thou hast struck all them who are my adversaries without cause: thou hast broken the teeth of sinners." [Ps 3:8]

The point of course is not merely the "verbal fireworks" or the incidental commentary on World War I, or even on the debate between journalists and some churchmen. The point is that the Psalms indeed form a chief weapon against the Powers of Evil, which are quite real, and must be fought against. And this is another reason for the power of the Office - that by praying God's Own prayers, dictated by the Holy Spirit and prayed by Jesus Himself, we work against our Enemy. (It ought to be noted here that our Enemy does know the Psalms - he quoted them in the Temptation: see Mt 4:6 which quotes Ps 90:12)

But you say, what if a person can't read the Psalms - or hasn't that kind of time? Chesterton gives us the answer in a curious place:

More than one portrait of Chaucer remains to give a general idea of his appearance, though that was the time of the first beginnings of the portraiture in paint, at least in this country, as Chaucer himself may be called the beginning of portrait-painting in literature. The pictures we have represent him as he was in later life, ... The best existing portrait is that published by the poet Occleve, to illustrate one of his own poems. It shows the head in a black hood against a green ground; two tufts of grey beard and a wisp of whitish hair rather recall, at least to modern associations, the elvish comparison; but the face is sober and benevolent, not without something of that sleepiness touched with slyness, that is the mood of much of his later work. Red cords on his dress support writing materials and he appears to be carrying a rosary; at least, as it is certainly a string of beads, it seems most likely that it is a rosary. For I cannot suppose that Chaucer's quarrel with the Friar even if it went to the point of assault and battery, would have prevented him from carrying what has been called the Layman's Breviary, devoted to the Virgin to whom he had so much devotion, merely because the instrument happens to have been invented by St. Dominic.
[GKC Chaucer CW18:232-3]

A "breviary" is nothing more than the book of the Divine Office, which we see Father Brown carrying in the famous episode of the "Flying Stars" (in The Innocence of Father Brown).

The "Layman's Breviary", as GKC tells us, is the Rosary - and that formal prayer we shall consider tomorrow. But for today I have one more point to make - the same point as I have been struggling to communicate in previous discussions. That is, if we have something formal and ritualistic, such as the Office - or even any given individual Psalm - how can it be OUR prayer - how does MY OWN particular message enter into such existing formalism?

There is a famous quip of Chesterton's which implies the answer. It is funny, and maybe flippant - but there is a clue in it, and I wish you to ponder it.

A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger.
[GKC Apr 7 1906 CW27:161]

We are not free to alter the composition of a Psalm - or the Office - yet we can use it artistically, just as an organist can exert his art in performing the most rigidly precise Bach fugue. He is not a computer governing a MIDI synthesizer, or a CD player regurgitating thousands of samples through a D-to-A converter. It is not the mathematics of the Psalm which provides the art, just as it is not the chemistry of the paint in the portrait. When Jesus gasped "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" He did not alter the text - but He stamped His own suffering into those words in an unutterably personal way. (Yes, I have noted the comments, made some time ago, surrounding GKC's views on this particular phrase, and perhaps someday will be able to address it at length.) If we are to be like our Master, according to His own last, most specific and most generative command "teaching them to do everything I have commanded" [see Mt 28:20] then we ought to pray as He did - and let our hearts and minds add that wordless but authentic "personal and imperceptible alteration" to our Work: yes, even to the Psalms.

Remember too, that "Master, teach us how to pray" is itself a prayer. If you need help, ask Him.

Fifth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

As we know, there are both public and private forms of prayer. The public forms are those in which there are more or less regular structures or formulas - the "rituals" which follow printed scripts - yes, just like the script of a theatrical production, it specifies what is to be done and what is to be said. Such things have existed as long as human records have existed to record them - there are fragments from Egypt dating back perhaps five millennia. It is important to note, as we noted last time, that the script is not the prayer. This ought to be clear to us technical folks: we know that the orchestral score is not the symphony, the source code is not the program-in-execution, the CD is not the rock-and-roll drums and guitars blasting out of the speakers - even while there is some strong relation between these things.

