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THE  RESTLESS  FLAME,  DANIEL  LORD,  S.J.

Thinking Big in a Parochial World


Chapter 26    Chapter 28



EXTRA   MATERIAL

Daniel Lord S.J.: The Restless Flame
Daniel Lord on Communism

Chapter Twenty-seven - 1949-1950
In the Shadows of Gethsemane

Football Stories

Qualified Athletes

Father LeBuffe told the story of the athletics-loving chemistry professor to whom the dean sent a certain athlete with this note: If this chap can’t get 50 percent in his chemistry test, he can’t play in Saturday’s game.

So the professor sat the youth down and said, sternly: What is the color of blue litmus paper?

After deep thought the athlete saw the answer: Pink, he cried, proudly.

The professor tried a second: What is H2O?

I don’t know, replied the youth, sadly.

So the professor sent him back to the dean with this note: The young man may play in Saturday’s game.  He answered correctly 50 per cent of my questions.  He missed the first question.  But he said he didn’t know the answer to the second one, and that was correct.

. . .


Father McDonough capped that story with the yarn about another chemistry professor whose word was to decide whether or not the lad would play in the season’s most important game.  The professor decided in this very wise and prudent fashion: This is to certify that this young man knows enough chemistry to play a good game of football.1

The Canada Tour

In 1949 Lord did his first trans-continent lecture tour of Canada sponsored by Father Thomas Walsh, S.J., the National Director of the League of the Sacred Heart.  Lord gave 35 lectures in 45 days including one at a hockey rink.  Father Walsh once had to share a hotel with room.  He described how Lord rose at 5:30 and took his typewriter into the bathroom to start his daily writing without disturbing Walsh.  On this tour Lord predicted that man would be on the moon by the year 2000.  Lord was also photographed by the famous Canadian Yousuf Karsh who remarked Father Lord is the greatest man I have ever met.2

The cover photo of Lord on The Restless Flame, Daniel Lord, S.J.; Thinking Big in a Parochial World is by Karsh.

Songs in the Winds

In 1950 Lord wrote the article Songs in the Winds for America about the racial insensitivity he grew up with.  He describes the Coon songs that were popular in his youth; giving examples of less offensive songs and recognizing that far more offensive songs existed.  Lord noted:

The winds have blown them away.  The winds are still blowing away vast accumulations of racial prejudices and racial insults.  We thought ourselves good, but our attitude toward the Negro was appalling.  Our grandchildren today, even with little Catholic instruction and social outlook, would reject and scorn our popular songs. . . .

Let the world look up and smile.  The songs in the wind indicate how vastly our attitudes have changed and how improved is our social outlook.  More than that, Negroes of America, still facing 1000 prejudices, can be singularly competent.  The past half-century with its upward trend is merely the happy guarantee of what lies the next half century.3

The Queen’s Work, 1949-1950

Although no longer the Editor, Lord contributed two articles to each issue including a regular feature Father Lord’s Letter to His Friends which in November 1949 was titled Chewing Ain’t Chawing and described various gum chewers: The Quiet Chewer, The Symphonic Chewer, The Gum Cracker, The Moist Masticator, The Rhythmic Rotator, and The Offbeat Chewer.  The February 1950 Letter spoke against smoking: Advertising never did a slicker job than when it got people to smoke.  Other topics ran the gamut from dancing, to how to greet people, to becoming a complete card player, to learning to type.

Salute to Canada

In 1949 Lord produced Salute to Canada at the Martyrs Shrine at Midland Ontario from July 27-31.  The shrine honors eight Jesuit missionaries killed by the Mohawks between 1642 and 1649.  There is another National Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville in New York State.  1949 marked the 300th Anniversary of the death of four of the Martyrs.

Lord wrote the music that was professionally arranged for a professional 24 piece orchestra conducted by Harold Sumberg from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.  The show included the Volkoff Canadian Ballet with Boris Volkoff.  The show had three scenes with two intermissions on an outdoor stage, 70 ft. wide and 50 ft. in depth, built into a hillside.  50,000 people saw the show with its cast of 750.

A reporter wrote:

I watched Father Lord at the final rehearsal of the pageant.  It was a red hot night and he was decidedly dishabille, his white shirt tails hanging outside of his trousers, and his iron gray hair terribly mussed.  He was putting his 500 [sic] actors and actresses through their final paces, and through it all, despite their errors, he kept his good temper.

