TIME IS LIKE A DREAM/AND NOW, FOR A TIME, YOU ARE MINE: Yet more reader comments on NFP and liturgical time (not using names b/c I haven't asked permission, but if you see this and don't mind, email me and I'll add your name back in):

#1:

Hi Eve,

It may interest you that if you go to Ethiopia today, you'll find that few weddings take place during the fasting seasons (Lent, Advent, Apostles, Dormition,...) and during the rainy season (mid-June to early September). Even the non-Orthodox (Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics) will tend towards avoiding these dates so that their Orthodox friends (about 50% of the population) can attend the wedding.

Between Easter and the June rains, there's usually a bit of April and June, and the whole of May. Interstingly, May (or the Ethiopian somewhat equivalent - Ginbot) is associated with negative superstitions, which means that late April and early June is heavy wedding season. Some folks end up going to more than one a day!

A significant portion of the Orthodox observe the fasts to some extent or another. It's palpable to any visitor. Restaurant menus change, butchers and dairies scale down, and there's a relative serenity in the air.

Also not (quite) on board with the sharp separation at the end between pragmatic discipline and spiritual discipline...

#2:

I thought you might like this little mnemonic verse on the Forbidden Times of Marriage (Pre-VII):
Advent bids thee to refrain,
Hillary sets thee free again,
Septuagesima bids thee stay,
Six days from Easter says thou may,
Ascension pleads thy chastity,
But thou may'st wed at Trinity.

The feast of St Hilary falls on 13th January, the Octave of the Epiphany, marking the end of the Christmas season. Septuagesima Sunday fell 70 days before Easter (the third Sunday before Lent) and Trinity, of course, is the first Sunday after Pentecost)

and Cacciaguida (who already gave me permission):

...On the pragmatic/spiritual point: it's traditional ascetic teaching that a mortification undertaken as such, for God, has somewhat greater spiritual value than one encountered, either passively (a bumped head, a stubbed toe) or in the course of a legitimate secular pursuit (we write the article when we'd rather blog or watch a movie, etc.). But the latter can be offered up as well, so I can't see that the difference is as big a deal as your correspondent makes it.

YOUR FACE IS MARKED UPON THE CLOCKFACE: An anonyreader brings up a very pertinent criticism of my liturgy/nfp post. I'm not on board with the sharp separation at the end between pragmatic discipline and spiritual discipline (it seems clear that people can make the latter also the former, and in fact, lots of people who write about nfp take exactly that approach so as to avoid the "contraceptive mentality" my correspondent notes), but otherwise, this is a good riposte to an experimental and perhaps not-so-well-considered post:

Hi Eve,

I'm not sure I follow the parallel you're trying to make in your 7/19 post. An observant Orthodox Jewish couple will I suppose ceteris paribus have a fast/feast sort of rhythm as you suggest. But an observant RC couple will generally have that only if they are self-consciously and intentionally trying to avoid having a baby, right? Which is sort of permissible but definitely not mandatory? An RC husband and wife who have sex on a haphazard and arhythmic schedule, sublimely indifferent to the odds of conception on any particular occasion, are not, I take it, being Bad Catholics. If anything, isn't there supposed to be some risk that couples who use NFP can fall prey to the negativity of the "Contraceptive Mentality" (tm) even if they act out that worldview by licit Humanae-Vitae-compliant means?

I think there from time to time in Christian history have been those who advised married couples to abstain from sex on what were otherwise fasting days or periods, I don't know with what degree of practical success. I vaguely recall some historian claiming to have determined from a review of birth records in medieval France (?) that the timing of births (minus nine months) suggested a nontrivial percentage of couples were, in fact, abstaining during Lent, but I don't know how reliable the records were and how good the methodology was (e.g. whether it controlled for the fact that marriages were not typically celebrated during Lent, meaning one would expect an uptick in first children born to newlyweds at Eastertide plus nine months and change). Taking that sort of temporal-rhythmic approach w/o focusing on the practical impact on fertility could, I suppose, have some sort of liturgical / sanctification of time benefit. But periodically abstaining from sex just to avoid conception seems rather like periodically abstaining from meat to get your cholesterol down. Maybe it's fine as a pragmatic exercise, but treating it as a spiritual discipline seems to miss (IMHO) the whole point about how fasting and ascesis is supposed to be beneficial for Christians.

(I totally almost included the thing about no weddings in Lent! If I throw enough pasta at this wall, won't some of it stick??)

MEET ZE MONSTA: A reader writes:

Eve,

Just saw your post on monsters. I just finished a terrific commentary on Aristotle's Poetics by Michael Davis, The Poetry of Philosophy. He makes the point that Aristotle's contrast of epic and tragedy at the end has this function: epic presents the strange to us (monsters, e.g.) so that we wonder at its strangeness, and then are led to the contemplation of ordinary life, which comes to light in the contrast with epic's strangeness. Tragedy presents ordinary life itself as strange, which also leads to the contemplation of the ordinary. In both cases, the ordinary is invisible until it is contrasted with the strange (epic) or made to seem strange (tragedy). Poetry thus provides us with the service of allowing contemplation of real life. Monsters do this by their very strangeness, which we cannot but notice. The deliberate contradictoriness that your author points out, Aristotle would say, is not (at least in good poetry) done in order to deconstruct our categorical impositions, or some other foolish thing, but to bring to our notice how the depicted object differs from what is real, and therefore to bring what is real to our notice where before it would have remained invisible and unexamined. The monster, in fact, depends on the prior fixity of real life. If real life had no fixity, there would be no need for a monster. Further, the monster itself would be invisible (as would everything else), and so the entire life of philosophy would be unavailable.

Anyway, hope that makes sense. ...

TH