The problem, of course, is that us technical folks don't even quite believe this - which is clear and easy. Oh yes. It takes quite some practice for someone to learn to perform a given piece of sheet music on a given musical instrument - but the concept of performance, and the general ideas governing that mystical five-line thing with the splendid squiggly treble clef and those clusters of black dots - why, that can be learned in an hour or maybe even less. You don't gasp at the complexity of a cookbook set next to the prepared meal, do you? Why should you then gasp at those other mystical pairs? Please. Sure it is hard to learn the physics and the electrical engineering and various other stages of development necessary to produce a CD (I mean a compact disk, not a certificate of deposit!) - but again, you could learn the general method, the why and the wherefore, of those stages in an hour. Yes it would take longer than the time it takes for you to pull the CD out of its plastic case and wedge it into your player - but you mean to say you BELIEVE IN IT as if it were MAGIC? Oh, no, no no!

I will omit, for obvious reasons, a repeat of this emphasis about computer programs - but believe me, I could make it, and at even greater length. (Some of my friends and I have started calling computers "the magic box" - the thing about which almost no one knows what it does or how it works, but which when you touch it, you become intelligent beyond the power of words to describe! How sad.)

But the same thing applies also to prayer - and especially to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. I don't know why - unless it is that people don't want to spend even an hour to learn what it's all about. I know not everyone is going to spend the requisite time to really learn its structure, its whys and wherefores, its history and so forth - but surely we can learn enough to appreciate its wisdom and beauty.

Since I am a computer scientist, I could draw the obvious links to operating system design - and there are plenty... Here you whine - Doctor, please, aren't you forgetting this is the CHESTERTON blogg? Oh, no I am not. Indeed, one of the best hints of this strong link comes from GKC's writing! It is quite surprising:

In the course of a certain morning I came into one of the quiet squares of a small French town and found its cathedral. It was one of those grey and rainy days which rather suit the Gothic. The clouds were leaden, like the solid blue-grey lead of the spires and the jewelled windows; the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping with damp; and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were scoured with old rains and new. I went into the round, deep porch with many doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain. I also found a notice of services, etc., and among these I found the announcement that at 11.30 (that is about half an hour later) there would be a special service for the Conscripts, that is to say, the draft of young men who were being taken from their homes in that little town and sent to serve in the French Army; sent (as it happened) at an awful moment, when the French Army was encamped at a parting of the ways. There were already a great many people there when I entered, not only of all kinds, but in all attitudes, kneeling, sitting, or standing about. And there was that general sense that strikes every man from a Protestant country, whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or likes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing was "going on all the time"; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual process, as if it were a sort of mystical inn.
[GKC "The Conscript and the Crisis" in A Miscellany of Men]

A perpetual process - this is about as literally precise a term from operating systems theory in computing as you will ever find. But it is far more. It is biblical:

For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts.
[Malachias 1:11]

From the rising of the sun to the going down. Yes, the kind of thing that is "going on all the time". In your computer, there are perpetual processes, programs unlike all the rest, that run without ending. (It is a superlative scholastic joke to say that their "end" is to not end!) But the mystery of the operating system is far more than this. It is most Christian, and most Eucharistic. The operating system seems to some to be the thing in control - they think of the "Master Control Program", the famous electronic villain in "TRON" - but they do not understand the truth of its existence, the purpose of every Program is to serve its User!

You must begin to think as Chesterton - no, you must begin to APPLY the Chestertonian methods to other things, not just to World War I or to Shaw's plays or to Blake's paintings. There is here, in your operating system, hidden deep within your computer, a mysterious suggestion of a great biblical dictum:

Even as the Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a redemption for many. [Matthew 20:28]

The word "minister" is just the Latin for "servant", hence this passage is also translated: "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve..." The system is there to serve.

Ah, but you do not like this electronic technology? You find it too magical? It's not. It's very straightforward, and can be taught, that's why it is called "technology", the study of an art! (Oh, you didn't study Greek? Neither did I, but I know enough to help, and I have Liddell and Scott too!) Well, let's try something else, maybe closer to you, and more familiar.