. . .

Come on kids, he shouted to some youths and maids who were a bit slow in getting to their places.  You’ll have to move faster than that. . . .

The drama was dragging a bit towards the end.  Again the whistle blew, Stop it, said Father Lord.  There’s a song needed there to fill in that gap.  I’ll write one, and turning to the lovely Cornflower of the play, he called, How soon can you learn it?  It was ready for the first performance the next evening.

And when the evening’s hard work was over he called the cast together, thanked them, warning them to keep out of sight when the real performance was on. . . .

Now, tomorrow night you won’t have me to help you.  You’ll be on your own.  Good luck to you.4

That night Lord wrote the Bridal Hymn to Mary.5


Synopsis

The first scene Pre-Christian Huronia opens with a Canadian Boy and Girl leading a HURON BOY and HURON GIRL on stage.

HURON BOY: More of those excavators at Fort Ste. Marie.  I’d have been sleeping yet, except that one of them jabbed my ribs with a pickaxe.6

The HURON BOY and HURON GIRL comment on the stage action that enfolds, including seeing their own lives.

CANADA, a Mountie, enters with HURONIA, an Indian Princess.  An Indian Harvest Dance follows.  Then a war drum is heard.  INDIAN CHIEF MEDICINE MAN of the Iroquois gives a war chant about killing the Huron.

In the second scene, Christian Huronia, the Flags of Europe are scene in the background.

HURONIA: The coming of discoverers, explorers, pioneers . . . into our land, into Huronia.

HURON BOY: Bringing us hope!7

English and French soldiers enter.  An English dance follows and then a Firewater Scene.  The HURON BOY and HURON GIRL lament the coming of Europeans but are glad for the missionaries.  The eight missionaries who will become martyrs are seen being sent by the Pope.  The scene ends with The phosphorescent hand holding the illuminated crucifix.8

Next, missionary Noël Chabanal teaches Huron children about the cross and how to sing Frere Jacques.  Jean de Brébeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, and Fr. Garnier are there.  A messenger warns that the Iroquois are attacking a nearby Huron village.  Brébeuf and Lalemant go to help.

A Wedding scene with a French Dance and an Indian bridal procession follows as Fr. Garnier marries the HURON BOY and HURON GIRL.  In the background a glowing light indicates the burning of the nearby Fort.  Then the Iroquois attack the village and the HURON BOY and HURON GIRL are killed.

The thirds scene is From the Ashes: Canada.  Famous Canadians appear on stage.  Movie clips about Canada are shown including one of Canadian soldiers at the battle of Dieppe in WWII.

A triumphal march, the Apotheosis of Canada follows as Mary and the child Jesus and Guardian Angels look down from the heavens.  The eight Martyrs are seen as saints in bright scarlet Jesuit robes.  The show ends with a procession of Mounties, soldiers, actors in period costumes, pilgrims, flags, and Smoke and fireworks!!!

[The author assumes that readers are astute enough to recognize the details in this script that today would be recognized as culturally insensitive.]

Salute to Canada got lots of coverage in the local papers:

...visitors who have had previous intimate contact with the artistic and entertainment worlds...were, mystified at the happy holiday atmosphere in which hardened professionals harmonized with the callowest amateurs to turn out a well-paced and polished production...so they went in search of the answer and met the same thing everywhere they turned.

They knew there must be some mysterious force operating to make all these people work together with a merry heart.  They wondered what higher power had subjugated the well-known artistic temperament, so they went in search of the answer and met the same thing everywhere they turned.  Among musicians of the symphony, the members of the ballet, the Choristers and the individual artists, they found faces lighting up and worshipful smiles appearing at the mention of the director-producer of the show and all they could hear was Lord—Lord—Lord.

Another reviewer wrote:

The ballet which interprets the funeral procession and the grief of the Hurons is a triumph of choreography and interpretation.  It is doubtful if Canadian ballet has ever reached greater heights than it does in this overpoweringly moving scene.  Boris Volkoff must certainly preserve this ballet as a piece de resistance in his repertoire of beautiful dances.9

Harold Sumberg, the conductor commented on Lord’s writing:

His music is amazing in its versatility.  Some of it is first-rate show music, like the opening number in this pageant.  Other pieces like the French court dance, the English sea-chanty, the Indian dances and especially the funeral procession are finely conceived music of authentic inspiration.  But above all stands his total creative concept which enables him to see, and produce, lyrics, music, dances, songs, tableaux, movement, as properly ordered variations in the unity of the whole.10

The performances went well and the audiences enjoyed them, but the show lost money.  Lord had planned on repeating the show in Toronto at the Mapleleaf Gardens but that show was cancelled.  Lord had expected to spread the costs of everything from orchestration to costumes over multiple productions.  He was also told that the Shrine would cover some of the expenses which did not happen.  Had Lord know in advance about these issues he would have added an extra performance to increase revenue.  The Shrine lost $20,000 that year in part due to the show.

Lord then began thinking what to do next, in part to recover some of the costs, but also because the show had much potential.  First he considered a repeat performance, then, he proposed repeating it every summer on a permanent stage as A Canadian Mission Play. The Franciscans had been doing yearly plays at the California missions.

Lord imagined eight weeks of Friday and Saturday performances.  He thought of marketing a package deal of train fair, meals, and the show.  He proposed working with the Quebec government, tourist agencies, and railroads to even bring people from the United States.  He thought it could be great PR for the shrine.  Lord even imagined having seats in front with parking spaces behind them for 300-500 cars so people could watch from their cars.  He suggested an overall sound system instead of sound boxes as at drive-in movies.  Lord estimated a production cost of $25,000.

However all of Lord’s ideas were squelched by the Canadian Jesuit Provincial who thought a shrine should be a quiet place of prayer and that pageants were only for special events.11

Pamphlets of 1950

Here’s How To Learn

I Entered the Sem

A Letter to a Friend Not of My Faith

M Is for Marriage

Oh! Not in My Pew!

Prayer for Peace

Your New Leisure

The Christmas Face of God


In Here’s How to Learn Lord gives straightforward and practical advice on learning.12  He admits this pamphlet might have a limited audience.  Lord talks of the importance of being curious and being eager to keep learning.  He gives tips on how to read, how to listen, and how to write.  The pamphlet also encourages people to be learners.  Perhaps some young people who read this felt legitimized in wanting to be good students and learners.


I Entered the Sem is a short but charming pamphlet that tells the story of Gallagher who goes to the Seminary called the farm.  He has one last drink with his friend Kinder.

Two girls and a Panama-hatted male swung into the cushioned stools beside them.  The girls were clad in crisp summer linen, and there was about them a cloud of Arden’s more ardent compound.  The male was a little over the shady latitude of forty.  The girls gave the two young men a pair of wistful side glances—and knew the futility of their speculative hopes.13

Many elements of the story are reminiscent of Lord’s going to the novitiate.  This is a subtle but powerful pamphlet about a man reluctantly going to the seminary but finding it to be exactly right.

Your New Leisure . . . And How to Use It

In 1932 Lord wrote the pamphlet Hours Off about how to use leisure.  In 1950 he wrote Your New Leisure . . . And How to Use It, another common sense pamphlet that tackles the leisure created by the 40 hour work week.  (Of course the 40 hour work week happened because of labor unions.)  Lord subtracted from the 168 hours of week the time needed for work and sleep and concluded:

What a blessing former ages would have considered leisure like ours!  In 72 hours a week almost anyone of us is capable of becoming great ... developing to an amazing degree our physical or mental or emotional life ... creating great works of art ... learning to know, love, and imitate the great achievements of the ages . . . mastering world culture ... becoming saints.14
If leisure were spent to rebuild the body, relax the nerves, release the emotional and spiritual strains that are part of modern living, there’d be fewer ulcers, fewer calls to the psychoanalysts, fewer breakdowns, and fewer bankruptcies.15

Lord described The Leisure Killers.

The Sunday papers are gigantic sedatives offered for that precious day of relaxation.  In all honesty many a Sunday paper might rightly be called The Sunday Chloroform or simply Ether.  The editors, knowing that you will have pleasant hours of do-nothing on Sunday, ram into those Sunday hours a mass of wood pulp that chronicles the unimportant, records the unnecessary, and—after perhaps eight pages of essential information, news, and opinion—proceeds to expand, illustrate, comment on, repeat in roto and color press, blow up to Gargantuan proportions the trivial, the topical, the transient, and the tempting.16

Lord did not see reading comic books as a good use of time: Superman is fathering a race of inframen, his readers and slack mouth admirers.17

Lord suggests seeing good movies, although skeptical about a movie with a hero who solves all problems international, national, financial, moral, ethical, or social by socking the villain with a fake punch in the jaw.18

Under the topic Make Your Test Lord asks:

Does the quiet of a room so appall you that, left for a few minutes alone with your thoughts (or lack of them), you have to switch on a radio or pick up a phone and call someone, it doesn’t matter whom?

