Year: 2004

"Yes . . . I Do"?

This Saturday at Mass they had seven (Count them! Seven!) babies baptized. As part of this process, the usual baptismal questions got asked (e.g., “Do you want this child baptized in the faith of the Church?”) and the seventh dad said something unusual in response . . .

SEVENTH DAD: Yes.

What was unusual about this is that the dad didn’t say what all the other parents said . . .

OTHER PARENTS: I[/We] Do.

Faced with the jarring “yes,” something occurred to me that hadn’t occurred before. I suddenly realized why we never hear this response in liturgical ceremonies. The reason is actually very simple.

Latin doesn’t have a word for “yes.”

Yes, I know. Amazing as it might seem, many languages don’t have a word for “yes.” Latin is one of them. So is Chinese. So is Irish. Other languages, like Spanish (“si”), German (“ja”), Hebrew (“ken”), Arabic (“na’am”), Aramaic (“aeh”), or Japanese (“hai”) do have a word for “yes.” Even the language of the reprobate French has such a word (“oui”).

“Yes” is a word that has a function but not a meaning. Its function (or at least its principal function) is to affirm whatever we just have been asked. The meaning of “yes” depends on what question has just been put to us. For example, if we want to give an affirmative answer to “Do you want to go to the party tonight?” we could say “yes” or “I do.” If we want to give an affirmative answer to “Are you taking calculus this semester?” we could say “yes” or “I am.” The word “yes,” not having its own meaning, thus picks up its meaning from the context in which it is used.

As a result, it’s entirely possible to live without the word. What happens in the languages that don’t have a “yes” is when speakers want to give an affirmative answer, they grab the main verb of the question and use it in a first person form. Thus “Do you?” questions get the answer “I do,” “Are you?” questions get the answer “I am,” and so forth.

That’s the way it is in Latin, so when people are asked in the liturgy whether they want to do certain things or have certain things done (“Do you take this woman?”, “Do you want which child baptized?”) the Latin original of the liturgy has the answer “I do,” and when this gets translated into English, that’s what comes across. Not even ICEL has has the khutspah to translate these with a colloquial “yes.”

This isn’t the only time when this kind of thing happens. A while ago I was reading a quotation from a British author (either Chesterton or Waugh, I forget which) in which he noted that Irishmen tend to say “I do,” “I am,” etc., where Englishmen would say “yes.” The reason, he noted, was that Irish lacks a word for “yes,” and the verb-grabbing affirmative method native to Irish has passed over into the English-language speech of Irishmen. Thinking about Irishmen I’ve known or heard, I realized he was right. They do have a greater tendency to do this in preference to using “yes.”

What I want to know is: What happens at the end of the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine in these languages? In the English version the Blue Meanies are converted from saying “No” to “Yes,” with “Yes” spelled REALLY BIG on the screen.

What do they do with that in Chinese, Irish . . . or Latin?

“Yes . . . I Do”?

This Saturday at Mass they had seven (Count them! Seven!) babies baptized. As part of this process, the usual baptismal questions got asked (e.g., “Do you want this child baptized in the faith of the Church?”) and the seventh dad said something unusual in response . . .

SEVENTH DAD: Yes.

What was unusual about this is that the dad didn’t say what all the other parents said . . .

OTHER PARENTS: I[/We] Do.

Faced with the jarring “yes,” something occurred to me that hadn’t occurred before. I suddenly realized why we never hear this response in liturgical ceremonies. The reason is actually very simple.

Latin doesn’t have a word for “yes.”

Yes, I know. Amazing as it might seem, many languages don’t have a word for “yes.” Latin is one of them. So is Chinese. So is Irish. Other languages, like Spanish (“si”), German (“ja”), Hebrew (“ken”), Arabic (“na’am”), Aramaic (“aeh”), or Japanese (“hai”) do have a word for “yes.” Even the language of the reprobate French has such a word (“oui”).

“Yes” is a word that has a function but not a meaning. Its function (or at least its principal function) is to affirm whatever we just have been asked. The meaning of “yes” depends on what question has just been put to us. For example, if we want to give an affirmative answer to “Do you want to go to the party tonight?” we could say “yes” or “I do.” If we want to give an affirmative answer to “Are you taking calculus this semester?” we could say “yes” or “I am.” The word “yes,” not having its own meaning, thus picks up its meaning from the context in which it is used.