Do you know about the engine in your car? Do you serve it, or does it serve you? You must give it gas and oil and other maintenance, but does it not wait patiently in your driveway, in the parking lot, does it not go when you press the gas and stop when you press the brake? Ah... but then you have learned that a great lesson, indeed, the most amazing of all lessons to be found in the Gospels, since it was not taught by Jesus, but by a pagan.

Huh?

Oh yes. It is so marvellous, that the very words of that pagan are recited in every Mass, yes, we Catholics are so catholic (the Greek for universal) that we adopted a pagan prayer and use it "from the rising of the sun to its setting". Because, if you understand that the car obeys, that it is under your authority, then you have grasped the famous Pagan Parable preached by the Centurion to Jesus:

And when Jesus had entered into Capharnaum, there came to him a centurion, beseeching him, And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, and is grievously tormented. And Jesus saith to him: I will come and heal him. And the centurion, making answer, said: Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof; but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed. For I also am a man subject to authority, having under me soldiers; and I say to this, Go, and he goeth, and to another Come, and he cometh, and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. And Jesus hearing this, marvelled; and said to them that followed him. Amen I say to you, I have not found so great faith in Israel.
[Mt 8:5-10, emphasis added]

Yes indeed. Those emphasized words are spoken at every Mass - and they are indeed a prayer (a petition for assistance) coming from a pagan (the Centurion). But the parable is a lesson in the nature of authority, and it is good that we study it.

I have one other point to make about the Mass, which might be a bit quarrelsome, but I wish to propose it for your consideration, since it gets to a difficult matter, and is intimately connected with the question of how such a spectacular and public prayer can also simultaneously be most private and personal. Here it is:

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a re-presentation of Calvary, and is sometimes referred to as the "Unbloody" sacrifice of the cross - though of course the blood is there, just as it was that Good Friday almost 2000 years ago. In some mystical manner, without concern for space and time, we who attend Mass are made to be present in actuality at the One Sacrifice on that little hill that afternoon in early spring... The question about "participation" might therefore be voiced as "How do we participate in the Crucifixion?" Are we the soldiers, nailing hands and feet, gambling on His robe, standing guard in bored indifference? The on-lookers jeering and challenging? Or are we standing silent nearby, opening our hearts and minds to the mystic truth of the God Who Became the Victim? Perhaps you might recall how Chesterton put it, in trying to emphasize the novel truth of the Mass, something missed perhaps because (as Father Brown says in "The Three Tools of Death") it is too big to be seen:

...nobody notices it, because it is not secret but public; because it is not cruel but humane; and because in that antique Italian idolatry, it is not the priest but the god that died.
[GKC The Resurrection of Rome CW21:455]

In other words, we can and should participate with our heart and mind, even if we are not otherwise called upon to move or speak according to the specified script. It is a profound mystery that we can be there at all, and we need to begin to take it to heart. Chesterton tried, again and again, by his use of novel vantage points of description, to bring the common things which everyone neglects back into view. It is the same thing with Mass. We are to try to bring this Great Event back into our view, daily if possible, even if we resort to automotive mechanics or to operating systems theory, for by that means "my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts."

After all, even these things, the work of human hands, are not to be excluded from singing the Divine Praise:

And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard all saying: To him that sitteth on the throne and to the Lamb, benediction and honour and glory and power, for ever and ever.
[Apocalypse/Revelation 5:13]

Perhaps we need to begin to think again that all human work, be it software or cars or CDs, ought to be fit to the praise of God. We might rejuvenate our world - and that, as you may recall, is the first psalm of the Mass:

Introibo ad altare Dei.
Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.

I will go in to the altar of God.
To God who gives joy to my youth.

Fourth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

In considering my comments yesterday, I was struck by what some will think is a serious discrepancy, or perhaps a failure to distinguish properly. The discrepancy is that there are different kinds of prayer, though they all have the same primary purpose: communication with God, just as they all have the same four "ends": Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, Supplication. What "kinds" are there? Of course there are various "dimensions" to prayer: public and private, formal and informal, verbal and nonverbal. But then there are different kinds of Art - music, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry - and here too there can be public and private, formal and informal, verbal and nonverbal.

The discrepancy is not a discrepancy. Like so many other things, it is a matter of intention Now, lest some people cry out a famous old epigram regardin intentions, I shall repeat what Chesterton says. It is necessary for us to be dogmatic, just as it is necessary in painting to discuss the nature of light and dark and color, or in music the nature of pitch and duration - and it is helpful to both the many Arts and Sciences, as well as to the Chief of All Arts, which is Language, and the chief work of that Art, which is prayer:

To understand the medieval controversy, a word must be said of the Catholic doctrine, which is as modern as it is medieval. That 'God looked on all things and saw that they were good' [Gen 1:31] contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow, or is too hasty to notice. It is the thesis that there are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with. But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:485]

Yes - this is why a computer or a parrot cannot pray, even though they "speak" the words of prayer. They cannot have any intention in their action. Therefore, once one has the intention of praying, any action subsequent to that intention can be, and is, a prayer.

Indeed, this is a bit hard to grasp for us, since we are used to so many pre-arranged formulas. But we need to repeat the definition: prayer is "the lifting of mind and heart to God". Yes, any action at all can be a prayer.

Now, what about formulas? Well, we use formulas in our every-day discourse, it's how we do things. We greet others in formula, we use them in letters and e-mails and on the phone. Whole new truncated formulas - "shorthand" or "tachygraphy" - have arisen to reduce the button-pressing on cell-phones. The ancient Egyptians actually had a shorthand, and both Greeks and Romans had forms: Plutarch says that Cicero introduced shorthand at Rome, calling it the greek term dia shmeiwn, suggesting that the Latin version derives from the Greek. ["Tachygraphy" in The Oxford Classical Dictionary 876] But we are talking about formulas in general. The Greek caire is readily translated as "Greetings" but has a fuller sense "rejoice, be glad". The Latin greeting Salve! is "Be healthy!" and the farewell Vale! is "Be strong!" We say "Hello" and "Good-bye"; in the days of Morse Code, there is "CQ" a kind of broadcast greeting; "73" means "best wishes" and "88" means "love and kisses" - but there are more rigorous rules, akin to those we use in written communication. For example, the letter "K" is sent at the end of a transmission and means "go ahead" to the guy on the other end. Finally, if you study even the most elementary parts of network computing, you will learn that there are messages just like these which keep the various computers working in harmony with each other.

So there are formulas in human discourse, and even in mechanical "communication". But prayer?

Let's look and see what Jesus did. The first observation is His response when the disciples asked "Master, teach us how to pray". The "Our Father" or "Lord's Prayer" is repeated countless times a day by Christians - the Church uses it in Holy Mass and also in the two cardinal "hinge" points of the official daily prayer, the "Divine Office" or "Liturgy of the Hours" which we'll discuss in a future column.

The second observation is to see how He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemani. It was a very simple prayer, and He said it again and again: "Father not My will by Thine be done." Here, we find the simple deflating of any possible rebuttals against "repetition" of prayer - if any could possibly exist after having heard His other comment about being steadfast in prayer (See Luke 18). Some may propose the words of Mt 6:7 against this, but there is a difference - and the difference is where it really is: in the intention and not in the volume (that means the quantity, not the decibel level). Or, to use a Gospel parallel: if a mother would not tire of hearing her little child make "ma" sounds over and over - how much more will our Heavenly Father not tire of hearing us repeat our heartfelt prayers? We are adults, yes, and can think with our minds and feel with our hearts - sometimes there are other works of Art which we are constructing while our mouth repeats simple but meaningful words, in the way Jesus did.

The third observation is to see the greatest and most profound use of prayer in the entire Gospel. It was while Jesus was suffering on the Cross. It is not readily recognized, but He quoted Psalm 21(22), which begins "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" You need to read it. The people who heard Him begin it knew how it went, and some of them must have stared, aghast, at seeing the prophecy fulfilled. And that was not the only Psalm He quoted. His very last words were these: " Into thy hands I commend my spirit" which are from Ps 30:6(31:5). If Jesus could quote someone else for His dying words, we surely can also resort to quoting others when our own words fail us. Henceforth, if anyone complains about using formula-prayer, just point out that you know a worthy example Whom you're imitating.