Are you among those modern Americans who when they have an unexpected hour on their hands climb onto a stool at a bar and gaze meditatively into the clouded crystal of a dry martini?19

Yet leisure is really one of the most remarkable tests of what you really are.

What you do during your leisure hours is really the test of your education.20

Other topics include Social Life Is Important, Hobbies are Grand (Lord mentions that the hobby of the boxer Gene Tunney was Shakespeare), Leisure for Athletics (as participants), Dancing One’s Leisure, Meet the World’s Great (great books and great music), and Time for God (retreats and reading Catholic authors).

What would Lord think of all the current options to waste time today: TV, the internet, and texting?

Nobody Loves a Tease

Daniel Lord Pamphlet: Nobody Loves a Tease

Nobody Loves a Tease forces the reader to think about teasing and to realize how cruel it can be.  Lord notes that we love to tease yet at the same time we hate to be teased.

The radio comedians have made a bulge in their bank accounts out of feuds that are open, carefully cultivated forms of teasing.  Jack Benny and Fred Allen have been at it for years.  Ed Bergen through the mouth of Charlie McCarthy has teased (joshed, slandered, insulted, plagued) himself over such matters as his bald head and his parsimony.  Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, close friends in private life, have turned the teasing of each other into upper-bracket incomes.  What would Hope have done without Crosby’s sixth in the race of six and his slight bay window?  And how could Crosby have continued without Hope’s ski-slide nose and his carefully nursed reputation for nickel-pinching?21
A bully is a person whose physical strength makes it possible for him to push his weaker associates around.  A tease is a person who superiority in some field or from some viewpoint makes it possible for him to push others around with words.  The tease is a verbal bully.  Teasing is an insult delivered with a laugh.22

Most decent people feel insecure even when they are doing their best; the most obvious good qualities look pretty wretched and wizened to the possessors.

By some strange instinct a real teaser is vividly aware of these feelings.  He senses not only the general fact but the insecurity of each person he sets himself to tease.  With magnificent skill he can whip out and flick the lash of his irony and hit the sore spot.  He can locate and kick out the brick in the edifice that we suspected was ready to crumble.23

Much teasing is harmless but much leaves permanent scars:

Tease a boy about his changing voice, and he is likely never to sing a note again; he may think himself tone-deaf.  Tease a girl because she learns with difficulty the fundamental waltz step, and possibly she never will be able to dance otherwise than badly, painfully.24

Although the cultural references in the pamphlet are dated, the message is still very relevant especially in an age when technology provides so many forums for teasing.

A Letter to a Friend Not of My Faith

In A Letter to a Friend Not of My Faith Lord gives straightforward answers and explanations of all the criticisms brought against Catholics by non-Catholics; starting with the legend that priests have horns and hooves which is why they wear cassocks and birettas.

I have always loved the story of the ancient crone in the hills of Kentucky who finally met a priest and at his invitation investigated for herself as to his horns.  When she found none, she was baffled for a moment.  Then she drew back, and, looking at the priest who was innocent of horns, she said, shrewdly, You’re young yet.25

Lord answers the accusation that Catholics believe that all non-Catholics cannot get to heaven:

In fact Catholics are taught that though Christ established one Church and not many, His true Church has both a visible and an invisible membership.  Those professing openly membership in the Catholic Church are the visible members.  Those who are trying to the best of their ability to love and serve God and their fellow man, far from meriting the wrath of the Almighty and the thunders of the Church, are really invisible members of the Church we love.26

He also answers the common criticism of Confession:

Sometimes people who do not know the Church get an idea that a sinner trots gaily into the confessional, tells his sins, gets a quick forgiveness, and then dashes right out to start sinning all over again. That is not at all the way confession works.27

Did Lord expect non-Catholics to read this pamphlet?  Was this a pamphlet Catholics could give to non-Catholics who raised these objections?  Regardless, the pamphlet is a great tool for teaching Catholics how to explain their faith and answer objections raised against it.



NOTES



Chapter 26    Chapter 28

  

Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner