Summer Saturday Lite

Tonight at Castel Gandolfo:

I picked up from Le Salon Beige that Benedict XVI will see a performance of The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc tonight, performed in the original French.  Pope John Paul II saw the same poem/play in 1988.  French Catholic author Charles Péguy wrote the play in 1910 as a poetic conversation between three women.  Péguy born in 1873, left his Catholic faith and became a socialist, and then returned to his Catholic faith in 1907, became deeply mystical, made pilgrimages to Notre Dame Cathedral of Chartres, and died in combat in World War I, September 1914.  Some of his early fans were offended by his openly Catholic writings of his later years, such as this book-length poem.

A review by Les Gutman of a performance in English translation, Off Broadway, in 2004, includes a short synopsis:

In The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, we find a young Joan of Arc (Sophia Skiles) engaged in an existential struggle, with her self, her faith and the relation between the two. These play out alone, in conversation with a young, less thought-burdened contemporary, Hauviette (Jerusha Klemperer), and in a dialectic with a holy woman, Madame Gervaise (Daphne Gaines). They are, we are asked to believe at least, the tribulations of Joan of Arc, the foundations for the more familiar religious figure to come.

The same review offers this quote from St. Joan's words in the poem:

He who allows things to be done is like him who orders them to be done. It is all one. It is worse than him who does them. Because he who does shows courage, at least, in doing. He who commits a crime has at least the courage to commit it.And when you allow the crime to be committed, you have the same crime, and cowardice to boot.

There is more information about Péguy in an article called The Mystery of the Passion of Charles Péguy, by Robert Royal.

The Book Meme:

. . .which I haven't done yet.

A book that changed your life. The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life by Hannah Whitall Smith, when I read it in high school.
A book that you've read more than once.  The Life of St. Teresa of Avila.
A book that you'd want on a desert island. The Bible.
A book that made you laugh. Some of St. Augustine's humorous memories about his past in Confessions made me laugh out loud.
A book that made you cry. What Maisie Knew by Henry James.
A book that you wish had never been written. The Purpose Driven Life.  I read it cover to cover in a church Lenten program at the Episcopalian parish where I was before I converted to Catholicism.  I read it because it was selected for the parish Lenten program, and I wanted to be with everybody else and get to know people better.  But I read parts of it with my teeth grinding or fists clenched.  It was just too far from the Carmelite spirituality that has meant so much to me, and in some ways antagonistic toward it.  It made me angry, but some of the people at my discussion table really loved it and, for some of them, it was their first real introduction to some concepts of seeking God's will and of their own individual vocations, ideas that I already knew from other sources and thus did not really see much in that book.
A book that you hope someone will write.  A book that can explain the European view of the ongoing situation in the Middle East in a way that American conservatives can understand it better, in a format that they will actually read -- and maybe a book to explain the American neo-con view to the Europeans in the same way.
A book that you wish you had written. The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis.
A book that you're currently reading. The Foundations by St. Teresa of Avila.
A book that you've been meaning to read. The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science by my favorite professor from Berkeley, A. James Gregor.

Caution: The following may not be politically correct:

Be alert: