Youth, the Faith and Vocation: seven thoughts

On the list of urgent matters to discuss in this world waist-deep in crisis, I can easily see that the lives of young adults do not come first.  More immediately pressing matters tend to push their hopes and anxieties into the background.  Still, these hopes and anxieties are there; they do not go away, and behind the louder elements, whose politicised protests are seldom representative of the whole, they accumulate into a silent mountain to which it is difficult to do justice.  

The world’s bishops, assisted by young lay representatives and others, has recently had a go at doing them justice, though, gathering in Rome for a Synod over the course of October to discuss ‘Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment’.  ‘What is life like for you?’, the Catholic Church has been asking its young members, those aged 16-29, this past year.  ‘How do you find your faith and work out your calling?  And what about young people who are not in the Church… or no longer in the Church?… What are your lives like; what meaning do you think the Church has?’  It is the Church’s business to help is in working out the meaning and purpose of our lives.

The Synod’s final report has just been released.  I have been meaning to write about it here long before now — ever since it was announced, in fact — not least because I fall squarely into the age bracket in question.  It is not a lack of interest that has silenced my keyboard.  I have been thinking and reading quite a lot about it all, and following the Synod’s progress.  I filled in the Church’s official online questionnaire earlier this year, and in the early summer attended three invigorating meetings of young adults with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, before he went off to the Synod.  So I feel that I have managed to repay the bishops’ frank appeal for views with some considered answers.  But I have not added much to the online conversation, having been left with too many thoughts to hammer out easily into a concise blog article.  Only now have I managed to boil them down to these seven, so that, for my own satisfaction at least, I can record my own point of view before I read the final document.  What do any readers think — do these sound true and fair?

1.  How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Human nature never changes; one of many thunderbolts to strike me while at university was to read the Pensées of Pascal with their freshness of informal jottings.  But history does change, of course, and just now even seems to be actually accelerating into the ever-uncharted territory of the future, even as mankind’s joys and sorrows remain the same.  So the Church’s mission, to go out and bring mankind home to God’s house, is desperately urgent, especially where history is changing most quickly: among young people.

I am an ordinary rank-and-file pew-filling Mass-goer, living and working amid the pulsing tumult of London, belonging proudly to the ‘Benedict Generation’ who came of age in faith under Pope Benedict XVI’s gently determined steersmanship.  To me the Church is truth and home.  But for huge numbers of young people my age this is clearly not the case.  To most of my contemporaries, even those of good will, the Church means little or nothing: an unnecessary and obsolescent encumbrance, rather than a life-giving stronghold of joy and encouragement.   I think also of the members of my parish’s Youth Choir, aged between nine and sixteen, who will be young adults themselves sooner than we suppose, and the scale of our task weighs heavily on me.  I think of the forces ranged against them, all the other ideas and lifestyles that clamour for their allegiance, the dazzling superficiality of the secular universe, and of the gulf of distraction and misunderstanding that threatens to separate them, or already separates them from the hearth of the Church.

The Synod has come not a moment too soon.  I know, because I have grown up with them, how deeply relativism and individualism have sunk their teeth into the young men and women of my generation here in the West, and how far away and foreign the Church appears to them.  The name Jesus Christ means, to many, merely a harmless spiritual teacher who lived long ago and may have had some sensible things to say which have since been improved on anyway.  The shocking idea that He was God, and then that He took on our nature, body and soul, walked and breathed and worked as we do, and suffered as we do to the point of death, and then was resurrected, thereby giving us too real hope in resurrection after death, is not merely strange to them, but it has never really been articulated to them.  The same goes for the idea that He may be still be encountered and befriended.  It is gone: if this knowledge was understood in previous generations, it has not been passed on and is forgotten now.  In the Church I think we already know this… but have somehow been slow, or even afraid, to contemplate the reality unblinkingly for ourselves (though I know that some observers’ gaze has been very clear and unwavering).  The New Evangelisation is urgent; it was urgent twenty, thirty, seventy years ago.  The reality is that many good people have no religious sense at all.

But nature abhors a vacuum.  Into the new void other ways of thinking and believing — new creeds, though they would never describe themselves in that way — have come rushing, and they are increasingly making their presence felt.  They do not necessarily declare themselves overtly to be enemies of the Church.  They sound nice and reasonable, at least at first, and certainly seem to make life easier.  They may even contain a great deal of truth, but in comparison to the Christian faith they are short-sighted and half-hearted, proclaiming a truncated, stooped vision of man, because they lack the sure, crazy foundation of love.  These new religions encourage us to place the weight of our faith in scientific progress, or governments, or unfettered liberty, or in political action, or social engineering, or in Me, the Ego, to solve our problems and fill the chasm of longing within.  In placing the individual at the centre of our lives, they leave us with an alarmingly blank slate when it comes to morality: we can do just as we please, provided we do not prevent anybody else from doing the same.  The new creeds claim to be harmless heralds of peace and freedom for all, but a nastier side can be revealed when they encounter resistance in the form of the Church’s teaching.  This is the dictatorship of relativism, which has nothing to say to those who hunger for more than the ‘OK culture’, and hope to live life to the full, to work out what life is really all about and to pursue heroic holiness, nor to those conscious of having done wrong and who search for true forgiveness, not for mere excuses.  In twenty-first century Britain, people still prove themselves capable of breathtaking acts of goodness, but a willing myopia shies away from asking why.  What lies beneath our common urge towards kindness, and behind the mystery of our simultaneous aversion towards and tendency to surrender to evil?  Nobody asks; it is as if we would rather not know.  Most of the moral values and ideas that survive in the secular world have a Christian origin, but that origin is allowed to be obscured, and the ancient philosophical pillars of strength that underlie them, and the revelation that lightened them, are not spoken of.  And anyway, in modern life, there is simply no time to think too much about these things, nor to seek anything approaching transcendence.  There is always something else that needs doing. Ours is a tired, unhappy culture, atomised in its homogenaeity; we are a great crowd of lonely individuals, constantly in search of something new to place on the altar where God should be.

In such a world, reverence is revolutionary and orthodoxy is rebellion. Going to Mass, even, often has a deliciously conspiratorial feeling about it, as if the Church were an underground resistance movement.  (That is partly because it is).  If for our parents’ generation it already took courage to go to church and to assent to the Creed with a straight face, for ours it is now actually subversive.   It really is counter-cultural and there really are people who hate the Church.  To be Catholic in these circumstances is often bracing for young people with fire in the blood.  But often it is tiring and isolating, too.

2.  The Question of Trust
There are many reasons why I am Catholic, and also many different kinds of reasons.  Among those reasons are people whose example vindicates the faith in my mind.  I am not the first, having traced good things to their roots, to decide that if such roots are good enough for certain people I have known, they are good enough for me.  Having admired and been impressed by these people, I have come to have trust the moral foundation on which they have built their lives.  I have confidence in what Church says about life.

I hardly need reminding of the wrongdoing that goes on in the Church.  I know that trust is its first casualty.   I do not wish to dismiss it glibly, but am aware it needs its own article if it is to be dealt with properly.  For now I will say that the first hope is this: that the Church has always acknowledged unequivocally that such wrongdoing directly contradicts her own standards, which are totally set in stone.  No excuses can be made for it.  Mercy is always there, it is true, but on Heaven’s terms, not our own.

But meanwhile it is hard to overstate how urgently the Church needs to make herself trustworthy.  Young people are in particular need of something to trust, and there is no shortage of movements in search of their confidence who could easily win too much of it: advertisers, political movements, Twitterers in search of disciples, professional cliques, gangs, to say nothing of those currents of thought that directly oppose the Church in their view of the dignity of life, marriage, wisdom, the law, the poor and so on.  All of those movements, though, have ulterior motives.  Who will love and affirm young people in their own right, for their own sake?  Above all the Church, it seems to me.  Dear reader, the Church will always affirm the absolute and irreducible dignity of your life, even when nobody else will — even if you yourself deny it — and what is more, can tell you why.

Young people hunger to do good, but often need confidence first.  The Church can give them that confidence and encourage them in difficulty.  We cannot outdo the secular world in slickness, but it is we who have authenticity.  So we need to be radiantly authentic.  That means that we must become good examples and living proof that the Church’s message is as valid and as fresh as it has ever been… living proof of the unwavering presence of Christ in the world.

3. Boldness
Our situation is now that the Church has to work hard to earn the trust that is placed in it, whether from within or without.  The Church should also repay this trust.  And I feel that one of the best ways to repay it is to be proclaim its own message boldly and confidently.  The Church needs to speak with authority, which does not mean with aggression or arrogance, but it does imply the courage to lock horns with the world if necessary.  I cannot be the only young Catholic whose experience of modern British culture is generally that of a head-wind.  It is so easy to sense our courage sapping without the Church at full steam beside us, trusting in God, reassuring us that the counter-cultural course we have set is worth the risk.

And the Church can do this because this authority comes from above.  This is at least one advantage we have over the secular world: we assert things not only because they sound good and we want them to be true, but because they are true, whether we like it or not.

4. The Vanguard of Anti-Cynicism
At one of the meetings of young adults at Archbishop’s House, Cardinal Vincent made some striking remarks about cynicism.  Answering a question on another topic, he suddenly spoke with some feeling of cynicism’s ‘corrosive effects’ on society and on individuals.  I wanted to burst into applause: he had articulated something I realise I have felt for a long time.  After the meeting I managed to thank him for his words, and again he lamented the prevalence of this cynical atmosphere; it was "everywhere in the papers", he said.  It is a kind of hardening of heart, and there are places in which it is so pervasive as to be more or less compulsory.  For example, it held absolute sway over my schoolmates between the ages of twelve and eighteen, so that it was seldom possible to have a serious conversation with anyone, and hardly anything anyone said was actually meant.  No high ideals, no hero-worships, no debates with any sincerity.  I know that this attitude is often adopted simply for the sake of self-preservation, but this does not make it any less caustic.  Even now that my generation has reached adulthood I often hear it lurking just beneath the surface, curdling laughter into sniggering, riddling the meanings of words with holes like wood-worm, corroding the sword of justice with sardonic resignation or bitter indifference, and hardening people against each other.  Some of my peers seem unable to turn it off.  It also gnaws away at beauty.  Look at what it has done to our art, music and poetry; look at the lovers of beauty it has beleagured.

But the Church is a stronghold against this caustic cynicism and irony.   I believe that we  lovers and defenders of good and gentle things  have no better fortress than the  Church from which to launch gleeful raids against cynicism, armed with the words and artistry to speak of beauty, delight, diamond innocence, and the pathos of the human condition.

This is not to overlook the cynicism that many feel about the Church.  For this reason, too, the battle for trust must be fought piece by piece: see part two, above.

5. We must be ‘Smart and Beautiful’

‘Smart and beautiful’ is how Bishop Robert Barron describes the Christian faith, and in doing so captures two things that draw young people to it: its intelligence and its poetic beauty.  

Catholicism is a serious, grown-up, intelligent faith that affirms and sanctifies everything I was right to love as a child.  It has more than enough intellectual fuel for any restless, curious mind; it is inexhaustible.  It is remarkable how deep it is possible to go and never reach the bottom, and others have descended far deeper than I have.   When I was a student, I was fortunate enough to have a chaplaincy where the chaplains gave homilies as fulfilling and stretching as lectures, and weekly talks with unforgettable thoughts: ‘If, when thinking about God, you do not experience intellectual vertigo, you are not thinking about God’, or that the news of the sack of Rome in 410 A.D.  ‘would have been as if we heard that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Paris’.  University chaplaincies can give tremendously stimulating moral, historical formation, and the Church must give them as much support as she can afford.  In general, I think the Church could make much more of her intelligence and brilliance.  Young people can all respond willingly to Pope Benedict’s exhortation to ‘know your faith with that same precision with which an IT specialist knows the inner workings of a computer’.  ‘You need to know what you believe’, is his invigorating challenge.

Yet this intelligence is not pretentious or supercilious.  At the same time, the Church could also afford to emphasise her down-to-earthness.  This is a religion of incarnation: of oil, of water, of wheat, of salt, of dust, of blood, of a baby in a cattle-shed, of carpenters and fishermen.  There is nothing airy-fairy about it.  And notwithstanding her intelligence, the Church is for us all, whatever our minds’ wattage.  The ranks of the Doctors of the Church include such a person as Thérèse of Lisieux as well as St. Thomas Aquinas. 

And as for beauty, the Church lies at the ideal strategic position from which to launch a new evangelisation in art.  We live in a culture that is remarkable for its inhuman ugliness, yet people, being human, still hunger for beauty, and indeed are often to be found seeking it in church buildings.  New movements of Catholic artists, composers, novelists, architects or poets, in single-minded search of beauty and generous with their findings, could answer our culture’s unuttered cry to God for consolation.  Not browbeating the culture around us but enlightening it, we could could have quiet but deep influence in the coming years, and be of great consolation to people of good will.

6. Togetherness
And in an age of division we will thrive if we remind ourselves, often, of our togetherness in the Church all over the world, present, past and future.  Great occasions such as World Youth Day, pilgrimages and outdoor gatherings, as well as renewed attention to the words of the liturgy (‘so that from east to west a perfect sacrifice will be offered to your name…’) resound long in the memory.  Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain in 2010 fired me up tremendously, and not just because, I confess, the media’s considerable hostility to Church in the preceding weeks and months only served to goad me into greater pro-Benedict enthusiasm and vigour.  I simply enjoyed, and will never forget, the uplifting yet unfamiliar feeling of kneeling with eighty thousand others with Pope Benedict in Hyde Park for Eucharistic Adoration (at the vigil of John Henry Newman’s beatification).  We need the confidence and resources to mount more such events, if we can, because their effects last well into the lean times of isolation.

Togetherness in the Church also means vigilance in ordinary life, however, so that legitimate disagreements do not sour into division, whether at the scale of parishes, of dioceses or of the Church on earth as a whole.  We all have different charisms — some, perhaps, are more inclined to social justice, say; others to liturgy, and most of us are somewhere in between.  Provided we all sign up to the Catechism and the Creed, and sincerely found our lives on Christ’s companionship, we are more or less all right.  Another point: if people struggle honestly to accept the Church’s teaching, and are not being deliberately belligerent about their difficulties, I think we should be as patient and kindly as we are resolute in affirming the truth.  Faith is a gift, and Christ never promised to make our lives easy.  It is often uncomfortable to be counter-cultural; a lot of people struggle with it.  We must be capable of working out disagreement between ourselves without giving anybody cause to feel undermined by their own side.

I am also convinced of the necessity of a determinedly ecumenical attitude.  The divisions between the churches, though much healed in the past century, still represent a great wound.  However distant unity seems, we must work very hard to maintain close friendship with our brothers and sisters in other churches.  The old disagreements cannot be brushed aside and should not be trivialised, and the pain of riven communion remains unhealed, but any survey of the terrain today will makes it plain that everyone who is signed up to the Creed is more or less on the same side now.  So, unless there is unequivocal evidence to the contrary, I think we must consider any serious churchgoer these days to be an ally.

7. ‘Young People Want Great Things’

Finally, I am very glad that this Synod has given such prominence to the idea of vocation.  It is tremendously important.  The sense of being called, rather than merely having floated or emerged into being, transfigures us.  It gives the longed-for direction to life that many others seek vainly in wealth, political action or Progress.  It gives meaning to days and years, to mere instants and whole epochs alike.  It can so convincingly capture the imagination for the side of light — within the soul, in the Church as a whole and throughout the world — that I think it should be made a mainstay of the New Evangelisation.  (This blog takes its name from Cardinal Newman’s prayer-meditation on vocation, incidentally).  Certainly in the West, where the dictatorship of relativism, the tyranny of mediocrity, reigns supreme, the idea that we might be called to a mission greater than ourselves, beyond our own desires, appetites and knowledge, is invigoratingly counter-cultural.  Also, as people tire of the dictatorship of relativism’s constant, off-hand instruction to make up a meaning for our lives, not caring a jot what we come up with, and as people detect the indifference that underlies this instruction (existentialism’s nasty backhand), they will look, in increasing numbers and with increasing determination, for something else — which they will know they have found when they encounter the idea of vocation compellingly expressed, and realise that they have one.  This is the Church’s secret weapon in our time.  

✛

‘Young People Want Great Things’, said Pope Benedict early in his pontificate, and the words leave very little else to say.  Young people are full of fire; we brim with energy.  But we need to know what to do with it, so that we can set to confidently, with God-given gumption.  We have the energy to purify first the Church, then the world.  In this age of destruction we yearn to build.  

Dear Bishops — Thank you for asking us your questions.  This is what we would like in the Church, please.  We want a challenge, but not without the Church beside us.  We want companionship so that we have the strength to face the isolating world.  We want more than the insipid, malnutritious menu presented to us by the world, in which anything goes and nothing really matters, but we also want to be able to speak with compassion to people who think that this fare is satisfactory.  We want to know how to have the courage, in a world which mistakes lesser evils for positive good, to announce what is really good all the way through — the Gospel, the electrifying news of hope — in a straightforward, calm, sane, unhectoring way, with our example as much as our words.  We want the miraculous triumph of the friendship of men and women that we call marriage; we want motherhood and fatherhood, defiantly raising families to the glory of God, or simply to be motherly and fatherly to those around us.  We want to be saints and artists and philosophers, holy and humble priests and nuns, teachers and scientists and gardeners and nurses; we want to be good companions.  We want to help people and to console them.  We want interesting things to read, homely places in which to discuss them, and like-minded people to discuss them with.  We want beautiful, beloved churches and energetic movements and associations. And our friends outside the Church want these things too, whether they know it or not.

Belonging to the Church is both a great joy and a lot of hard work.  But it could be more joyful still. We know that we need help, and instruction, and often forgiveness.  We need the gold standard of justice and, being every one of us broken, the medicine of mercy.  And, above all, youth wants truth.  And the Church’s strange and loving founder can give us all of this.  Long may the Church make a nuisance of itself by calling us all to greatness.

Some revisions made (to improve phrasing) in March 2019.

‘Excelsam Pauli gloria’ — Westminster Cathedral Choir.

