Month: July 2024

Ran my miles before full sun, hot breakfast, shower and staff meeting (our last till September). I’ve been doing some reading and (a little) writing; frustratingly, one piece that came clear in my head is the necessity and current irrelevance of spelling out directly the pivotal concept of amplification in dream interpretation as it illuminates our work in biblical studies… but I have two other tasks before that. Le sigh.

‘The late Barney Cohen, a longtime colleague at the University of Chicago, was once asked how he felt about his dual membership in the departments of anthropology and history. Cohen is supposed to have replied that it did not matter which discipline you identified with, just so long as you were properly ashamed of it.’
— James Chandler, ‘Introduction: Doctrines, Disciplines, Discourses, Departments’ Critical Inquiry 35 (2009), p. 734.

I got my run in this morning before the heat set in, a pace that was surprisingly brisk given my recent stiffness and soreness. Morning Prayer, coffee and fruit breakfast, and I thought I’d spend the morning reading and writing, but it took all morning for me to catch up on email and general responsibilities. Maybe this afternoon?

I see that Danya’s first post about Jesus and the pharisees has dropped (I can tell, cos my blog is registering interest on a scale not seen since I proposed that the Franciscans might be suing Starbucks over the use of ‘cappucino’).

I’m honoured that you visited here, but until the Feed-Reader Revolution gets more traction, I’m still probably more visible on BlueSky @akma.bsky.social and even (shame!) ex-Twitter @AKMA. But as you can see, even though it’s mostly boring stuff about my morning run here (two miles, every day, whether I want to or not) I am trying to keep the blog functional for the day in which we all begin to use RSS to undermine the pernicious influence of corporate social media.

And again, thanks for your interest.

I left my eye mask behind in Belgium (I think; of course, Sod’s Law dictates that I will find it the minute I post this, or the minute I buy a replacement), so I needed to buy a substitute for my trusty sleep aid. ‘Easy,’ methoughts, ‘I’ll look on Amazon.’ But Amazon is populated with infinite pseudobrands that may provide adequate products, but may on the other hand be only a reshipper with an ‘office’ in a cafe in Ruislip or someplace, and I prefer to buy an item with an identifiable chain of responsibility. ‘OK then,’ says I to myself, ‘I’ll Google it.’ But the Google products algorithm draws in pseudoproducts as well as genuine branded products, and although the Boots moddel seems fit for purpose, I’d like to be able to compare with some more reliable merchandise. It’s a headache, though, trying to isolate and compare in a cluttered browser window.

At a certain point, it’s just simpler to walk to Boots and buy what’s on offer there, even if I haven’t done a minimal comparison browse; the kudzu online has overwhelmed the other plant life, and I’m not patient enough to hack it away (only to do it again the next time I’m inclined to make a general-purpose purchase).

Yesterday after Mass I was entirely wiped out, felt as though all the energy had drained from me. When at length I went to bed, I flopped down as a limp rag. We did have a pleasant visit from Clara and Richard, and began watching the Apple TV version of Presumed Innocent.

Then when I rose in the morning, I dislocated (I think) the little toe on my right foot — it hard like the dickens when I put any weight on it. Once I was up and about, though, and gave the toe w thorough probe and massage, it slipped into place, and resistant and achey flesh gave way to a positive, moderately ambitious pace.

Morning run, coffee (!), prep for this morning’s service and sermon, over to church early to re-establish my sense of the place, home afterward for a visit with friends, and some reading and (heaven permitting) writing.

I pushed harder on my pace this morning, and my knees and thighs noticed. Brussels was hilly, and we walked a bout five miles each day, but running (even in flat Abingdon) calls on muscles differently.

Walked and ran my two miles this morning, warming back into shape. I walked more than five miles a day while in Brussels, but a first-thing-in-the-morning run is a different beast, and I’m not going to force my creaky joints into a full-on run right away.

Back to work, too, with Morning Prayer in an hour and a half. Had my coffee, time to clean up and get dressed. Who knows what else the future holds?

We had a great time in Brussels, doing what we most enjoy doing on holiday*: visiting churches, resting, and eating. (I also enjoy hunting in second-hand bookshops, and looking for fountain pens and holy cards.) We devoted long stops to the Cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, Notre-Dame de Bonsecours, St Jean-Bapiste au Béguinage, St Catherine of Alexandria, Notre-Dame des Victoires au Sablon, the Chapel of the Magdalene, St. Nicolas, and Notre-Dame de la Chapelle, with two fruitless stops at Notre-Dame aux Riches Claires.