As a result, it’s entirely possible to live without the word. What happens in the languages that don’t have a “yes” is when speakers want to give an affirmative answer, they grab the main verb of the question and use it in a first person form. Thus “Do you?” questions get the answer “I do,” “Are you?” questions get the answer “I am,” and so forth.

That’s the way it is in Latin, so when people are asked in the liturgy whether they want to do certain things or have certain things done (“Do you take this woman?”, “Do you want which child baptized?”) the Latin original of the liturgy has the answer “I do,” and when this gets translated into English, that’s what comes across. Not even ICEL has has the khutspah to translate these with a colloquial “yes.”

This isn’t the only time when this kind of thing happens. A while ago I was reading a quotation from a British author (either Chesterton or Waugh, I forget which) in which he noted that Irishmen tend to say “I do,” “I am,” etc., where Englishmen would say “yes.” The reason, he noted, was that Irish lacks a word for “yes,” and the verb-grabbing affirmative method native to Irish has passed over into the English-language speech of Irishmen. Thinking about Irishmen I’ve known or heard, I realized he was right. They do have a greater tendency to do this in preference to using “yes.”

What I want to know is: What happens at the end of the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine in these languages? In the English version the Blue Meanies are converted from saying “No” to “Yes,” with “Yes” spelled REALLY BIG on the screen.

What do they do with that in Chinese, Irish . . . or Latin?

Actual Homily Material

Something for the “I am not making this up” file.

Actual material from the homily delivered last weekend at the 5:00 p.m. Saturday Mass at St. Cyril of Alexandria parish in Houston, Texas:

PRIEST: Now here is something for those of you who like Star Trek.

We Christians are like the Borg.

Our purpose is to assimilate everybody into a spiritual collective . . . in Christ.

Just thought you Trekkies might like that.

At which point I leaned over to my aunt and whispered “Or not . . . “

This brings up a good point that even some apologists need to remember: A single point of contact between two things does not mean that one is automatically a good metaphor or similie for the other. By that logic the priest might as well have said “Here’s something for those of you who like Germany. We Christians are like the Nazis. Our purpose is to impose a spiritual order on the world . . . in Christ.”

I'm Baaa-aaack . . .

If y’all listened to the show last Thursday (RealPlayer Feed), you’ll know that I did it by phone from my family’s ranch in Deep East Texas and was heading to Houston (South East Texas) the next day. These were two of the stops on my nearly 4000-mile Long Hard Ride (WMP Hear It, Buy It) in the words of the Marshall Tucker Band. Took two weeks, and constituted my summer vacation. More on that later.

In the meantime, I wanted to thank my good friend Steven Greydanus for helping out with the blogging duties while I was gone. All of my posts for the last two weeks were written before I left, as I knew I would have spotty Net access while gone.

Steven’s posts seem to have been a resounding success, as I knew they would be, and I have extended an invitation to Steve to keep posting here whenever he’d like. He tells me that he probably won’t be posting every day, but will whenever he wants to sound off on something.

So now we have a kind of symmetry: I’m a regular bloggist and part time movie critic via Steve’s site, and now he’s a regular movie critic and part time bloggist via my site. I think the book of Proverbs listed that as one of the benefits of friendship in that “two is better than one” passage or something.

Anyway, glad to be back, and three cheers for Steve for filling in! If you’d like to tell Steve how much you enjoyed his posts and encourage him to write more, use the comments box. 🙂

I’m Baaa-aaack . . .

If y’all listened to the show last Thursday (RealPlayer Feed), you’ll know that I did it by phone from my family’s ranch in Deep East Texas and was heading to Houston (South East Texas) the next day. These were two of the stops on my nearly 4000-mile Long Hard Ride (WMP Hear It, Buy It) in the words of the Marshall Tucker Band. Took two weeks, and constituted my summer vacation. More on that later.

In the meantime, I wanted to thank my good friend Steven Greydanus for helping out with the blogging duties while I was gone. All of my posts for the last two weeks were written before I left, as I knew I would have spotty Net access while gone.

Steven’s posts seem to have been a resounding success, as I knew they would be, and I have extended an invitation to Steve to keep posting here whenever he’d like. He tells me that he probably won’t be posting every day, but will whenever he wants to sound off on something.

So now we have a kind of symmetry: I’m a regular bloggist and part time movie critic via Steve’s site, and now he’s a regular movie critic and part time bloggist via my site. I think the book of Proverbs listed that as one of the benefits of friendship in that “two is better than one” passage or something.

