It is a point of pride, I confess, but I am a slow reader, and more generally a slow learner.

An habitual, even wilful slow-wittedness, was instilled in me at an early age, by a beloved teacher. Miss Quinn constantly warned her pupils against thinking too fast. A kindly if paradoxical woman, she would actually lay snares to entrap the smart, and took a strangely mischievous delight in the phrase, !he "uick and the dead.# $ow, there are advantages to being able to think on one%s feet, as I was reminded a few times recently while making short appearances on television. In the world of sound bites and the five-minute interview, the guest who announces that some popular formula is nonsense for at least ten reasons,# and then offers to enumerate them, will not become a star. &ikewise in our current scribal world -- of 'ikipedia, Internet databases, and searchable e(ook libraries -- the space left for plodding is very small. !hanks partly to technology, but perhaps more to the mindset that made the technology possible, the world has been catching up with America. 'e have become results oriented# on a planetary scale.

!his has been, on the whole, bad news for )hristianity, and for )atholic )hristianity in particular, which long benefited from slow thinking -- if we include such geniuses as Augustine or A"uinas, who always thought slowly, but happened to be able to do it very fast. *n the contrary, it has been good news for those who think "uickly, even if they are able to do that only at a glacial pace. I think of so many glorious reputations belonging today to persons whose claim is to one thought, at best -- and that rather glib, if not demonstrably asinine. (ut, !he paths of glory lead but to the grave,# as the slow-witted !homas +ray observed, in his ,legy 'ritten in a )ountry )hurch--ard.# !he fate of that poem, among our modern critics, will illustrate my point. +ray is condemned for not getting anywhere. In particular, he is taxed with failing to make the resounding political statement that would have been of benefit to the oppressed rural poor. .e took eight years fussing over his composition, and it isn%t even in a recogni/able elegiac metre. It meanders ridiculously. About the only thing one can say for the poem, is that no one

who reads it can ever forget it. I was myself remembering it, very recently, while burying my mother -- in what was once the little country graveyard of )larkson, *ntario, now entirely surrounded by metropolitan suburbia. And remembering in turn the very first time I entered a )hristian church, as a believer, in some rural parish of 0uffolkshire in ,ngland. It was on All 0ouls, in anno 1234. $or could I ever forget that5 the procession of these basically rustic people, with their candles, out of their mediaeval church, into the graveyard of their ancestors. And, the graceful way the procession divided, each family to their own headstones, till the whole graveyard was full of light. And, how I stood watching -- the dead and the living seemingly together, along perhaps with the yet unborn -- from my impossibly abstract, tourist position. And, for the first time in my urbane young life 6I was then twenty-three7, it did not occur to me to make some cynical reflection on the nature of country hicks, but rather to recogni/e them all as my superiors.

8or I am slow, as I boasted above. ,ven having admitted to myself, that my adolescent atheism was a puffball, that only fools could believe there is no +od, and finally, that )hrist was my improbable saviour, it took some time to enter a church. !o this day I enter any church awkwardly, still unable fully to assimilate the breadth of its content, and with the sinner%s wonderment about why he is there. And death itself still pu//les me, and the sermons on death still pass over my head. My mother is now buried beside my father. 9im and 8lorrie,# once so happily of this world, have descended into earth to await the :ay of 9udgement. .ow few of their once-young contemporaries were left to mourn them; and those mostly needing to be wheeled about. And <ust behind them, .arry =oy and Mabel,# my father%s parents, whom I am old enough to remember when they in their turn were still vividly of this world. !hese were not )atholic people. I was the first of this tribe to swim back across the !iber, after a separation of four or five hundred years. My mama used to <oke that my 0cotch )alvinist ancestors were spinning in their graves. $otwithstanding, I read the Dies Irae, that old

8ranciscan se"uence for All 0ouls, and the memorial Masses before >atican II. It is a miraculous thing, constructed as if to demonstrate the concision and tight logic of which &atin is capable, and the ease with which a trochaic rhythm will admit the musical order of rhyme. 8or all the translations, it is unmatched and will be unmatchable in any other language. As I am vaguely aware, a certain Annibale (ugnini -- very "uick thinker -- had it trashed in the post-conciliar liturgical reforms. .e found it too rich for modern tastes; that it overemphasi/ed# <udgement and fear and mediaeval darkness; that it lacked our modern, smiley-face "uality. ,veryone goes to heaven in the $ovus *rdo, or rather, that is the impression that is left, of a =esurrection that will be happy-clappy. !his is a lie, eating away at our heart. It is a lie told because the truth itself has been <udged incomprehensible to the modern mind, which is results oriented,# and not to be crucified by encumbering detail. -et to me, the slow and difficult recovery of faith began with All 0ouls, and the candles lit in

darkness, and the dark, dark, they all go into the dark.#