The Gucci Awakening

by Julie Robison
Joshua also said to the people, "Sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will perform wonders among you." (Joshua 3:5)

“People in my grade look so much more mature than me,” said my 15 going on 16 year old sister. We peered into the computer screen, and looked at a girl we’ve all known since she was a wee tot, not yet 16, wearing a tight fitting tank top and shorter skirt. I felt a twinge of simultaneously feeling young and old at age 23, wearing a green blouse and blue jumper dress, and then felt sorry for her, so grown up in looks and  not realizing her whole worth, and the need to protect her body, not just show it off.

A few Sundays ago, the head pastor at my grandparents’ parish wrote in the bulletin about proper Mass attire during the summer months. Father wrote,

Once again the summer months are here and we have to remind ourselves of proper Mass clothing. It is hot, and sometimes we don’t give it a second thought, but we should be conscious of what we wear to Mass. Remember our church is air-conditioned. Men and teenage boys should wear trousers and a dress shirt. Women should wear modest dresses that fall below the knee, and modest blouses and slacks. Flip flops, shorts, tee shirts, and any type of immodest clothing should not be worn to Holy Mass. Remember the rule: I am conscious of what I wear to Mass and it is modest for the Holy Congregation. We owe this respect to Jesus and Our Lady, and to each other. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

While I am in complete agreement—perturbed, even, at how people are so casually dressed at Mass—my grandmother, aunt and I said the same thing: good luck getting most women to wear dresses that fall below the knee.

Sorry it's above the knee Father, but I love this skirt.

Today’s retail stores simply do not offer many (if any) dresses or skirts that long at the wide-scale level. Most of my dresses and skirts go to my knee, or slightly above. Pencil skirts notwithstanding, dress and skirt lengths today do not typically go past the knee unless they are going all the way to the ankle. Moreover, length is not the only litmus test for modesty.

In South Korea, women do not show their shoulders. They may wear very short skirts and high heels, but their chest area is completely covered. A lot of summer dresses in the States have skinny straps and lower fronts (and sometimes lower backs as well). I wear cardigans to work almost every day, especially if my dress has no sleeves. But what of the dress’s fit? I tried on a dress last week for an upcoming wedding. It wasn’t tight, but it was fitted, and made me self-conscious of my figure. I asked the sales ladies for their opinion.

“If you’ve got the figure, wear it!” was the consensus.

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?

By Julie Robison

Last Tuesday evening, I saw ‘Of Gods and Men’ at the only theater in Cincinnati showing the excellent French film, based on a 1995 true story. There were only three other people in the theater with me, and none of them cried like I did during the latter half of the movie. The monks’ triumphs over their own desires, and their overpowering love of God through darkness and desert, brought true grace to flow in a desperate situation.

"love is eternal hope" --five stars, see it.

‘Of Gods and Men’ is about a small group of Trappist monks who live in Algeria, serving a mostly Muslim village by providing health care and friendship. Their very familiarity with the people is what prompts more disruption in the community when radical Muslim terrorists begin inflicting terror and killing Croatians, Muslim women not wearing the burqa, and those who protested against their regime. The scene of Christmas night, the fateful night when the terrorists went to the monastery, showed the true caliber of the monks. In an effort to reach common ground, one monk referenced the Qu’ran to remind the leader that Christians and Muslims are brothers under one God, not enemies.

The monastery’s relationship with the government was significantly less cordial, and the “might makes right” attitude pervades the actions of the overly aggressive military force against the peaceful monks. When one monk prays over the body of one of the Muslim terrorists whom he is being forced to identify, the disrespect for the dead and human life is evident through the passive-aggressive anger of the government official. It cannot be surprising, then, that the monks’ lives were not respected either.

It is no coincidence, in my mind at least, that Osama Bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011. In the Roman Catholic Church, May 1 was Divine Mercy Sunday—and who can be more in need of God’s divine mercy than the mastermind behind the ruthless attack on September 11, 2001, affecting thousands of souls? The celebrations of the man’s death prompted P. Fredrico Lombardi, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, to release this statement:

T.E. Hulme: The First Conservative of the Twentieth Century

[significantly modified and expanded from a previous post at STORMFIELDS]

History should never have forgotten T.E. Hulme, and we would do well to remember him and what he wrote. Indeed, the German shell that took his life in the early autumn of 1917 might have changed a considerable part of the twentieth century by removing Hulme from it. Our whole “Time of Troubles” as Kirk defined it, might have been attenuated by the presence, personality, and witness of this man.

Eliot, certainly one of the greatest of twentieth-century men, understood the importance of Hulme in 1924. Eliot saw him as the new man—the twentieth-century man. In April 1924, he wrote: “When Hulme was killed in Flanders in 1917 . . . he was known to a few people as a brilliant talker, a brilliant amateur of metaphysics, and the author of two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language. In this volume [the posthumous Speculations, edited by Herbert Read] he appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own.”

Hulme is, Eliot continued, “classical, reactionary, and revolutionary; he is the antipodes of the eclectic, tolerant, and democratic mind of the end of the last century . . . . A new classical age will be reached when the dogma. . . of the critic is so modified by contact with creative writing, and when the creative writers are so permeated by the new dogma, that a state of equilibrium is reached. For what is meant by a classical moment in literature is surely a moment of stasis, when the creative impulse finds a form which satisfies the best intellect of the time, a moment when a type is produced.”