Anyway, glad to be back, and three cheers for Steve for filling in! If you’d like to tell Steve how much you enjoyed his posts and encourage him to write more, use the comments box. 🙂

Inventions I Want #1: The Song Longer

Fifteen or twenty years ago I thought of the idea of combining a cash machine with a gas pump so that you don’t have to go inside to pay. Now such hybrid machines are everywhere.

Here’s another invention I want: I call it, The Song Longer.

You know how there are some songs that are just too good to be so short? There are even some parts of songs that are too good to be so short. Well, the song longer is meant to remedy that problem. Here’s how it works: You load a song into your computer and then The Song Longer makes it . . . longer. It does this in a number of ways:

1. Basic mode: If you simply want the song as a whole longer, it identifies the bridge of the song (the middle part between the intro and the outro) and repeats it as many times as you desire.

2. Advanced mode: After the user identifies particular parts of the bridge for special emphasis, lengthens the song by resequencing these segments in a more complex manner (i.e., so the middle of the song isn’t just played twice through).

3. Superadvanced mode: Like advanced mode, except The Song Longer modulates the pitch and speed of different song elements so that they are transposed up an octive, down an octave and played faster or slower so that there is more variety as the song gets longer.

4. Superduperadvanced mode: The Song Longer composes new segments in the same style and based on the same melody and sequences them into the mix.

5. Extrasuperduperadvanced mode: The Song Longer composes new lyrics to go in the new segments.

Wouldn’t that be great????

The thing is, we already have the technology to do most of this. A good sound editing package can let you accomplish modes 1-3, you’d just have to do it all by hand. The Song Longer would automate the process and make it easy enough for your grandmother to do (even if she doesn’t have a sound engineering degree), while still letting the user have the flexibility to customize the outcome of the song.

Modes 4 and 5 aren’t beyond our reach, either. There are already programs that do both of these, though they may not yet be ready for prime time.

So there you have it: The Song Longer, ending the plague of songs and song moments that are just too short.

(Like that one moment in Dvorak’s New World Symphony where the violins really soar . . . Oh! It’s a crime against the humanities that that moment doesn’t just go on and on and on.)

SCHOLAR: Ancient Athelete Ate Atkins Diet

Well, that makes sense. If you cut the carbs you don’t have blood sugar spikes and lows that will sap your strength during competition. After going on the diet I noticed how much energy I had in the hour following lunch now that I wasn’t trying to shrug off a blood sugar low like those who ate carbs during lunch.

Further, you’ll need the protein to build the muscle to compete.’

GET THE STORY

Internet Infidelity Clubs

A while back I started getting a whole wash of spam with subject lines like “Lonely wifes looking for action” and “Cheating wifes” and things like that. (What is it with the misspelling of “wives”? Is that an attempt to get around spam filters? No matter, mine is catching them now anyway.)

When I started getting these, I figured that they were advertisements for ostensible online matchmaking clubs for people who were already married–in other words, adultery clubs. I say “figured” because I simply deleted the e-mails without opening them and I say “ostensible” because I didn’t really suppose that such clubs existed or, if they did, that they would be conducting massive spam campaigns.

I couldn’t imagine that people would really be interested in such clubs. Why would women want to sign up to be one of the “cheating wifes”? And what kind of total loser men would want to be patrons of such places? What would it say about such a person to be attracted to such a place? Notice that the appeal the advertisement is based on is not that you find the other person attractive. The idea is that cheating with somebody else’s wife is itself supposed to be an inducement. What kind of sick desires are wrapped up in that?

I couldn’t imagine that very many people would be interested in such clubs and that the e-mails were more likely a credit card scam designed to prey on the few lonely, gullible men who might actually respond.

Well it seems I am a little naive.

Turns out that there are such clubs. A reader sent me a link to this story about such clubs.

Now I’m thinking: How do we make these illegal or at least unprofitable? Alienation of affection class action lawsuits?

CNN.com misreports sacramental theology

SDG here with yet more proof of the inability of mainstream media reporters ever accurately to report on a story involving religious doctrine.

“Wheat-allergic girl denied Communion”, blares the headline at CNN.com.

Actually, technically, that’s true.

