Jacobean Era is BACK!

LOL

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain, MAY 27, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The archbishop of Santiago de Compostela has officially announced the 2010 "Jacobeo" Holy Year, which is celebrated each year that the feast of the Apostle James the Greater falls on Sunday.

St. James (in Spanish, Santiago) is the patron of Spain. His feastday is July 25. The feast falls on a Sunday 14 times every century, giving rise to 14 holy years. Next year's celebration will be the second Jacobeo Holy Year of the third millennium.

we can expect lots of movies with lycanthropes and weird incestuous relationships?

But seriously, one of my favorite novels of all time (and I don't usually like novels...too many words) is Therapy by David Lodge. In that book, the protagonist and his high school sweetheart, forty years after high school, undertake the pilgrimage hike to Campostella, and it has been having me dreaming of doing that walk ever since. Apparently, it's two weeks through the Pyrenees, and every day's journey there is a monastery where pilgrims can stop, refresh, eat and sleep. The only problem is: what kind of shoes to wear? The protagonist, whose name is Tubby, ends up with some nasty blisters.

BY the way, despite the fact that the novel is about a 60 year old named Tubby making a long walk, it's one of the funniest, wisest, best novels I've ever read, and one with a real fondness for the church.

I'm going to see if I can find it tomorrow on my library trip. After I pay my HUGE fine. Don't you hate it when you think you've turned in all of your books, but instead there are seven more floating around that you forgot about? Ugh.

You asked on another thread about Mariette in Ecstasy, which I did read, and loved. I also felt a little befuddled, though; was it an idictment of too-organized, staid religionin favor of mysticism? Was Mariette wring? Or maybe that was the point, to get me wondering. What's your take?

I think one of the crucial things about the book is that the discipline and rigor of convent life is meant to keep all the women from swooning into ecstacies--that it's a discipline meant to keep them from that kind of ravishment. Because I think they (understandably) fear the ravishment of the divine taking you by force. They know it's real. So it's frightening.

I think too that there's something about the period--early 20th century--where there's a kind of rationalism and empiricism and skepticism that's even crept into the convent, so that part of being "modern" and Catholic is rejecting the affective pieties of earlier eras.

That's a curious book. I've never seen anything quite so frankly eroticize and sexualize the experience of divine communion since the poems of Donne.