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Murphy and Steinfels

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from: Cullen Murphy

The Wave of Peace

Posted Thursday, Feb. 18, 1999, at 12:41 PM ET

I noticed the same phenomenon all over town yesterday that you noticed at the ballet--cinder sprawl. It used to be that the ashes were applied in a discreet smudge, but this has now given way to something bolder. The kind I've been seeing has more of a brute, Southwestern character. You probably have a choice of pinyon or mesquite.

No, you didn't tell me what you're doing for Lent, and I'd like to hear. Sounds like it's time to fess up myself. The tradition in my family when I was growing up was to try to do something extra rather than to attempt new forays in denial. Last year I tried to get to Mass on several weekday mornings at the North End church nearby--an enterprise that became nearly unbearable for a shameful reason. St. Stephen's is a beautiful old church on Hanover Street--it's actually the oldest Bullfinch church in Boston--but the morning attendance is sparse. It is so sparse that when the time comes for the "sign of peace"--when congregants are supposed to shake hands with the people around them--there is no one nearby to shake hands with. So what has developed at St. Stephen's is the "wave of peace": the congregants hail one another silently with a wave of the hand across acres of empty pews. In practice, the wave has evolved into a sort of limp, stylized rotation of the hand, which turns all the old men into the Ayatollah Khomeini and all the old women into the Queen Mum.

This year I thought I'd attack the Shelf of Reproach and read Karl Rahner's Foundations of Christian Faith, a book that various friends have been pushing at me for years. And probably I still will. But on your advice I think I'll push Murdoch to the front. So thanks.

Pax tibi, Peggy. (Your imagination can supply the wave.)

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314151617
from: Cullen Murphy

The Wave of Peace

Posted Thursday, Feb. 18, 1999, at 12:41 PM ET
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Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the author of the comic strip Prince Valiant. His book The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own was published last fall. Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal, an independent biweekly journal of political, religious, and literary opinion.
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