‘It is good to be here’: Hymns and belonging in a Polish park

Sławcie usta Ciało Pana — Pange Lingua (‘Of the glorious body telling’)

Good things are always going on in the world, even if out of sight or over the horizon, and these days, it seems, many of them are happening in Poland.  Here’s an example of something we should know about in Britain: enormous open-air hymn-singing concerts which every year draw great multitudes, people in their tens of thousands, to a park in the city of Rzeszów.  As the feast day of Corpus Christi draws to its close, huge numbers of ordinary folk — young and old, married and single, lay and consecrated religious, public officials and plain citizens — gather in the Sybiraków park to sing and pray.  There to lead them is a choir a hundred-and-thirty strong and an array of other musicians.  Candle-light spreads and strengthens as evening falls: the multitude joins hands and sing hymns into the night.

These are the ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ concerts (the name means ‘Of One Heart, Of One Spirit’; the ‘c' in ‘Serca’ is pronounced ‘ts’ as in ‘dance’, the ‘ch’ in ‘Ducha’ as in ‘loch’), and I can find no evidence against the claim that they are Poland’s, and Europe’s, largest regular concerts of religious music.  Last year 45,000 people were present, the greatest number since the events began in 2003.  Even those who came up with the idea — Jan Budziaszek, a drummer, Fr. Andrzej Cypryś and Fr. Mariusz Mik — might be forgiven for some surprise at what they have created.  And it is not only the high attendance that is remarkable: the concerts convey a definite and distinctive atmosphere, even over the Internet.  Something is happening which Fr. Cypryś describes as a kind of transfiguration: “There are lots of events in which a crowd enjoys itself and goes crazy, for better or worse.  But in this concert the crowd reacts differently; people are uplifted, spiritual.  A spirit rises up out of the heart and, ultimately, to the Lord God.”  Paraphrasing Simon Peter’s words at the Transfiguration of the Lord, he says, “Most likely what lies behind the phenomenon is this: ‘it is good to be here’.”

Serce wielkie nam daj — ‘Give us a great heart’

Of course, the musicianship has a great deal to do with its success.  There is no cutting of corners here.  Members of the choir must first pass an audition and, if successful, learn their parts and words by heart.  The orchestra is reinforced by players from the Rzeszów Philharmonic.  Hubert Kowalski, who conducts the orchestra and creates the orchestral arrangements of many of the hymns, is a composer and prominent figure in Polish liturgical music.  Marcin Pospieszalski, a bass guitarist, violinist and and composer of film music, also produces arrangements for the ensemble.  His wife Lidia Pospieszalska, along with Tamara Kasprzyk-Przybysz, leads the choir.  The solo singers and instrumentalists, too, tend to be prominent names in Polish music — Joachim Mencel, Poldek Twardowski, Viola Brzezińska — and some are international visitors, such as last year’s guests Levi Sakala (Zambia) and Fr. Stan Fortuna (U.S.A.).

For those of us who were struck by the quality of the music at the 2016 World Youth Day in Kraków (about which my tuppence-worth here and here), this all explains a great deal.   For at Kraków too there was this same compelling recipe of familiar or singable tunes heightened by rich and colourful orchestration.  The same musicianship, it turns out, is behind both phenomena — and by ‘musicianship’ I mean both the same individual musicians (Marcin Pospieszalski also contributed to the WYD hymn, for instance) and, more broadly, the same strong underlying musical culture.  Now I see why, when the world came to Kraków, the youth of Poland rose so splendidly to the occasion.

Even so, the evenings are not meant to be thought of simply as as an aesthetic experience, as this article (translated here) explains.  It is not for a performance that the multitudes have gathered.  In fact, the distinction between stage and audience is relaxed: the soloists, however famous, are not announced by name when they come on stage to sing; instead, the words of the hymns are projected onto screens so that everyone can join in.  There is a togetherness of music-making, itself in service of a togetherness of heart and spirit: “We believe profoundly that it is not only for an artistic event that we are gathered together,” says Hubert Kowalski; “but for deep prayer, in an expression of our belonging to God, and of our faith.”

Ciebie całą duszą pragnę — ‘For you I long with all my soul’, Psalm 63 (62)

And hymns are sung from every age and corner of the Church.  Taizé, nineteenth-century patriotic hymns, plainsong, seventeenth-century German melodies, American worship songs, the oldest known Polish hymn (the ‘Bogurodzica’) and even a rap, to whose lyrics presumably nihil obstat, performed by its author, a priest in full cassock — now I’ve seen it all!.  All sorts, then, which is another sign of a concerted effort to unity.  Perhaps not all the music will be to everyone’s taste, but everyone will like at least some of it.  I don’t think either traditionalists or innovators could complain of being left out, and I have to say I find most of it very appealing, especially with the choir’s open, unaffected, even raw way of singing.  But maybe it is the idea itself that matters more, the idea that people might willingly choose to spend some hours in each other’s company, and their Creator’s.  This is perhaps why, in 2010, when a terrific rain-storm caused flooding in the region and threatened the concert itself, those without long journeys to face decamped to a car park, hurriedly set up a new stage, and carried on singing under the deluge.

Chrystus Pan karmi nas — ‘Christ the Lord nourishes us’.

‘Serdecznie zapraszamy,’ they say —  ‘we cordially invite’ all people to join the gathering in the park.  Even from afar, watching online from here in England, it is impossible to resist being drawn into this spirit of togetherness, and to notice certain heartening things: the sheer variety of the people who are there, the roughly equal numbers of men and women, the presence of families and children, the breadth of ages, the large number of young priests and religious.  Then there are other surprising details, other refreshing sights, like natural ornaments of celebration and goodwill (as simple as flowers in the ladies’ hair, or exuberant balloons and banners among the audience), bishops’ bonhomie, John Paul II look-alikes, and people holding hands, or couples with their arms gently around each other, quite ordinarily and unshowily.  Everyone is quite obviously having a good time.  The young in particular are visibly uncynical, relaxed and actually youthful in spirit.  This is the youth that Benedict XVI knew is ‘not as superficial as some think’, and surely it is precisely because of the concert’s sincerity and authenticity — no artificial emotion, no pseudo-intellectualism, no smarminess, all those fakeries that young people can smell a mile off — that they come in such huge numbers.   Here all that is good about modern music and the modern world are taken and elevated to their highest purpose.  It is enough to make anyone ask why we are agonising and dithering over the New Evangelisation.  This is what it looks like and how it is done: some of this music could evangelise a potato.