Obviously, the simple fact that prayer is an Art, and hence has multiple levels of meaning, suggests that we can pray in more than one way at a time. When we hear one of our favorite songs, we might attend to the tune, or the rhythm, or the words - or we might recall where we were, who we were with, how we felt, when we first heard it. This is the key to the great formula-prayers, in particular the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Divine Office, and the Rosary - but we shall explore those in future episodes.

Third day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

Yesterday we considered briefly the mysterious power of language - itself so wonderful and so transcendent that it would take several books to begin any real study, and that before we begin to address specifics like grammar or writing style.

It is this strange and somewhat lopsided treatment of the subject which can disturb some engineers and scientists. They proceed, much as our present-day Luddites do, to attack the tool with itself! You see it everywhere: web-sites and bloggs and political societies and even some academic institutions, arguing bitterly against "technology" as if it were somehow opposed to the liberal arts. Yet, all these always have web sites, and electric lights and word-processing software and laser printers. It might be understandable if they skinned their sheep to make their parchment, and scraped soot from their chimneys to make their ink... but of course they are bound to the tradition of a much higher technology, just as the cranky old "liberal" hypocrites who speak of "change" and "questioning authority".

All of these have forgotten Chesterton's great epigram on the subject:

A cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, "How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter." Moral. You should not look a gift universe in the mouth.
[GKC quoted in Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton 49-50]

The greatest technology is language, which also happens to be a great tradition, formally bound to ART writ large, that is, formed by human contrivance in all its parts; a thing far more unchanging than it is subject to change, and a thing which exists only, and most strictly, upon the force of authority.

All right. But what do we do with this language? Granted, the mathematicians have finished their studies of it: we know, and can assert, that all possible phrases, indeed, every possible collection of symbols of every human tongue, be it ancient and lost, or yet to exist, natural or contrived, Esperanto, Klingon, Quenya and the rest - every sentence, paragraph, book, volume, poem, and utterance, is contained in the simple symbol A*. That is, the star-closure of the free monoid over a given alphabet A. Sure, it's true - but what does that give us?

You are lost due to my symbols. I will paraphrase in the classical tongue. The A* of the automata theoreticians might be nothing more than the Greek hexameters on the palm-leaves of the Cumaean Sibyl, the ancient prophetess...

In her cave she was accustomeed to inscribe on leaves gather from the trees the names and fates of individuals. The leaves thus inscribed were arranged in order within the cave, and might be consulted by her votaries. But if perchance at the opening of the door the wind rushed in and dispersed the leaves the Sibyl gave no aid in restoring them again, and the oracle was irreparably lost.
[Bullfinch's Greek and Roman Mythology 220]

Yet, as with all prophecies, there ought to be an interpretor - even St. Paul points this out. Moreover, as we know from the real study of ancient tongues: the Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Cretan Linear, we need a "rosetta stone" to link one tongue to another, or the meaning of the text will forever lie beyond our grasp.

We do not even need to go quite so far back in history to see examples of such confusion. At the beginning of the chapter called "The Age of the Puritans" in Chesterton's A Short History of England there is an example of how distorted some histories have become:

We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the most exciting argument or string of adventures in which unmeaning words such as "snark" or "boojum" were systematically substituted for the names of the chief characters or objects in dispute; if we were told that a king was given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrendering the boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury by the public exhibition of a boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on the snark.
[GKC A Short History of England CW20:535]

I happen to like his two examples: a "most exciting argument or string of adventures" - but there is a better example which links the ancient Sibyl forward to something even more exciting:

That St. Francis would have burned all the leaves of all the books of the Sybil, in exchange for one fresh leaf from the nearest tree, is perfectly true; and perfectly proper to St. Francis. But it is good to have the Dies Irae as well as the Canticle of the Sun.
[GKC St. Francis of Assisi CW2:129]

