Parking The Catholic Bus

In metric football, aka soccer, "parking the bus" means that a team is playing maximum defense. All 11 players are usually behind the ball, crowding the penalty box to the point where an opponent's skill becomes meaningless as there are just too many bodies in the way to score a goal. It's typically done by a team which is far inferior to its opponent. Any hopes for scoring hinge on the occasional breakaway, counter attack.

When I read the inestimably wise Rod Dreher talk about his Benedict Option, that's what I hear. Fair enough. We're third in strength behind the secular progressives and Islam and we need to think about playing defense - maintaining our churches and as many of our current believers as possible. I disagree with him that we have no offensive ability, but that's a topic for another blog post.

Last night we went to a secular wedding. We've been to several recently. The ceremony is always brief as there was nothing substantial to anchor it outside of the vows. There's a brief introduction, the couple say the vows, everyone claps and we move on to the party. In each case, the (young) couple has chosen a friend to officiate, so there's not a whole lot of life experience to impart in a homily.

As I watch the loving pair pledge their troth and then the whole gang drink and dance the night away, I think about Rod Dreher's proposition - that a culture in decline needs to cling to its orthodoxies like soldiers in a bunker awaiting an offensive.

Well, maybe.

I'd suggest that the most important thing that's missing in these lives is the acknowledgement that there is more to life than this (pinching his flesh). That's pretty much it. If this is all there is, then doing the Wobble, drinking a lot of rum and Cokes and then going home and boinking is pretty much the apex of human existence. Instead, if the gang thought we were souls who had bodies, then natural curiosity would lead them to ceremonies that mentioned that.

And then we could move on to the Wobble and, later, the horizontal monkey dance.

This is the kind of bus I want to park.