‘A spirit that can rise up from the heart’… ‘an expression of our belonging to God’… The unison of lifted voices begets the unity of many lifted hearts and lifted spirits: one voice, one heart, one spirit.  It is what it says on the tin, then, and how sad it is that most of us in Britain can scarcely imagine it.  Yet what should be more natural than this, than gathering in a park to pray and sing?  Hymns were made to be sung anywhere, as much at home, at work, or to candlelight in the park as in church.  The concerts are astonishing to us not, then, because they are strange in themselves, but precisely because they are so completely natural that they should be commonplace, and yet are not.  Of course, the concerts are not meant as a substitute for going to church, or the sacraments, or the ordinary practice of the faith — the organisers suggest nothing of the kind — but as the natural expression of a certain moral and spiritual culture, as well as a musical one, a culture that knows the meaning of purposeful worship, it is a great sign of hope.

In other words, it is the reality of the occasion that is so startling: startling both because it is rather astounding that a gathering like this should happen in real life, and also because it is such a real, such a genuine thing to do, a thing so refreshingly free of illusion or falsehood.  There’s nothing forced or self-conscious about it.  Really, the broadcasts and videos of the occasion show for themselves what is going on.  The Holy Spirit is not very easily faked. 

Dziękuję wam, organizatorzy, muzycy i śpiewacy koncertu ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’, za takie wydarzenie, tak podnoszące na duchu!

Przykazanie miłości: ‘The Commandment of Love’

Most of the ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ concerts can be watched on Youtube:

2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDtfont8WE4

2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYYkEchNGbc

2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MizpESL97o0

2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR6DLJ-zcN4

2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kZ-Bnw-BpA

2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPGFNFa_0go

2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XprTM0meYZc

2016 (in Kraków for World Youth Day): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJKWyrUlwuM

2017: https://youtu.be/bsaA-EBdOXE?t=3h22s
2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LaVDNpPBok&t=8242
2019: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c0M7ZrqVR0&t=6735

The New Evangelisation: ten thoughts

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  The question asks itself now not in ancient Babylon but in our own country and our own day, and with growing urgency.  The Church’s answer is the New Evangelisation —  a great call to re-evangelise Christian cultures that have forgotten the faith — but it can be hard to see how we are to fit into it, or where to begin.  I am not a convert, still less an expert, but I thought it might be worth putting up this list of reflections, even if most of them might seem obvious.

1. Apathetic agnosticism is a greater, a subtler and a more widespread challenge than aggressive secularism.  Our country is awash with spiritual apathy (or acedia): a number of people are openly opposed to Christianity, but far more in modern Britain seem almost to sleepwalk through life, hurled by busy lives from distraction to distraction, not seeing what weighs them down.  There is a lot of unwise, stupid and wrong behaviour as well, but we should never confuse this, the result of sin to which believers are hardly immune, with the actual intelligence and goodness of non-churchgoers.   Easy though it might be to forget in a culture opposed to the Church in so many ways, people really do examine the human heart carefully without any particular grudge against Christianity.  We should remember that our faith does not make us, in ourselves, superior to them — see Galatians 6:14.  Another point is that people have different reasons for not going to church, and these cannot necessarily be bashed aside with a copy of the Catechism.  For instance, many young people, having been brought up without regular church attendance, might feel that to start practising would be a slight to their parents and their values; it would be wrong for us to ride rough-shod over that loyalty.  Many people stay away from church without resenting churchgoers; many pray without practising; many believe in God but lack faith in the visible institution of the Church; many people are of good will but spiritually unadventurous. There are also more people with misgivings about modern values than the media suggest: I know a number of (young!) people who reverence marriage, dislike bad language, seek beauty in poetry, and so on.  To be evangelised is to discover something that is not completely unfamiliar.
2. We should announce the Gospel by asking people questions.  This is an age, in thrall as it is to the doctrines of self-determination and relativism, in which people dislike being lectured to, and in any case, it is better to invite people to discover the faith for themselves and in their own time.   Proclamations, however resonant, can be taken as slogans and brushed off quite easily.  Even quietly-posed questions are less easy to ignore.  They are more likely to percolate unobtrusively through the mind, reappearing every so often, never really going away, gently nudging and pestering for an answer.  We could learn from our Evangelical brethren here:  the talks and discussions they organise often have a question as the title, such as ‘Is there more to life than this?’, ‘What if the Resurrection really happened?’, and so on.  Even rhetorical questions demand unspoken answers.  Do you believe that you have an absolute and irreducible dignity as a human being?  Would you prefer to be excused for your wrongs, or to be forgiven?  Do you remember that we believed because it is true?
3. We must evangelise the arts and culture.  We must have the courage to answer the cults of sarcasm and ugliness with works of art, literature and music that uphold human dignity and strive for beauty.  The right artistic intention is, I think, to be prized even more than accomplishment or execution.  A  sincere true utterance with some rough edges is better than a thousand polished works calculated to trample goodness and truth gratuitously (I think works of art or literature can be evil, as well as simply bad).  The ideals by which all art was once made have been so neglected that they now represent a niche in the market, and it is up to us to fill it.  We need writers, composers and architects whose subjects are not necessarily explicitly religious but whose faith can be seen to leaven their work.  We need audibly beautiful, even musical poetry.  Popular music must be prized out of the hands of the industry that has dragged it down into sordidness, and the airwaves filled with simple, unaffected, authentic and uplifting tunes.  Films, too, could explore the world and the soul far more deeply, and without sermonising (Inside Out, which I have already praised, is a case in point).  These things matter because art is not inanimate: it always acts upon us for better or worse.  If beauty is a reflection of God, and God is love and truth, beautiful art will lead us towards deeper understanding and purer love of each other and of God.  Such love is several orders of magnitude above a love of music or poetry, but both have the same essence and the same divine origin.
4. Our position should not be a merely anti-modern or reactionary one, even though we are right to mourn to much of what the past has taken with it.  Although we should cherish tradition, resist our culture’s chronological snobbery with energy and revive certain aspects of the old world, our aim is not simply to return to the past.  Likewise, given that much of what we say and believe might be called ‘conservative’, we should remember that we are so confident in its truth because it is Christian orthodoxy, not because it is conservative.  We should look for opportunities in the modern world; we should embrace new technology.  This is, for instance, the age of the image, and ours is the religion of the image: the modern ‘explosion of imagery’, Fr. Robert Barron has said, even makes this a ‘Catholic moment’.  Why should the Church not encourage the building of beautiful websites or beautiful graphic design?  I am probably guiltier than most of yearning for the past and raging against the present, but we should make the effort to receive the ‘sacrament of the present moment’ gratefully.
5. We must never tire of striving and praying for Christian unity.  Christians have inherited a difficult and a painful tangle and our divisions, though less raw than they once were, remain scandals and obstacles to faith.  We should make a greater effort to collaborate with Evangelical Christians who, like us, hold to Christian faith in the teeth of fashion, their concern for what is ‘Biblical’ corresponding to ours for what is ‘orthodox’.  We should make an effort to understand the Eastern Orthodox faith: last February’s meeting between Pope Francis and the Russian Patriarch Kirill, and good relations with the Patriarch of Constantinople, are valuable and significant.  (I have heard a priest say that fifty years might suffice for full communion to be restored between East and West.)  Even within the Catholic Church, we should overcome our differences by trying to keep them in perspective, avoiding airing them in public if possible, and also by keeping our minds and hearts fixed on Jesus Christ (see point 10). 
6. Marriage, the family and childhood matter.  It is on this front that the modern world has declared war most explicitly on the Church.  We need courage to defend it.  A preoccupation with the welfare of adults, though not unjustified, has contributed to the social and cultural neglect of children and the elderly, who in their own ways have become almost second-class citizens.  Children in particular are segregated from the world of adults: because the adult world believes itself entitled to violent and sordid entertainment, children must be given their own isolated culture.  This, among other things, means that the passage from childhood to adulthood is no longer a steady growth or slow mellowing but a series of disillusioning shocks and blows, the worst of which fall between the ages of eleven and fourteen.  Surely most of us have seen this happen: the descent of the grey veil of cynicism; the deliberate self-vandalism of the soul; the hideously thorough revolt against childhood.  The New Evangelisation reminds us of the importance of the family, in which all people have their place and by which all understand their own lives.  Somewhere (I wish I could remember where!) I have heard and heartily agreed with the statement that ‘all men are called to be fatherly and all women to be motherly’.  I think it would also be good rule to behave at all times as if children might overhear.  Unfashionably, I also believe that men can and should cultivate chivalry towards women and that women should demand excellent manners of men.  Both men and women, if they are called to do so, should steel themselves joyfully for the mission of marriage and parenthood.
7. There is a good deal of health in the Church’s youth.  I can report this from belonging to it!  In university chaplaincies, in diocesan ministries, in parishes, however small in number, there is plenty of energy, intelligence and good humour to be harnessed.  The Church has great strength in its youth, as World Youth Day has proved again and again, and will surely do again this coming July. 
8. A sense of vocation is the antidote to the myth of self-determination.  There is more strength to be gained from the feeling of being called to do something than from simply wanting to do something.  The current idea that we may do as we please as long as we think it harms nobody else will, I think, pall, since it leaves nobody but oneself to blame for plans going wrong or indeed for suffering.  As people tire of endless fruitless avenues, the Church should be there to propose a robuster way of life, something requiring service and devotion and even vows, which nevertheless brings far greater happiness than the path of self-absorption and quick gratification.  I never tire of quoting Cardinal Newman’s meditation about service and vocation, from which this blog’s name is taken: ‘God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission — I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next […] I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.  Therefore I will trust Him’. One way of telling whether something is a real vocation, it has occurred to me, is to feel a strong desire to do something good, to be terrified of doing it, and to be determined, almost in spite of oneself, to do it all the same.
9. We are sharing a revealed faith, not advocating a philosophy or policy.  Our faith is not an idea that we came up with one afternoon in the pub and are rather pleased with.  It is not a theory to be evaluated, nor a strategy to be risk-assessed.  It is not our idea but God’s.  If we invite people to understand the Church, we do so because we believe they will be happier for knowing it, and we want happiness for them out of love: it is something that we can hardly help telling other people about, like the urge to share music or discuss favourite books. 
10. Who do we say that He is?  Our first task is to evangelise ourselves.  In a lecture that is well worth listening to, Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth says (here to be precise) that in the modern world we are to concentrate above all on the person of Jesus Christ.  Where, before the Council, the emphasis might have been too often on ‘The Church of the Lord’, we are invited now to found our lives more clearly upon ‘The Lord of the Church’.  The New Evangelisation may be a great task, but it begins here, and is a futile exercise without it.  It may also be a great task, but it is to be gone about in small, even unseen ways.  Whatever happens, we should not worry: we have already been told that it will all come right in the end.

Do readers have thoughts about these?  I would be interested to read any comments.

‘O the mind, mind has mountains’: Pixar, the Poets and the Teenager

This post has somehow ballooned into a 2,000-word tract.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I have said anything that will spoil the film for those who have not seen it, nor given away the plot beyond about the film’s half-way mark, though I let slip clues to the mood of its resolution.  Put simply, two hours spent watching the film is recommended over two hours trying to read my review of it. 

Film fare at the university Cathsoc on Shrove Tuesday was Pixar studios’ Inside Out.  I suppose I had been expecting something fairly light after all those pancakes.  Yet here I am a week afterwards still puzzling out this unusual film.

Inside Out has been selling itself on the point of its being set mainly inside the main character’s own head.  Riley is an ordinary American girl, with a strong and steady mother and father, who has been steered through her eleven years (and counting) by five characters who are her emotions personified: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust.  They oversee her mind, react to all she meets, influence her actions, send off a daily consignment of memories to the archives and engage themselves perpetually in a well-intentioned squabble for the upper hand.  The apparently whimsical premise is rather like the Numbskulls series in the Beano comic, except that, for all its bright colours, for all its lashings of humour and for all its characteristically American warm-heartedness, this is a not a trivial film.  It has something serious to say to adults and children alike.  In other words, it does not reach over the heads of the young audience but has two rare qualities: firstly, it is a children’s film which takes itself seriously because it takes its young audience seriously, and secondly it remembers most of the time, as it also speaks seriously to an older audience, that both old and young are in the same room.