Margaret also took a workshop on making chocolate truffles, and I walked and browsed.

The churches were breathtaking, as we expect in an ancient Catholic city. We were somewhat charmed by the legend of Béatrice Soetkens, who allegedly had a vision of the Blessed Virgin who prompted her (Béatrice) to sneak to Antwerp to steal ‘the miraculous statue of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw op ‘t Stocxken (“Our Lady on the little stick”)’ from the cathedral; apparently Our Lady was being neglected there, and she would be more fulsomely venerated in Brussels. Sotekens succeeded in her mission, sailing a boat upstream on the Senne to Brussels, despite the lack of a tailwind (some say she had to navigate into the wind), and despite having been detected by a nosy vicar who was frozen in place as she and her husband escaped with the stake-bound Virgin. When the sacred pirates arrived in Brussels, the statue was deposited in the chapel of the Crossbowmen’s Guild (as one does).

Sad to say, the ecclesiastical news from Brussels is not all ‘miraculous delivrance with stolen action figure’. Brussels, and specifically the [pre-cathedral-status] Cathedral of St Gudula. As best I can make out from Wikipedia’s NPOV narration, two clergy of St Gudula’s were caught out engaging in usury, so to distract from their guilt they blamed the Jews of Brussels of stealing consecrated Eucharistic hosts — that is, the very Body of Christ — and desecrating them by stabbing. The primary (alleged) wrongdoer was murdered shortly thereafter; when the alleged secondary malefactors stabbed the hosts, they bled; the alleged desecrators panicked; the hosts were entrusted to a Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity, to take them to the Jewish community in Cologne; instead, she handed the hosts in to the clergy of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle, who returned them to the church of St Gudula, where they were kept in a reliquary thereafter. The Duke of Brabant ordered that somewhere between six and twenty of the (relatively few) Jews in Brussels be burned at the stake.
This grim story of scapegoating, blame-shifting, and religious hatred at the expense of Jews (who can have had little to no interest in what Christians did with their consecrated hosts) persisted in city culture and was re-enacted annually as part of the celebration (!) of the miraculous preservation and return of the Eucharistic Body. That annual observance was suppressed in the aftermath of Vatican II, and a brass plaque is now attached to one of the main doors, saying that the accusations were ‘tendentious’ and the overall narrative a legend.

That strikes me as a faint-hearted apology for mob violence conducted under the auspices of the ducal coronet and ecclesiastical authority. Until churches step forward and acknowledge their complicity in acts of hatred and terror, and endeavour to show their penitence by actions of reconciliation and redress, the guilt remains.

On a less somber note, I found a Parker 51 but didn’t buy it; a holy card of St Eve, and did buy it; and a notebook folder with Magritte’s ‘Les mots et les images’ which you bet I bought.

So we had a magnificent time, shadowed by the persistent reminder of how cruel and base (not ‘based’) the church can be. There’s much more to see, but I’m not sure we’ll be going back; there are so many places we haven’t seen at all.

* ‘On holiday’, not ‘visiting family’. There’s a world of difference, even when the latter is a joyous occasion.

Laptop will be packed most of the day. No big plans, so meandering and shopping. Home tonight.

We had a lovely time, and will testify that the Motel One is a commendable compromise of price, convenience, and comfort.

Amazing tour of the excavated undercity in the royal district, a fabulous lunch there (above ground in the museum restaurant, not in the subterranean streets), a visit to Notre-Dame de la Chapelle, then Margaret and I parted ways and she went off to a truffle-making workshop while I wandered the streets of the Beaux-Arts district (‘Bozart’, on the street signs). I headed for the Chapelle de la Madeleine, cos when in doubt, always go to a church you haven’t yet visited. On my way, though, a street sign pointing to the Librairie Schwilden in the Galerie Bortier, caught my eye. Did M. Schwilden by any chance have some images pieuses, holy cards? Yes he did — and he brought out a shoe box filled with holy cards of many sorts. Only one of them came from the Société St Augustin, my special focus of collecting, but that card of St Eve of St Martin is in perfect condition. M. Schwilden has to vacate his shop by the end of August; I’ll keep in touch with him, to know where he and his goods land.

Then I looked in at the Chapelle de la Madeleine, a small church with modern stained glass, side chapels for St Rita and Our LAdy, and a cosy wee gift shop.

Margaret and I met up in the Grand Place, went to Fritland for an afternoon snack, thgen marched up the hill to our lodgings. A long day, but with distinct rewards.