THANKS

As I look out the window at bare branches hung with glowing red berries that I can't name and can't eat, I'm thankful to be still alive to enter the busiest time of another interesting year. It's good to have the chance to write this small work every week, and I'm thankful that you read it. I'm even more thankful to all you smart, thoughtful, funny readers who take the time to write, and let me use your stuff. Some of you are old friends and some have become new friends, even if we haven't met in person yet. I'm grateful for Fred's encouragement and editing. And I'm thankful for the Internet.

I hope you all have a fine Thanksgiving, and for those of you abroad who don't have the Thanksgiving holiday, have one anyway.

CHRISTIANS VS. LIONS VS. CATHOLICS

Tim S. wrote re Christian vs. Catholic, from his Michigan experience:

I recently saw this distinction made on a local billboard about some sort of social service offering and had to laugh, wondering who had signed off on the faux pas.

My hometown of Grand Rapids is bifurcated by the Grand River, and traditionally the West Side has been the domain of the Cat'lics, while the East Side has been the domain of the Dutch Reformed, the latter just a couple of generations removed from a host of cantankerous immigrant Hollanders who settled here after having left the Old Country in a huff over its sloppy theology and liberal ways ~ which is to say that they have in many ways been defined specifically by their rejection of religious traditions that deviate in even microscopically small ways from their own vision of the Truth. Both sides of the city are religiously conservative in their own peculiar ways, and although ethnic assimilation and general democratization have broken down a lot of the old insularity and even promoted a certain amount of ecumenicity, old habits and prejudices die hard. Indeed, the Dutch Reformed still cling more tightly to their religious roots and traditions than most mainstream Protestant communions, and some of their founding documents, produced in the roiling bowels of the Reformation, include quite specific and severe condemnations of the grievous errors endorsed by the popish horde. I've sat through more than one service in which (usually) an aging visiting preacher has invoked the old divisive distinctions through readings of these documents, and I've imagined that the folks on the other side of river must occasionally have to listen to equivalent denunciations of the benighted souls who call themselves Christian even though they have arrogantly departed from the One True Church.

Linguistically the distinction persists here in another way. The immigrant Hollanders established a host of private schools under the administration of what was formerly known as the Christian School Association and is now, I believe, part of Christian Schools International. Anyway, they are popularly known hereabouts as Christian schools. The Catholics, here as elsewhere, have a well-established parochial school system. And so, on snow days, the local media announce school closings in categories of public, Christian, and Catholic, and nobody blinks an eye or raises a cavil.

There's another facet to the issue, too, arising principally among the farther right enclaves of Protestant Christendom and also, I believe, among some of the more moderate communions growing out of Protestant offshoots of the past couple hundred years established with the explicit goal of attaining a repristinated vision of Christianity (e.g., Christian Churches/Churches of Christ), communions that reject the designation of "denomination" on the grounds that they are not one Christian communion among many but rather that they are distinct from denominations in the extent to which they constitute the true contemporary realization of the traditional apostolic faith. Such folk covet the adjective "catholic" for their own use, in the spirit of the phrase "one holy, catholic church" from the Apostles' Creed, and they tend to refer to the flock of the church of Rome consistently as Roman Catholics rather than just Catholics. When I was editing, distinctions among "catholic," "Catholic," and "Roman Catholic" were critical in some contexts. People never seem to tire of separating the sheep from the goats. ~ TAS

What Tim wrote reminds me of a couple of other things, of course. I read that Jehovah's Witnesses distinguish between lower case "witnesses" and upper case. Outsiders use the name of the church, which as a name must be capitalized. But the insiders know that they are simply "witnesses" period.

Likewise, a professor once told us that in most if not all early languages, people around the world referred to themselves by a name that meant something like "the people" or "the folks". Outsiders have other names. Here's just one example, the definition of Eskimo in dict.org:

a member of a people inhabiting the Arctic (northern Canada or Greenland or Alaska or eastern Siberia); the Algonquians called them Eskimo ('eaters of raw flesh') but they call themselves the Inuit ('the people')

And according to www.yourdictionary.com, Algonquian (or Algonquin) is:

Canadian French, from Malecite elakómkwik, they are our relatives.

People have always used language to distinguish between inside and outside, us and them (or I and thou, if you want to get high-toned).

MISCELLANY FROM MIKE

Mike S. asks if one can talk about a "born-again" Catholic. I think not, and not only because Catholics are not in the habit of using that phrase. As I understand it, Catholics believe if you're baptized, you're sufficiently born-again, and you only do that once. Furthermore, the increase in revelation or understanding or access of grace or whatever you want to call it is something that continues throughout life. Also, what Protestants mean by being born again is often actually an emotional experience, which is distinct from the spiritual life. On the other hand, the understanding of the resurrection of the body, as demonstrated by Jesus Christ, means something more than we (that is, I) ordinarily understand it to mean. And this is something that Bernadette Roberts talks and writes about (she's the speaker at the retreat I'm organizing, see below).

On county vs. country, Mike's dictionary says for "country":

1 An expanse of land; a region. ME.

b Land, territory; esp. land with distinct characteristics or associated with (the work of) a particular person.

2 An area of land defined in terms of human occupation, e.g. owned by the same lord or inhabited by speakers of the same language. Formerly, a county, a barony. ME.

Mike adds: "It's only after that that it gets on to anything to do with nations. Which supports the view that some Americans [e.g. Kentuckians referred to in PO 150] preserve archaic English usages better than others (and better than the British, though we might talk about 'fox-hunting country')."

I add: Americans also use "country" to mean rural ("He's from the country"). The phrase "He's countrier than a brown egg", mentioned last week, I grabbed from a DVD by blues man Sonny Robertson. It refers to character, not just locality.

On "Transport", where I wrote:

I've always preferred the expression "going to hell in a handcart" over "going to hell in a hand basket". I picture someone vigorously and cheerfully pumping one of those railroad handcarts, in a quite determined manner. Much more purposeful than just being carried in a hand basket. I'd prefer the railroad handcart for myself.

... Mike says: "It's more appropriate too ~ handcart: drawn or pushed by hand. I think the idea behind that expression is that most people would prefer a more elegant funeral, and a more congenial destination."

I'm not sure if a railroad handcart is more elegant than a really nice basket, but the handcart image brings to mind an Alfred E. Neuman sort of idiot energetically driving himself to hell.

Retreat: The Essence of Christian Mysticism

Bernadette Roberts

I am organizing a workshop with Bernadette Roberts, a remarkable Christian contemplative and author of three books:

The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center

The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey

What is Self? : A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness

This retreat, called The Essence of Christian Mysticism, will be held on the weekend of May 5-7, 2006, in Loveland, Ohio. For more information, go to Bernadette Roberts Retreat (www.keithops.us/brretreat.htm). NOTE: The web page has been changed to allow viewing with different kinds of browsers.

If you buy these or any other books from Amazon, using the link below, I'll get a tiny commission, and I'd appreciate it.

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

NEED A WEB PAGE? NEED SOMEONE TO ORGANIZE A MEETING OR CONFERENCE? CALL KEITHOPS.

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!

Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back issues may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries.

If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe," "quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject line, and I'll take you off the mailing list.

Copyright Rhonda Keith 2005. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.