Inside Out’s first triumph, in my view, is its astonishing animation.  It is slick without quite being too rushed and lavishes detail on the viewer.  No stone is left unturned in recreating wan sunlight on concrete or the cold yellow sweep of street lamps through a moving car.  Most impressive of all is that, out of nothing but pixels under a computer’s bonnet, it is now possible to breathe the very subtleties and shadows of emotions into a character’s face: the face falling, the collapse into laughter, the dawning of disappointment, the hesitant brightening of hope, the dance of dozens of movements or half-smiles or twitches or blinks in conversation, and (crucially, as it turns out) the zero of numb expressionlessness.  Even in this age of commonplace technological wonder it is amazing to watch.  The personified emotions may be very clever on their own, but they are, after all, (deliberately) undisguised stock characters.  The really remarkable achievement is their way of mingling and moderating each other in the heroine’s expressions.  The whole film has surely been designed to show off this animation; at any rate, it certainly depends upon its success.  I think the ambitious gamble has paid off.  

I am hoping that it is all right to link to this short extract from the beginning of the film,  which gives a better impression of its cleverness than the trailer does.

Then there is the film’s setting, the landscape of the mind.  They have the most important thing right: its scale is enormous.  The five emotions sit dizzyingly high up in a sort of control tower, from which they and the viewer can see miles of shelves of long-term memory in the distance.  There is also an archipelago of ‘islands of personality’, great floating citadels to Riley’s particular strengths and talents, which are (if I remember properly) ‘Family’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Hockey’, ‘Honesty’ and something like high spirits.  Between these and the control-tower yawns a dark void, a hopeless pit of forgotten memories.  They have depicted Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines exactly:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there.

The mind is not a mere safe or chamber.  It is its own country.  Yes, this scale is completely right: yes, this setting is entirely fitting, as the film’s audience will have known, in fact.

Having built up this mountainous mythology of the mind, the directors have kept the narrative simple.  All that is made to happen to Riley is that her family moves from the Mid-West of the U.S. to San Francisco in California.  Yet the setting’s palette means that this realistic uprooting and her understandable struggle to settle in her new home can be depicted in scrupulous, meditative detail.  In Riley’s mind its effect is literally upheaving, even seismic.  Setbacks and threats, real or imagined but all of an unfamiliar potency, suddenly come thick and fast at home and at school.  The five emotion characters struggle to maintain control over the mind.  There is a panicked tussle over the memory-mechanism, and then there is catastrophe: the Joy character — the sole optimist — and the Sadness character — a combination of Eeyore and King Midas, who cannot help tainting anything she touches with a contagious blue gloom — manage to catapult themselves out of the control tower, across the mind’s chasm and into the archives of memory, hopelessly far away from any influence over their charge and leaving to hold sway over the mind only Fear, Disgust and Anger who, as might be expected in spite of their efforts, cannot sustain Riley’s character by themselves.  One by one, her ‘islands of personality’ begin to founder and topple; a tectonic catastrophe threatens and weakens her whole person.  (How puny and trivial San Francisco’s immense Golden Gate bridge, seen in opening shots, is made to seem now).  That is the plot seen from the inside.  From the outside, and from the perspective of her parents, she withdraws into herself, turns her back on her surroundings and slumps into disillusion.  Come to that, the narrative can be stated more simply still.  The move to California jolts Riley’s mind into a new age: her growing up enters a painful phase.

This linearity and simplicity of narrative leaves plenty of room for a remarkable richness and dignity in the portrayal of her character which, it is also worth noticing, also provides the film’s setting.  This richness of character is its fourth and crowning triumph in my book, and the reason why I think so many people have found it so powerful.  Just as the animation shows the emotions mingling in Riley’s face, so their overall effect is to mingle in her character.  Inside Out’s heroine is at intervals joyful, sorrowful, disgusted, angry, fearful, or somewhere in between, but remains always plainly the same person.  She is exalted and deepened where, in many modern children’s books and films, characterisation often suffers from being crowded out by over-complicated narratives.  Even though I had trouble keeping up with the frenetic dialogue (once a line is missed it is gone), I can see that such slickness is justified here.  It makes sense for these emotions, being the voices in Riley’s head, to chatter away at the speed of thought: their speech, perhaps along with the musical score, is the very sound of her thinking.  (The film’s dialogue outside the mind is very well paced and particularly cleverly delivered).  The distinction between first person and third person is gloriously vague. The result, then, is a meticulous and self-unconscious chronicle not only of a character’s actions and words but also of her every thought.  It might even be possible to treat this film as a moving portrait instead of as a story, and to be content with studying and contemplating a single character, painted as richly as any in literature, for its two hours’ length.  

I have longed for a work of literature for children (for I think this is literature) that is brave and serious enough to do something like this.  I have often thought that the most moving stories work on this sort of scale, painting the apparently prosaic or normal in monumental colours without taking leave of a realistic world, and by making characters deep enough to let their young audiences almost befriend them.  Such literature triumphs because it upholds human dignity — as I persist in believing all literature ought to, one way or another — by portraying its majesty.   For majesty is the cornerstone of Inside Out, in spite of its psychedelic appearance.  Riley’s loss of heart, manifested on the outside only in despondency and flouncing (which I thought her parents indulged too much!), is actually the interior landscape’s very ruin. The doomed realm of childhood imagination is depicted as a sprawling rubble-strewn demolition site, leered over by lofty cranes; the collapse of an ‘island of personality’ is always slow, grave and noble, more terrible than the foundering of a battleship, or the schism of an iceberg or indeed a San Franciscan earthquake.  ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, and, come to that, O it carries enough quests and perils for a trillion trilogies, even at eleven. 