Now you may not know that the Dies Irae is the Sequence (the poetic text) which is (or should be) used at Masses for the dead; it mentions the Sibyl as prophetess along with David. But you may not know what the "Canticle of the Sun" is. You may recall Chesterton's famous epigram "The greatest of poems is an inventory." [GKC Orthodoxy CW1:267] The "Canticle of the Sun" is the great poetic inventory written by St. Francis, enumerating the various members of the Creation and praising God Who made them. (You may have sung a version called "All Creatures of Our God and King".) It has quite a strong pagan tone, except that instead of deifying the various beings, it praises God their creator - much as Psalm 148 or the famous "Song of the Three Young Men" in Daniel 3.

Ah.

So this must rank as the first of all uses of language - praise and thanksgiving to the Creator for all His creation. And it is. When we speak of prayer, there is often taught a simple mnemonic (an aid to memory) to remind us of the Four Ends (purposes) of Prayer. It is not in Greek hexameter, but it is an acrostic, and you may regard it as something quite a bit more authentic than the the leaves of the Sibyl... the mnemonic is ACTS:

A - Adoration
C - Contrition
T - Thanksgiving
S - Supplication

And the first, "adoration" is hardest of all.

According to the Five Verbs of the Gloria, about which I hope to write some other time... oh, you are wondering what they are? Here you go:

Laudamus te. = We praise You.
Benedicimus te. = We bless You.
Adoramus te. = We adore You.
Glorificamus te. = We glorify You.
Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. = We give You thanks for Your great glory.

Now, as I was saying, according to the Five Verbs, "praise" is not the same as "adore" - and yet praise is a form of adoration. It would go beyond the scope of our study to proceed on this, but the very fact that these five verbs are specifically addressed to God, and are somehow parallel to the first three "Ends of Prayer" I listed above - this suggests something important in our use of Language.

It suggests that we must have knowledge about the basics - the sun, the earth, the food we eat, the air we breathe - even the death we must one day face - and see them all as gifts of God. This is nothing more than our knowing the meaning of words - we link our mental, spoken, written (typed) phrases - be they mere fonts or phonemes or symbols, members of A* or leaves of the Sibyl - to REALITY.

And in bowing down humbly to this awesome truth, we likewise acknowledge the Artist Who arranged it for us, to serve, to inspire, to delight. You may not be a scientist in a lab coat, but you were once a child, and you and I are both children and shall always be children when we touch Reality, when we look around:

He sees around him a world of a certain style or type. It seems to proceed by certain rules or at least repetitions. He sees a green architecture that builds itself without visible hands; but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern, like a design already drawn in the air by an invisible finger. It is not, as is now vaguely suggested, a vague thing. It is not a growth or a groping of blind life. Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end, even for every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common field. In the very shape of things there is more than green growth; there is the finality of the flower. It is a world of crowns. This impression, whether or no it be an illusion, has so profoundly influenced this race of thinkers and masters of the material world, that the vast majority have been moved to take a certain view of that world. They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower. But so long as the race of thinkers was able to think, it was obvious that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another thought more thrilling and even terrible. There was someone else, some strange and unseen being, who had designed these things, if indeed they were designed. There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods and hills for their coming, and had kindled the sunrise against their rising, as a servant kindles a fire.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:396]

Prayer is the Language by which we communicate with that Mysterious Benefactor...

Second day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

We proceed to examine our topic, the High Technology of Prayer.

One of the sillier antagonisms of our times is the one which tries to rank "science" against "art". I say it is silly, since "art" is nothing more than a thing done by Man, and "science" is nothing more than a thing known by Man - and in nearly all cases which come to mind, doing and knowing are so inter-related that it is (as I said) SILLY to think they are separate.

Of course it is true that the typical scientist spends more time studying and doing math and forces or circuits or structures - the things of the world and the typical artist (in the large sense) spends more time studying and doing words and dates and thoughts - the things of humanity. Again I find it silly, since the scientist has to use words - in other words, reading and writing, and the whole panoply of human arts - in his work, in order to acquire or disseminate his ideas. The artist has to use things - in other words, media, paper, pens, and the whole panoply of communication, that is the technical arts - in his work, also in order to acquire or disseminate his ideas.