An unnamed Catholic priest who attempted to celebrate Mass with a rice wafer containing no wheat did indeed deny communion to 8-year-old Haley Waldman, who suffers from celiac disease.

He did so by attempting to celebrate Mass with invalid matter. Because non-wheat grains are invalid matter for the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, what the girl received was not the Body and Blood of Christ, but an untransformed wafer.

So, yes, the girl was denied communion, by a priest who doesn’t know his sacramental theology.

That’s not what the headline means, though.

It means that the mean old bishop of Trenton has (correctly) declared the girl’s communion invalid and has (also correctly) refused to authorize the use of rice wafers for her consumption in subsequent communions.

Yet the article itself admits, a few grafs down, that the diocese has not “denied” the girl communion at all. It admits that the diocese has told Haley’s mother that her daughter may receive Christ’s body and blood under the species of wine alone, as well as offering her low-gluten hosts.

The article adds that Haley’s mother “rejected the offer” of low-gluten bread, “saying her child could be harmed by even a small amount” of gluten. Apparently she has also rejected the offer of receiving under the species of wine alone, though the article doesn’t say why.

The misleading headline (flat-out wrong headline, in the sense intended by the author) isn’t the only error in the story. CNN.com also reports that “For alcoholics, the church allows a substitute for wine under some circumstances, however the drink must still be fermented from grapes and contain some alcohol. Grape juice is not a valid substitute.”

Wrong. Unfermented grape juice (or “mustum”) is a valid substitute, and permission can be obtained from competent church authority for its use in specific circumstances (cf. the “Norms For Use Of Low-Gluten Bread And Mustum”). It’s not ordinarily a licit substitute, that is, it isn’t normally allowed by church law, and cannot be licitly used without episcopal permission.

But liceity and validity are two different things. Liceity has to do with disciplinary rules established by the Church, which the Church is at liberty to rescind or suspend. Validity has to do with absolute sacramental rules established by divine authority, which the Church has no authority or power to alter or suspend, ever, under any circumstances.

That communion hosts must be unleavened is a matter of discipline, just as that a candidate for Holy Orders must be unmarried is a matter of discipline. The Church can make exceptions to either rule, and indeed in the Catholic Churches of the East those rules don’t apply at all. However, that communion hosts must be made of wheat rather than other grains is a matter of sacramental necessity, just as that a candidate for Holy Orders must be a man and not a woman is a matter of sacramental necessity.

Obviously, Haley’s mother is as unclear on this point as the reporter. “How does it corrupt the tradition of the Last Supper? It’s just rice versus wheat,” she complains. Yes, and Jesus used wheat and not rice at the Last Supper, just as he taught his disciples to baptize in water and not milk, and as he ordained men and not women. These are precedents the church has no authority to break. The Church has no more power to change a rice wafer into the Body and Blood of Christ than to turn a Dorito into a Wookiee; by the same token, she has no more power to ordain a woman than to pronounce the Archangel Gabriel and Mother Theresa man and wife. (And there, once again, is one of those sentences that has never before been constructed in the history of the universe.)

Haley’s mother has actually gone so far as to write a letter to the Pope and to Cardinal Ratzinger requesting a change in the rules. “This is a church rule, not God’s will,” she wrote in the letter, “and it can easily be adjusted to meet the needs of the people, while staying true to the traditions of our faith.” Hopefully at some point, someone will carefully and clearly explain the truth to her.

Of course, it may be that someone already has, and she’s just being stubborn. The article reports that the pastor of St. Denis Catholic Church in Manasquan correctly refused to allow a substitute when the family first approached him, at which point they went to the other pastor who, presumably out of misguided compassion, agreed to use a rice wafer. I hope the first pastor carefully and compassionately explained the reasons for his refusal and immediately offered to allow Haley to receive communion under the species of wine, and that diocesan officials she’s been dealing with have been as clear and as sympathetic as they possibly could be. Perhaps Haley’s mother is simply stubborn, but inadequate catechesis and/or pastoral insensitivity can also sometimes be a factor in such situations.

The story adds that “Haley’s Communion controversy isn’t the first. In 2001, the family of a 5-year-old Massachusetts girl with the disease left the Catholic church after being denied permission to use a rice wafer.” That anyone would leave the Church over such a thing (or over anything else for that matter) is a terrible tragedy. Pastors and other church leaders need to do all they can to be sure that if and when it does happen, it’s not because of a failure to respond sensitively and compassionately to people’s needs.