For all that I praise the film, I must also admit to being unsettled by it.  This is not really the directors’ fault but the fault of the culture that engulfs Pixar Studios and audience alike.  I have two criticisms to make of the film’s powerful depiction of growing up, which I think is what most moves its older audience.  Firstly, curmudgeon that I am, I find myself deprived of the film’s cathartic relief because I do not see much hope in the culture into which Riley is about to graduate.   The end of the film shows that the screen-writers are uncritical of the principles, and the implications, of modern Western teenager- and adulthood.  When Riley is more than once given the line ‘I’ve got to go’ — just before some setback, always ‘I’ve got to go’, words delivered casually but which become profoundly haunting once they are recognised as a refrain — it really feels like a permanent farewell.  This is why I find myself hoping that they do not attempt a sequel and instead leave Inside Out alone atop a plinth of its own.  My second regret is that this growing up produces in her mind nothing short of revolution, rather than a less traumatic formation — or, in other, broader words, I lament that she must be delivered up to teenagerhood without comment or criticism.

I am compelled to wonder why the growth from child to adult must now, since the invention of the teenager, necessarily involve more ruin and revolution than mellowing and deepening.   Why a campaign of levelling and rebuilding, rather than a programme of refurbishment and extension?  Why must the teenage attitude be one of self-repudiation, a developer’s instead of a gardener’s?  We have all surely seen it happen: young people, feeling compelled to rebel against themselves, vandalise any part of their character they perceive as childlike and re-engineer themselves aggressively into almost a different person.  In fact, one of Inside Out’s finest strokes is to look briefly into the mind of a worldly, eye-shadowed-up ‘in-crowd’ girl from school during the credits.  Underneath the façade her emotional characters are wailing, ‘We’re a complete fraud; do you think they can see through us?’, ‘It’s so tiring being cool’, and so on.  Teenagers will go to such lengths because they are now even more afraid of being thought childish than of being thought stuffy.  Of course we must all in the end put aside childish things; of course we squirm at some of the things we have said and done in childhood; of course the teenager plumbs depths unknown by the child; of course we must arm ourselves for the adult world.  But why is that adult world so unforgiving of childhood at present?  What is the attitude, I wonder, of the ordinary modern man to his boyhood, or the ordinary modern woman’s to her girlhood?   What does the adult do with the child’s spirit and ambitions?  Do we remain loyal to the principles, if not the practice, of youth?  (Shouldn’t we?).  What do old and young versions of the same person have in common?  Were such a thing possible, could they any longer have a sincere conversation with each other?  What would the child think of the teenager’s later policy of disinterest, scoffery and sullenness adopted precisely in order to spite the old earnestness, enthusiasm and high spirits?  

In response to Wordsworth, who was able to sing

My heart leaps up when I behold 
  A rainbow in the sky: 
So was it when my life began, 
  So is it now I am a man, 
So be it when I shall grow old
    Or let me die! 
The child is father of the man: 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety,

Gerard Manley Hopkins, who might have been joking, went to the trouble of cementing into a triolet his view that ‘the words are wild’, scoffing ‘Suck any sense from that who can’.  Supposing Wordsworth was certainly not joking, though?  If the child is indeed father of the man, then the parental authority against which the teenager actually rebels is not, in the first instance, that wielded by the real mother and father.  The struggle is more against the authority of the childhood self.  This is why, in Inside Out, Riley’s personality must be torn down and demolished rather than refurbished from within; why there must take place not merely a broadening and deepening of the mind but its wholesale razing and rebuilding.  Watching the film, I thought this dramatic, even violent depiction of the end of her interior childhood was unwarranted except, of course, by cinematic purposes.  Surely we ought to grow up more steadily, more slowly, more gently, than that?

There is, of course, a sorrow about the necessary fading of childhood that is sewn into us irrevocably.  I do not take these lines, also by Wordsworth (from his Intimations of Immortality, set vividly to music by Gerald Finzi) altogether as the whole truth, but they are very moving, and perhaps we all know what he means:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

        Hath had elsewhere its setting,

          And cometh from afar:

        Not in entire forgetfulness,

        And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

        From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

        Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

        He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

    Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

      And by the vision splendid

      Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

And how about the note struck here (by Cecil Day-Lewis, in his poem Walking Away), also sounded in  Inside Out’s ‘I’ve got to go’ refrain:

                                                              … I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

For all its pain, felt by the self and by others, the farewell to childhood is necessary.  Why, though, must our culture insist on so high a price, paid in full and not in instalments, as ransom for the passage into modern adulthood?  Why must it harden children so swiftly into so hollow a cynicism; why must its economics compel parents to leave their children for days on end in nurseries and child-care; why must even its entertainment exclude the young for the sake of adults’ freedom to snigger?  Why should we not revere childhood to the point of costing ourselves and society something?  We might even keep in mind Herbert Howells’ titanic Hymnus Paradisi, which, as I have written about here, he saw fit to consecrate to his small son, lost suddenly to polio at the age of nine?  Why should we not say of the child, with Eliot, 

Let him continue in the spirit of wonder…

… So that the reverence and the gaiety

May not be forgotten in later experience,

In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,

The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure…  ?

I ask all these questions, but see no good answers.

Comparison of Inside Out to the age that has produced it also makes me restless because it throws light on all the good things that Western culture — not simply American culture, though this is an American film through and through — is capable of if only it tried.  Why do we not make more films like this instead of the catastrophic waste of money and time and talent there is, I am tempted to fume, on idiotic, violent or lurid films that trample human dignity in a stampede for fame and wealth?  Pixar has produced a justly popular film (and incidentally made a great deal of money) without graphic violence, almost entirely wholesome humour and, apart from three rather surreal scenes that might alarm very young children, no gratuitously upsetting scenes.  (I should say that there are upsetting scenes, but they are not gratuitous!).  Why can we not have more films with fine actors and symphonic musical scores, dispensing with the low and the sordid but confronting the great questions of the spirit and soul, elevating the detail of ordinary life, depicting the fortress of a traditional family deepening and strengthening in love even in crisis, and underlain by an uplifting vision of human life and dignity?  Whole swathes of this film resound in a majestic minor key that, astonishingly for a children’s film, never quite resolves wholly to major.  If I had seen it at the age of its intended audience — as the reviewers interviewed here on BBC Radio 5 have done — I suspect that I would impulsively have declared it film of the century.  It is tempting to do so even now.

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Further viewing / listening:

Readers who have seen the film might appreciate this.