Moreover, the singular art which is the also the singular science, the fountainhead of all other such things in the Tree of Virtues, is Language. Whether we come at it by the extreme mathematics of Finite State Automata, and all the glamors of the formalisms from Boolean Algebra to Turing Machines, or by the curious hypotheses of Indo-European Roots and the glamors of the three-consonant Semitic roots or the structures of poems and plays, we always approach it "from the inside" - since we cannot ever really get "outside" of Language to study it. In the neums of Gregorian Chant, as in the diagrams of Petri Nets, We always find ourselves erecting systems of signs to represent our thoughts. As Chestertonians, we might recall things like "The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd" in The Club of Queer Trades, or the hilarious mechanisms for character names GKC proposed when his sister-in-law got in trouble for using the name of a real person in a novel. [See Autobiography CW16:181-4] Of course the suggestion to use "numbers" rather than "names" ought to suggest that our Mr. Chesterton was a fore-runner in the theory of compiler design and file-system schemes, to rank with Von Neumann's "Code is Data" paradigm... but I digress.

No, the greatest Science, and the greatest Art, truly the sine qua non of civilisation, is Language, in both spoken and written forms. It is indeed so wonderful a gift that we are given it so early in life that most of us forget that we have been given it.... unless, as adults, we made the attempt to acquire another language, at which point we find out how incredibly hard it really is!

Language is of course a great mystery as well as a great gift. It is so important that it is one of the few human acts about which there is a specific commandment (the one about bearing false witness). If only we could feel the power, the majesty, that ought to gleam out from our powers of speech and of hearing, of writing (I must include typing here) and reading! Ah, if only there was a religious ritual - perhaps of the old pagan form, since the moderns don't seem to be creative - perhaps a temple - its symbol would have to be the door-knocker, on which Chesterton heaped such extravagant praise:

a door-knocker is so full of significance that any person of quite average intelligence might write volumes of poems about it. It is - to name but a few of the things beyond question - the symbol of courtesy, the guardian of the home, the declaration of the proposed meeting between man and man, the salute to the rights of the individual, the sign of the bringing of news, the herald of happiness, the herald of calamity, the iron hammer of love and death. That we have a knocker on our doors means almost everything that is meant by the whole of our ritual and literature. It means that we are not boors and barbarians; that we do not call on a man by climbing into the window or dropping down the chimney. It means all that was ever meant by the old fairy stories, in which a horn was hung up outside the castle of the giant or the magician, so that the daring visitor might have to blow it, and utter in echoing sound the thing that he dared. That trumpet, somewhat conventionalised in pattern and no longer, I must admit, adaptable as a wind instrument, still hangs outside every door in Brixton. It is still there, however neglected and debased in form, to express a dim sentiment that it is a serious thing to go into the house of a man. It is there to say that the meeting between one of God's images and another is a grave and dreadful matter, to be begun with thunder.
[GKC Lunacy and Letters, 66-7]

But therefore - no. Let me start again, with Chesterton's own emphatic phrase.

How much more, therefore, must we exalt our power of language when we use it, not to communicate with our neighbor whom we hail as we meet on the street, or our friend on our cell-phone, or cast forth our e-mails to all the corners of the networked globe - but to communicate beyond all space and time, past all possible representations of symbol capable to any analysis by automata, or even by human - that is, when we pray!

For then, we use our art and our science together, our knowledge and skills, to put into act our thought - even if it remains just a thought, but it is an ordered thought - it is a "message" and therefore a "linguistic unit". But it is no longer a natural action - that is merely a natural action, or limited to nature. It is exalted. It is now supernatural, for the "message" defeats even the grand theories of Einstein and such speculations of physics, and escapes the All-That-Exists - because its destination is the One Who Is, the Creator.

The fact that we also use the same tool to greet our friends, or even passers-by, in work and at play, in study and in chores, that we could use it to assist or to impede, to praise or to curse.... well, perhaps Language is far more transcendent than the transcendental numbers, and has more of infinity in it than a whole flock of Alephs.